ABSTRACT
Ville and Matti, two male homeworkers with contrasting experiences, represent other exceptions. Ville, a sixty-year-old married man in a metropolitan area, began working at home as an agent for a journal when ill health forced him into early retirement. With the children gone and his wife laboring outside the home, Ville thinks he has full autonomy in arranging his work and in his time use. Despite the association of home-based work with residual, backward sectors of the economy, national statistics list people working in their own homes within nearly all job categories, and 288 different kinds of work are done at home. Homeworking is a multidimensional phenomenon not only in the number of occupations it includes but also in the ways in which people become home-workers. The majority of home-based workers in Finland are also women because the female-dominated field of child care is the largest occupational field of homeworking.
