ABSTRACT
In a world shaped by the economic way of thinking, labor is a cost which we bear to earn wages. And for firms, labor is the cost incurred in production. It is difficult to see the proper telos of work as an intrinsic good. In this essay, I turn to the work that is performed in the home, and therefore outside of the market system. Work within the household is intrinsically relational and is the necessary last stage in economic production, the one that delivers goods and services for their final use. It is thus a form of work in which the telos is clear. Nowadays, a significant amount of work once performed in the home has been transferred to the market. That transferal has led to a corresponding decline in the status of work done in the home because market production is more “efficient” and because the decline in the status of household work imposed significant social costs on the women who did that sort of work. But this decline has made it harder for us to understand the proper function of the economy, and is therefore part of the story of why the question of the meaning of work has arisen in our times.
