ABSTRACT
My interest in the subject of home-based work, or homework, derived initially from learning about cross-border organizing of maquiladora workers in Texas and Mexico in the late 1990s. I was especially interested in the work of community-based labor organizations such as La Mujer Obrera in El Paso, which had achieved some success through a “home-based” strategy of worker organizing. Home-based in two respects: one, because home was where, under the intensifying conditions of maquiladorization and structural adjustment, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, more and more “factory” work was taking place (again); and two, because home was where La Mujer Obrera intentionally encountered many of the women workers it was organizing. This double movement from factory to home, of both work itself and worker organizing, launched me in a particular way on the trail of homework, and more specifically, the organization of home-based labor.
