ABSTRACT

For the past two centuries, low-wage work conducted in workers’ own homes, so-called homework or outwork, alongside unpaid housework, child-care, and other domestic labor, has been a formal feature of capitalist production and services on a global scale.1 Such a notion goes against the grain of commonsense thought that homework is a dying vestige of the nineteenth century-as well as against contemporary social scientific thought that industrial and other kinds of homework, though representing a vast sector of production, nevertheless should be considered part of what economists term the “informal sector.” While it is assumed, especially in the Northern hemisphere, that low-paid homework no longer exists, or that it exists on a very small scale, social scientists (who should know better)

continue to assert that after 150 years of observed presence, homework isn’t really an integral or formal part of capitalism.