ABSTRACT
Any conception of work that excludes their daily toil—as many market-oriented conceptions of work do—misrepresents work’s many worlds. Prior to the twentieth century, a vast majority of the world’s workers performed the bulk of their work in other settings than salaried jobs as we know them. Over the world as a whole, most work takes place outside of regular jobs. In forcing recognition of the genuine work women do outside the market, feminist scholars have drawn attention to the large portion of all work that women, men, and children all actually perform outside the world of wages, indeed outside the world of direct pecuniary compensation. Only around World War I did top management of large American firms generally create personnel departments and direct top-to-bottom, beginning-to-end surveillance of production. Throughout our contemporary world, workers in the huge “informal sector” of individual entrepreneurship and semi-legal enterprise thrive on subcontracting.
