Unpaid Labor

The notion of unpaid labor has been traditionally associated with domestic housework and raising a family in the privacy of the home. This labor was (and still is) highly gendered, often undertaken by women, while men would most likely take up the role of household “breadwinner.” Paid work is visible in the public eye, whereas unpaid work has remained invisible. Until recently, accounting for unpaid labor was not considered to be important by statisticians, economists, or policy makers, as it was considered to be irrelevant to market-based economies. Given this, unpaid labor has been largely omitted from world history. What stands to count as labor, and how it comes to accumulate value, is a highly contentious issue. Certain individuals’ labor and their efforts are recognized by others, made visible, and subsequently rewarded with economic and cultural benefits. Other individuals find that their labor is not recognized and is made invisible-and thus goes unpaid and unrewarded.

Unpaid labor in the household ranges from cleaning, collecting and producing edible food, and managing financial outgoings, to caregiving and maintaining family and community relationships. The motives described for why many more women undertake this kind of work are often associated with altruism, family responsibilities, or empathy. Empathy especially is regarded as a particularly naturalized feminine attribute, and so efforts expended in this kind of labor are viewed to be done willingly and are not considered by some to count as work. As this work is often regarded as part of women's natural role, it is made invisible, given no market value and little social status.

Work is traditionally regarded as a productive activity that is attributed a market value and is exchanged for a wage in a capitalist system. For Karl Marx, this allocation of market value to human productive capacities and the extraction of profit after goods are sold underpin the labor process. This labor process is viewed to be exploitative, because most individuals must sell their labor to those who own the means of production and offer the best wages. These wages are governed by economic forces of labor supply and demand for particular kinds of goods and services. As economies develop and industries change, the value of certain labor capacities fluctuates.

For example, in highly industrialized economies, paid labor was predominantly undertaken by men. Labor in coal mines and ship building was regarded as highly masculine work that could only be done by men. This meant that paid work was viewed as a male remit, while women were expected to stay at home to undertake household duties and depend on men to subsist. Paid work was attributed a highly valued status within society, usually unavailable to women. However, as demand for products such as coal and ships began to cease and was replaced by service-sector and knowledge-based economies, the value of masculinized labor decreased. This transition is called postindustrialization.

[Page 1503]Postindustrial economies require different skills from the labor force. For instance, flight attendants, beauticians, and customer-service operators all provide embodied care-work that is consumed by the customer almost immediately. This service work is temporal and often intangible. Attributes needed to carry out this kind of embodied service work-empathy, altruism, and often beauty-are highly gendered and attached to women's bodies. This demand for feminine attributes in service-based economies overturned traditional notions that paid work was a male remit. From the 1980s onward, more women than ever before began to take up paid labor in postindustrial economies. This is known as the “feminization of the workplace.”

...