Abstract
Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I argue that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction.
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Notes
Jamieson’s notion of cognitive mapping draws upon Althusserian understandings of ideology as common sense.
The idea of a gender contract blends Carole Pateman’s (1988) notion of a sexual contract with the idea of a social contract, a concept that aims to capture, social, legal, and political norms surrounding the exchange between breadwinning and caregiving, protection and freedom, and public and private responsibility (Fudge and Vosko 2001; Vosko 2010). Gender relations and discourses are inscribed with processes of racialisation. For example, the gender contract of male breadwinner and female housewife did not pertain to Black women in the UK, who were much more likely to be employed full-time that their white counterparts (Ashiagbor 1999).
The original study was conducted for the performing arts sector. However, the analysis has also been used to describe consequences of the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Another implication of the analysis is that public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.
Meg Luxton (2006) points out that apparent limits to the concept of social reproduction in part stem from the imprecision with which it can be deployed as a rubric under which all manner of tasks performed by women are collected. Jane Jenson (1986) points out the elision in the concept between different levels of analysis.
In 2011, the International Labour Conference adopted a Convention (No. 189) concerning decent work for domestic workers (Entry into force: 05 Sep 2013); Geneva, 100th ILC session (16 June 2011) that indicates that recently paid domestic work is being treated as a matter of employment and not family relations.
Regulation 19, Working Time Regulations 1998 (No. 1833 of 1998).
Council Directive 92/85. These exclusions emerged from the political settlement that grounded EU working condition laws in the realm of health and safety; Member States decided to exclude private homes and domestic work from the scope of health and safety laws. Directive 89/391 on Health and Safety singles out domestic workers from exclusion.
National Minimum Wage Regulations 1999 (No. 183 of 1998), Regulation 2:
(2) In these Regulations “work” does not include work (of whatever description) relating to the employer’s family household done by a worker where the conditions in sub-paragraphs (a) or (b) are satisfied.
(a) The conditions to be satisfied under this sub-paragraph are–
(i) that the worker resides in the family home of the employer for whom he works,
(ii) that the worker is not a member of that family, but is treated as such, in particular as regards to the provision of accommodation and meals and the sharing of tasks and leisure activities;
(iii) that the worker is neither liable to any deduction, nor to make any payment to the employer, or any other person, in respect of the provision of the living accommodation or meals; and
(iv) that, had the work been done by a member of the employer’s family, it would not be treated as being performed under a worker’s contract or as being work because the conditions in sub-paragraph (b) would be satisfied.
Noah Zatz (2008, 2011), who I will discuss in the following pages, endorses an idea of work that focuses on the activity, not the relationship, and he adopt a narrower scope of labour law than do Freedland and Kountouris by confining it to employment. Like them, Zatz does not want to disrupt prevailing conceptions of the appropriate scope of labour law.
Freedland and Kountouris (2011, 350) note that their analysis of personal work relations “is posed as a challenge to a generally accepted much simpler paradigm for the legal construction of personal work relations in which those relations are viewed as universally or nearly universally having the legal character of bilateral contract.”
Glenn (2010, 12–40) notes how slavery and indenture in the United States to forced women to care and imprinted domestic work as different from free wage labour.
I am using jurisdiction to refer to regulatory regimes that pertain to specific subject maters such as family law, tort law, contract law, tax law labour law.
Another is that it lacks the conventional indicia of employment—control and an employer.
The latter is Freedland and Kountouris’ concern.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Donatella Alessandrini, Kate Bedford, Emily Grabham, and Kendra Strauss for their very helpful comments and conversations on this paper or the topic more generally, and the Leverhulme Trust for providing the support for my visiting professorship at Kent Law School that made these conversations possible.
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Fudge, J. Feminist Reflections on the Scope of Labour Law: Domestic Work, Social Reproduction, and Jurisdiction. Fem Leg Stud 22, 1–23 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-014-9256-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-014-9256-2