ABSTRACT
This chapter will pursue the category of “unpaid work” inside and outside the home in the last 50 years, studying its use in both the research literature and social movements. It will first recapitulate the political and scholarly discovery of “unpaid work” through an analysis of domestic work and the feminist controversies that swirled around it in the 1970s and 1980s. Secondly, it will explore the contemporary expansion of the category of “unpaid labor” outside the “home,” namely those more or less institutionalized forms – from volunteering to workfare, from unpaid internships to digital labor – which have been categorized by scholars but also by social movements as “unpaid/invisible work” or “free labor.” Drawing lessons from the feminist approach to “unpaid work,” it will finally attempt to shed light on the institutionalization of unpaid work in the labor market today, analyzing both its politics and its conflicts, and questioning the consequences of unpaid work as well as its meaning in terms of work transformation and work frontiers.
