Econ Notes #1: After Work, p. 50

I decided to start Econ Notes in 2024 - a reading journal for economic texts that I missed out on until now. Parts of Econ Notes are probably going to be paid-only content, because Sporadical Chic is hoping to grow in support. (But the first ones are for free and their definite form still has to be determined.) If you have the money to subscribe to Sporadical Chic, it is immensly appreciated and a motivation to put more sweat into it.

Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek (2023):« After Work. A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time ». Verso Books.

I have been looking forward to this book for the last three years or so. After the announcement by the publisher, the publication date was postponed many times, at last because - as the authors ironically pointed out - the authors had newborn children to care for. What interests me about this piece is the application of a post-work approach to « reproductive work » (while I am always sceptical and unsure how all those terms « reproductive work », « care work », « housework », « unwaged work » and so on are really distinguished). All too often « reproductive work », especially care work, is trapped in the dilemma of being a mental (and physical) overload, but also an example of un-alienated work and part of an ideal society in which care is the prime goal.

I am interested in the economics of unwaged labour and in the economic units that escape market laws (like the firm and the family) and I am fascinated by future imaginations, so of course I am drawn to this topic. But what makes this book so personally appealing is the fact that I always experienced the home and its work as something so drastically assaulting that I never fully felt enjoyment in building, cleaning or maintaining it, because it is governed by - as the authors call it - a « domestic realism », a surface that is a daily confrontation with a lot of wrong intended politics (of course, prisons and hospitals are bad, I get it, Michel, but why not the home?). And I mean this without desiring a commune or « shared spaces »; I do not mean that. I just hate the formal omnipresence of it, while also thinking that it is crucial for intimacy, freedom and changing the economy.

Content:

I - INTRODUCTION
II - TECHNOLOGIES
III - STANDARDS
IV - FAMILIES
V - SPACES
VI - AFTER WORK

INTRODUCTION

The End of the End of History (this subchapter, albeit the try-hard title is not very convincing, starts from the fact that the labour market is in crisis, hints to the strand of thought called « post-work » and tries to add to it the domain of reproductive work)

Post-work, in contrast to a long and strong tradition of leftist and also feminist economics, wants to free people from labour:

« While more orthodox approaches have responded through efforts around reskilling and education, and through endeavours to create ‹decent work›, the more radical post-work approach has been to reject the centrality of work entirely. […] Work, these [post-work] thinkers suggest, should be framed as a problem rather than a solution, and we must seek to be emancipated from (rather than through) our labour. » 3

But What Is Work? (this subchapter unfolds the crucial argument of the book: reproductive work as work to be overcome.)

But  unwaged labour is also often not on post-work thinkers minds:

« As a result [of a focus on waged labour], the work of social reproduction - the work which nurtures future workers, regenerates the current workforce, and maintains those who cannot work, while also reproducing and sustaining societies - has largerly been neglected in speculations about the ‹end of work›. », p. 4

(The term « social reproduction » has a function in Marxist economics which is very valuable, but at the same time only defined vis-a-vis the sphere of production and capital. I just think its peculiar that they stick to the term...)

« In some cases, reproductive labour has simply been ignored - deemed to be not really work at all. […] Other thinkers, however, recognise reproductive labour as work and yet argue that post-work ambitions are simply incompatible with this sphere of activity.» 4-5

Core argument: First considering reproductive work as work, then eradicate this work as every other work. Applying the post-work approach to reproductive work means to leave behind the kitsch of other ideas of care and reproductive work as a « noneconomic » sphere:

« In fact, a defining feature of much of this labour is that it is resistant to producitivity increases. Wouldn´ t a reduction of work-time simply mean a reduction in care — less time spent looking after others, leading to the perpetuation and deepening of neglect already felt by many recipients of care? There are no simple answers to these questions, which has led many to believe that the only hope for reproductive work is to valorise and celebrate it — or at best, to share it more equitably across the population. Earlier proposals against domestic work have been forgotten and we appear at an impasse: post-work has nothing to say about the organisation of reproductive labour. » 5

« In the formal economy, social reproduction is a major source of jobs. The UK›s National Health Service (NHS), for example, is among the largest employers in the world, and as of 2017 employed (directly and indirectly) around 1.9 million people. » 5. - And its growing.

On the difficulty of measuring unwaged labour:

«This opaqueness [of unwaged labour] leads to some perverse consequences: as Nancy Folbre notes, ‹If you marry your housekeeper, you lower GDP. If you put your mother in a nursing home, you increase GDP.› », 8.

« [T]he post-work project can only be fully realised when it takes into acount this immense sphere of activity. » 9

« Why should we want to reduce the time spent on unwaged social reproduction in the first place? [10] We might begin with the point made by socialist feminists, that this work remains work, much of which can be boring, monotonous, and isolating. […] The dominant argument for reducing unpaid work, however, is that it enables women to enter into waged work. […] Against this approach, we must insist that […] this reduction is essential because it expands the availability of free time that is a prerequisite for any meaningful conception of freedom. The struggle against work — in all its forms - is the fight for free time. » 10

« The normative project of this book is therefore to develop an approach to social reproduction that values freedom for all — that recognises reproductive labour as work, that reduces this work as much as possible, and that redistributes any remaining work in an equitable manner. »  11

TECHNOLOGIES

With Hester (as coauthor of the xenofeminist manifesto) and Srnicek (as coauthor of the Accelerationist Manifesto), it is not surprising that technology is a possible means of achieving freedom. But in the case of reproductive work, this chapter has to confront the paradox, why technology has not substantially improved the reproductive work despite huge innovations in the 20th century. I will extensively quote from this chapter, because I personally think it is interesting, and because I was irritated, yet intrigued by how complicated thing get when looked at closely (while they explicitly name the Cowan paradox, there are several other paradoxes at play, for example to strange cyclical nature of the out-,in- and outsourcing of services like clothing, while there are anticyclical movements by services like health care which experienced an in-, out-, and insourcing).

First the authors have to argue in favour of technology which is - especially in leftist discourses about reproductive work - confronted with suspicion. About the conflicts of technology and work, for example of the human interaction in care and its possible automation they stay in line of their argument that even care work has often « dull parts » :
« […] [M]any [care workers] freely point to elements of their jobs that could usefully be automated away — often precisely to allow them more time to perform more explicitly human-centred aspects of their jobs. »16

And: « this [the care-kitsch, how I would call it] overlooks the fact that such interaction is frequently hostile and abusive, both within and beyond the family home, and it ignores the myriad physical and psychological burdens associated with certain forms of caregiving. » 16

The Industrial Revolution of the Home (this subchapters analyses the many innovations and technologies that changed the home between the 1870s to the 1940s)

The authors analyse the « industrial revolution of the home » (Ruth Schwartz Cowan) in the 20th century. And indeed there are many substantial improvements, namely in the infrastructure of the home: Lighting, heating, water (« a job that still takes up a significant portion of women›s work around the world — and as late as the 1960s, took up hours of most of women›s daily time in rural Ireland» 17 -  « one and a half to two hours a day of work spent pumping, carrying and heating water », 19) imports, waste exports (that was collectivized in the 1930s). « In the 1890s, [18] ‹the average household lugged around the home 7 tons of coal and 9000 gallons of water per year›. » Food and clothing (« Women, for instance, spent the majority of their ‹free time› sewing, knitting, and doing embroidery », 18). Laundry.

The difference between industrialisation in paid labour and the absence of it in unpaid labour was huge before the 1900s, but the structure of the home was also different. « More often than not, younger members of the family were instead rectruited in the domestic workforce, effectively reducing rather than generating labour. » 18 « Working until death was standard and the requirements of eldercare minimal. » 18 and so on.

Between the 1900s and the 1930s huge infrastructural improvements like gas heating, waste removal, water pipes reduced labour. « More than individual devices, it was these sorts of infrastrucural transformations which had the most significant impact on the nature and extent of work being done in the home. » 19 But they also mention individual devices like the gas, oil and electric stove (which reduced especially the amount of cleaning drastically as coal dust did not have to be cleaned out daily) 19f, commercial laundries 20, synthetic fabrics and wash-and-wear clothing 20, preproduction of flour (which otherwise had been milled at home), freezers and frozen food. 20

The Cowan Paradox (this subchapter explains the Cowan Paradox - why time for reproductive work has not decreased despite huge societal and technological changes, but it also brings to light many different phenomena regarding innovation in these domains)

3 Explanations for Cowan Paradox:

1) « dramatic shift in the social organisation of this work » 23

2) higher standards (in depth in a later chapter called « Standards »)

3) additional tasks following from technology (like management and technological support)

Cowan Paradox is accompanied by some paradoxical changes in out- and insourcing, a new logistics, so to speak:

« The rise of mail-order catalogues, along with the emergence of department stores in the late nineteenth century, made the purchase of clothing increasingly simple and cheap. Lastly, in addition to food and clothing production moving into the waged sector, healthcare also moved out of the domestic residence. » 22f

But this did not really work as the case of the launderettes shows:

« Indeed, as early as 1869, women were arguing for the socialisation of laundry work, with Catherine Beecher suggesting that one commercial laundry be made available for every dozen families. But the washing machine turned what could have been a collective industrial process into the work of a lone housewife, and the economies of scale (or government support) which could have made collective laundering a reality were never achieved. Moreover, the manufacturers of these devices saw more profit potential in mass market production than in production for collective use. A mixture of factors contributed to the eventual downfall of launderettes – technological improvements to home washer/dryers, the power of large appliance manufacturers with substantial advertising budgets (versus smaller, typically locally owned launderettes), rising wages for launderette workers, and often classist and racist anxieties about one’s washing mixing with that of other households all played a role. » 24f.

« The general shift from the household as a space of production to one of consumption entailed both the expansion of some existing responsibilities and the addition of new ones: shopping, managing finances, travelling to purchase goods, and so on. » 26

« During the first decades of the twentieth century, goods and services were largely delivered to the house: food, linens, medicines, repair work, healthcare, and so on, were borne by people travelling to the home. When people stopped into a store, clerks would provide information about the products, collect them for the customers, check out the goods, bundle them together, and then deliver them. The rise of mail-order catalogues in the late nineteenth century made the labour of transport even less burdensome for the home.

Yet this era of full-service retail rapidly changed with the rise of the automobile in the early decades of the twentieth century.» 26f.

I am still a bit surprised that « logistics » is not a framework the two work with, because the historical changes in logistical supplychains seem to be crucial for Cowan paradox.

Numbers for small talk: « (In recent years, shopping has typically taken up around three hours of an individual’s week.) », 27

Summing up the assessement of technology:

« Changes in social norms and expectations, the nature of the gendered division of labour, the shape of the household (e.g., multigenerational, collective, nuclear) all help determine whether or not labour-saving devices are in fact capable of saving labour. »27f.

The Stagnation of the home (this subchapter considers, with several examples, the meagerness of innovation between 1940 and 2020).

This storyline is based on a thought experiment that echoes the ones from Mark Fisher when he describes the similarities of music between the 1980s and 2000s:

"A housewife from the 1870s would find a house in the 1940s virtually unrecognisable, whereas a housewife from the 1940s would find the home of the 2020s almost entirely the same.56 Since the 1950s, the only major new domestic appliance has been the microwave.57 It was invented in the 1940s, but cost and safety concerns meant it wasn’t widely adopted until the 1980s. » 28

[The 20s called, they want their trousers back]

Spinal catastrophism and the dishwasher:

« Top-loading machines, for instance, are less demanding on a user’s back but more difficult to produce – hence the rise of front-loading machines instead." 28

The few candidates for impactful innovations in this time are: disposable nappies, breast pumps (which are more time-shifting than productivity increasing tools) or contraceptives:

« As Federici notes, contraceptives may be ‘the only true labour saving device women’ used in the period. » 29 (but at another point, the authors seem to suggest that before the 1900s having children might have reduced rather than increased workload)

The Work Transfer (this short subchapter looks at insourcing of work and especially in health care, with use of technology and DSG, Fallpauschale)

« Ventilators, catheters, morphine drips, and hemodialysis are just some of the devices that have moved into the domestic residence in recent decades. This constitutes a reversal from the earlier movement of this work from unwaged or low-waged amateurs and lay healers to increasingly well-paid (and masculinised) professionals.

One important driver here has been the widespread use of reimbursement based upon diagnostic-related groups (DRGs) – whereby hospitals are reimbursed a standardised amount for any given diagnosis, regardless of the cost to them. The result is an incentive system for hospitals to push patients out of the door as soon as possible, thereby lowering their costs and maximising their cut of the fixed revenues.68 While America was an early leader in adopting DRGs in the 1980s, these have since become widely used around the world. » 30

A capitalist success story:

« As a result, whereas the average hospital stay in America was 7.3 days in 1980, by 2000 it was down to 4.9 days. The average stay for elderly patients was cut in half over the same period.72 Supported as a cost cutting measure for hospitals, in 1985 the shift to unpaid home care was estimated to have saved the industry $10 billion in wages. »31

The « world-making » of the hospital (hospital-becoming of the home, what would Michel tell us about this):

« The technologies of home care have become vastly more sophisticated, as devices originally created for care in the hospital have been adapted for home use – though in many cases, the home itself must be transformed into a sterile, hospital-like environment in order to facilitate the safe use of these technologies, with the risk of emergencies or malfunctions creating a ‘pervasive sense of anxiety’ for carers.77 After all, the germ theory of disease was one reason why healthcare moved out of the home and into sterile environments in the first place. Carers are forced to engage in what has been called ‘“disability world-making”, which involves solving problems with everyday objects, tinkering and hacking to make worlds liveable’. » 31

« And whereas professionals have (relatively) clear boundaries between their work and the rest of their lives, complete with breaks and mandated time off, household carers have little space for respite from the demands of care work. » 32

« Just as washing machines brought work back into the home, so too have these new medical technologies. » 32

Self-management disguised as innovation:

« The 1970s saw the continued development of self-serve culture, as customers were increasingly expected to do work that had previously been carried out by waged workers.85 ATMs became widespread, self-serve gas stations popped up, and today, self-checkouts are increasingly ubiquitous – not least after the pandemic-fuelled push for social distancing.86 Often mistaken for ‘automation’, these technologies are in fact labour-displacement machines used to shift work from a waged worker to an unwaged user. » 32

More self-management duties: planning trips and vacation, searching for insurances, and the eventually ineffective « sustainability work » associated with climate change, 32f.

« The period of neoliberalism can therefore be broadly characterised as one of domestic stagnation in technological terms, combined with a growing number of devices being used to transfer activities from waged to unwaged spheres in an effort to save costs. », 33

Why Did Technology Stagnate? (this subchapter looks at possible explanations of this trend, despite the huge social transformation and the many women joining the waged workforce)

« One possible reason is that it was part of a broader technological slowdown over the last fifty years. As Robert Gordon has argued, the 1920s to the 1970s was a period of one-off productivity improvements dependent upon a series of radical technologies created in the decades prior [...] Even the internet has been mostly underwhelming in productivity (labour-saving) terms, especially compared to earlier inventions such as electricity, the steam engine, or the telegraph.», 33f

Servant economy:

« There is a second reason for this lack of innovation though – […] the fact that domestic labour-saving devices are often more expensive than the low-wage workers who might carry out the same work. […] Folding clothes, for instance, involves complex image recognition in varied lighting conditions, sophisticated dexterity, and the ability to operate in an unstructured environment. These are all incredible challenges for machines, even to this day.  […] This is not to say that there is no hope that this work might to some extent be alleviated by technologies; one can imagine the construction of structured environments, for example, which might make such tasks more amenable to automation. The dishwasher, after all, is effectively a structured environment that enables a heterogeneous collection of dishes to be washed. »34

Digital Social Reproduction (this very short subchapters considers the effects of digital innovations for child care)

« Somewhat perversely, the more enjoyable aspects of childcare – engaging, playing, interacting with children – have been automated via screens, while the more routine and burdensome aspects have remained largely untouched. Hence, we use domestic technologies for our children’s entertainment, education, and enrichment, so that we can cook their dinners and organise their PE kits. Surely it should be the other way around. » 35

Outsourcing Housework (this subchapter looks at platform services and their huge impact on household while also not reducing any productivity whatsoever)

« As a means to outsource traditional household labour, digital platforms have been one of the most significant technological transformations in recent decades. They are not a reduction of work, of course, but rather a transfer of work from the household to the market. In many countries, they have become quite widely used, reaching far beyond the upper classes. One European study, for example, found that in the seven countries examined a quarter of all households had used a platform to hire a domestic service. » 35

«  As one economist puts it, ‘The fast-food industry … must have saved housewives the world over trillions of hours of cooking and cleaning.’ […] Indeed, for the wealthiest households, more money is spent on eating out than on food at home, suggesting that money – rather than desire – is often a core limitation to people moving a substantial portion of this work outside the home. » 37

« Dark kitchens » and « dark stores » are services only for home delivery.

The complicated turn (which is not considered in its complexity, imo):

« While the trend for decades has been for shopping to consume ever more of people’s time, the rise of online ordering and delivery in recent years may be symptomatic of a return to pre-1930s retail and its associated shift of work to the market. » 39

« The end result of recent socioeconomic changes – diminished time away from waged work in dual-earner households, expanding chains of care, and new platform businesses – has been a situation in which a growing amount of domestic social reproduction can now be outsourced to markets. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes, ‘This is finally transforming the home into a fully capitalist-style workplace, and in ways that the old wages-for-housework advocates could never have imagined.’ » 40

At Home With Platforms (this subchapter gleams at the imaginations and real innovations of the « smart home » and asks why the smart home does not seem to change things).

Reasons why the future imagination of a « smart home » is not labour-saving and not intended to be:

1)  « First, we would argue that these houses are frequently oriented towards convenience, rather than towards saving labour per se. » 42 They only automate minor frictions, which does not seem very alleviating or freeing at all, similar to the automation of « adjusting your wing-mirror by hand » 43

2) It is labour-saving for some people, for example for people with faltering eyesight, but not to all.

3) New labour by creating the environment (again): «Robot vacuum cleaners, for example, save us the effort of manually dragging a Hoover over the carpet, but they also require that our spaces be arranged in very particular ways. Floors must be kept clear, potential obstacles repositioned, corners and crevices fenced off in case the device gets stuck, and staircases blocked to prevent potentially, fatal falls for your Roomba.» 43f. « Furthermore, the smart home creates a whole new series of technical tasks – updating devices, attending to notifications, getting appliances to work together, scouring the internet for quick fixes, and so on. If you want a picture of the smart home future, imagine trying to fix a malfunctioning printer, forever. » 44

4) It consolidates the existing gendered hierarchies. « Already in housework and childcare, men tend to do work that is more autonomous, less routine, and more engaging than that of their female partners. […] This work certainly has the potential to become a burden or annoyance over time, with users recounting how they wish the technologies would just work and not require endless supervision and maintenance, but it nevertheless demonstrates that qualitative as well as quantitative differences in the performance of reproductive labour represent a substantial issue for feminist post-work imaginaries. The equality of reproductive labour is not just a matter of time. » 44f

5) It is not demand, but supply driven: « As Judy Wajcman notes, ‘The drive to motorize all household tasks – including brushing teeth, squeezing lemons and carving meat – [was] less a response to need than a reflection of the economic and technical capacity for making motors.’139 Today we are witnessing a similar dynamic with smart home devices: the drive to make all household tasks ‘smart’ is less a response to need than a reflection of the economic and technical capacity for collecting data and producing computer chips. » 45 For example Roomba becoming a data company. « Ultimately, for data companies, ‹home is where the data is›. » 46

Conclusion

The « potential to reduce work has gone largely unfulfilled. » 47

While it might have helped to facilitate women´ s entrance into the labour market. But the Cowan paradox arised, because new tasks and higher standards annihilated any producitvity increases. « Prime-age adults spent twenty-six hours a week in 1900 on domestic work, while by 2005 that had only reduced to twenty-four hours a week. For full-time housewives, the time spent on unpaid housework stayed steady at around fifty hours per week for the entirety of the twentieth century. The gender shifts over this time have been notable, with women doing less work than before and men doing significantly more – but as one recent study discovered, there is no ‘evidence that the diffusion of [domestic] appliances leads to any significant alteration in the traditional gender division of housework tasks’. Technological impacts were minimal, as the far more important predictor of gender balance in unpaid domestic work is the employment status of women. » 47

They conclude that « we do not have the technologies that we deserve. » And there is a reason for this: imagination. « A particular gendered imaginary of how housework should be done », « constrained imaginaries » and « a relentless hold on our imagination ». « Seemingly everything can change except the social relations surrounding domestic technologies. » 48

This I think, is a neat argument and maybe much less of a paradox if one thinks of imagination as a realm of technology, too.