Outsourcing

The Rise of Domestic Outsourcing

In the post–World War II period, perhaps the dominant family structure throughout the Western world was the male breadwinner model. In most households, women were first and foremost housewives, while the husband provided the family income. The use of external services as substitutes for domestic labor was seldom considered. Instead, the wife was deemed responsible for nearly all domestic and caring tasks. Only affluent families would hire live-in servants for tasks such as domestic cleaning, and domestic outsourcing was predominantly viewed as a sign of wealth rather than a strategy for enabling the wife to enter the formal labor market.

Since World War II, however, the composition of households has markedly changed, with significant rises in the relative number of dual-earner and single households. Given that dual-earner households face time pressures due to the competing claims of work and family and single households face the [Page 1073]responsibility for household and caring tasks alone with no help, the purported outcome has been an increase in domestic outsourcing.

Outsourcing: Contemporary Issues

For singles, outsourcing is commonly used due to the absence of help. For dual-earner heterosexual couple households, meanwhile, outsourcing is more a coping practice adopted due to the failure of men to take greater responsibility for the domestic workload or even to help out. Despite the widespread entry of women into the labor force in recent decades, that is, the participation of men in domestic work has shown only a minor increase. The slightly more equal gender division of domestic labor now apparent within households is simply because women are doing less domestic work rather than men doing more, notes Jonathan Gershuny (2000). This reduction in women's domestic workload has been achieved by outsourcing.

Although the outsourcing literature often implicitly assumes that work is being externalized to commercial providers, in practice, external providers take many different forms operating under diverse work relations and for a multiplicity of motives. First, there are external providers who are commercial services operating in the for-profit market sector. Second, however, households sometimes outsource to closer social relations, such as kin living outside the household, neighbors, friends, and acquaintances either on an unpaid or a paid basis, and if paid, such work can be conducted for financial gain and/or for the purposes of redistribution or reciprocity. Third, outsourcing might also be provided by voluntary and community organizations in the third sector or even public sector organizations, and fourth and finally, tasks can be outsourced to external providers working in the underground economy where some or all of the activity is not declared for tax, social security, or labor law purposes. Until now, little was known about the proportion of domestic outsourcing that goes to each of these external providers.

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