Econ Notes #2: After Work p. 111

I do not want to quote so extensively, but I cannot help it. It helps me understand, and I have to admit that, albeit the book is very clearly written and a nice and compelling read, I am increasingly confused. I tend to understand less when reading it, because the arguments are so important and the whole field is riddled with different imaginations and false ideas (of technology, of tradition, of gendered norms, of what work is and what reproductivity). This is by no means the fault of this book, on the contrary, it is a crucial step to untangling all of this - but still... it remains a clusterfuck.

Content:

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

III - STANDARDS

In the last chapter, the authors have presented the paradox of technological innovations. In the new one, they consider one specific explanation, why technology did not improve productivity (or better: "reproductivity", a term the authors do not dare to use): Expectations and (living) standards.

"While capacities for extending free time may have grown, social norms, standards, and expectations have evolved in such a way that these advances are minimised." 48

In a way, this argument seems obvious, but it is important to untangle it, because while some standards appear as traditional and xenophobic norms (e.g. the heteronormative breadwinner model which sets the home as a clean beacon of recovery from work for the man), others are the result of historical struggles for freedom and egalitarian (?) progression (e.g enlighted and even more specifically anti-autoritarian education for the children which demands arguably much higher maintenance). Interestingly, they also reveal how some post-work thinkers are prone to raising standards themselves:

"Indeed, it is interesting how frequently high (that is to say, extremely labour intensive) domestic standards are mentioned in post-work theorising across a number of traditions. The German collective Krisis Group, for instance, insists that the labour involved in ‘the preparation of a delicious meal’ will never be eradicated. Andre Gorz celebrates ‘looking after and decorating a house … cooking good meals, entertaining guests’ and so on. Kate Soper looks forward to a world where ‘cooking, sewing, and mending – even cleaning – [become] more rewarding’." 49f.

Maybe consequentially, they do not consider technology as the main driver for any utopia in the Post-Work household, but to : "For those who wish to dispose of their time in ways other than cooking, cleaning, and caring, it may be advisable to think less about the heights of domestic splendour to which we will all be able to aspire after the end of work and more about reducing the disciplinary force of certain social expectations." 50

Never Clean Enough (this subchapter considers the "escalating" 51 standards of hygiene and cleanliness, and it is divided into 3 parts: Personal Hygiene, Laundry, and House Cleaning)

Cleanliness has historically been the expression of civilization (e.g. Unilever slogan "soap is civilization") and of higher class (e.g. the working class as "the great unwashed" ). Within these dynamics cleanliness and hygiene signified an aspiration to greatness and bourgeoisie, but it was also seen as a right to elevate the people:

"One of the first economists to study the home, John Leeds, claimed that ‘the increase in cleanliness of home and person contributes to the growth of democracy … Cleanliness is not only next to Godliness, but it is essential to the establishment of the Brotherhood of Man.’" 52

A) Personal Hygiene

In the humours theory of the 16th century, "bathing was thought to open up pores and let in evils." 53 With miasma-based theories, diseases were transmitted through the air, but the opinion on dirt was conflicted: It could be a "protective layer against airborne contagions" or a warning sign of illness. 53 Only with the germ theory, hygiene became the unambiguous goal, and with germs being unvisible the objective of a disciplinary self-surveillance (combined with infrastructural innovations like plumbing).

And in the 20th century hygiene was the product more than the aim of advertising campaigns:

"Deodorants and antiperspirants were invented in the early years of the twentieth century but were met with indifference by most of the public. People had to be convinced of new problems like ‘bad breath’ and ‘body odour’. Products like Listerine shifted from being disinfectants for medical surgeries to being solutions to the newly invented disease of halitosis." 54

They add one arguably reversal trend some pages later: the COVID-pandemic temporarily reduced the time spent on "showering, shaving, and putting on make-up" 60

B) Laundry

They already talked about laundry in the chapter about washing machines, but they have some interesting numbers to accompany the rise in expectations:

"If we go back to the 1800s, we find that most families rarely washed clothes – typically, only once every few weeks. [...] By the 1960s, most families were washing clothes multiple times a week. [...] Today, in countries such as Japan, it is common for people to do laundry every single day. Laundry has gone from being ‘a weekly nightmare to an unending task’." 55

This is one example of fallen standards:

"Standards of laundering have admittedly seen competing tendencies in recent years. On the one hand, it is clear that some of the ‘extras’ of laundering have disappeared. Expectations around, for instance, perfectly ironed and starched clothing have drastically diminished, even among the professional classes." 56

"At the same time, though, the standards applicable to laundry have arguably increased, largely driven by detergent manufacturers. This industry remains big business, with a market size of more than $60 billion in 2020,31 and is the focus of intense research and product development."57

C) House Cleaning

In their historical overview, the authors picture the cleanliness of the house as a standard that rises in accordance with hygienic measures for preventing disease - but it might have peaked in the interwar period. Thus, it is another example of a reversal in standards:

"More recent decades have witnessed a significant decline in the time spent in domestic cleaning. As women have moved into the workplace and men in mixed-gender households have neglected to ‘pick up the slack’, it would seem that the standards for what constitutes an acceptably clean house have diminished. Many have ceased to prize the pristine and immaculate home of the 1950s ideal and have instead found themselves at home in the rather more dishevelled and lived-in domestic spaces of today. Survey research backs this up: despite less time being spent on cleaning the home, people state they are more happy with the cleanliness of their home than in decades past." 59

But it is also the case that "upper-middle-class households" might spend less time on the household, but much more money.

Ornamental Cookery (this subchapter looks at another rising-and-falling pattern of standards besides cleanliness: cooking standards, and it is divided into 2 parts: Domestic Ideals and Foodie Culture)

A) Domestic Ideals

Taylorism also invades the home and improves processes and systematics - but it also demands a new management ethos.

B) Foodie Culture

"With the exception of France, most countries spend much less time on cooking in recent decades. In America this tendency has gone the furthest, with a typical individual spending only thirty minutes cooking and cleaning dishes per day (compared with fifty-two minutes for the OECD average)." 64

While standards also diminished in the last seventy years (e.g. no warm breakfast), the authors mention a new food nostalgia for "home cooking" which does compensate this downfall of standards a bit: cooking, while having been a "standard" for the housewive dinner parties in American suburbs of the 1950s, is now more differentiate by class.

The Rag Rut Race (this subchapter focusses on the standards of education and caretaking for children which in contrast to the other two has been almost irreversibly rising, it is divided into 2 parts: Little Stranges and Raising Human Capital)

"Across the advanced capitalist countries, there has been growing support for childcare whether through cash or tax-based subsidies, support for parental leave, or public provision of childcare services. This is a striking development – with ‘family policy spending [expanding] more than any other social policy domain’ during an age in which the welfare state has been the subject of intense pressure to control spending. In fact, ‘the only welfare state expansions since 1990 have occurred in activation and in work/family reconciliation policies.’" 67

(Well, we know at least of one country that did not even seem to need this)

"And yet against all expectations, hours spent in this activity appear to have been increasing.83 American mothers, for instance, are spending about as much time on childcare as they were in the 1920s.84 The nature of this time has changed, with more of it being devoted to interactive time, often concentrated into the weekends, and less of it devoted to passive childminding." 69

A) Little Strangers

They describe further the history from calling the children "it" and "little stranger" through the idealisation of mother love in the 19th century which paradigm still holds in general:

"The lack of contraceptives or reliable abortion care meant having children was all too easy, while a lack of adequate nutritional or financial resources meant keeping children was all too difficult." 70

"Even the term ‘parenting’ was not widely used until the 1970s." 71

B) Raising Human Capital

"The work of social reproduction extends as parents fill their time with researching the best activities in which to enrol their offspring, coordinating multiple schedules, ferrying children from one place to another, and often learning alongside their kids so that they can support their development. If and when these offspring continue on to university, more and more parents are remaining heavily involved in their lives – to the point where some universities report having to adapt to the demands of intensive parenting." 72

"In short, it can be considered a quite rational response to changing material conditions: rising inequality, a shift to ‘human capital’-centric economies, and the intensified competition characteristic of contemporary capitalism. Parents, anxious about a dwindling number of ‘good jobs’, aim to get their children into the top schools as a way to give them a chance in today’s world. [...] Given the role of competition here, it is no wonder that countries with higher levels of inequality are far more likely to adopt intensive parenting styles." 72f.

"Intensive parenting, in other words, is an important means of class reproduction." 73

"Hurdles that make reaching these standards more difficult – a lack of money, a dearth of time, or a child with extra developmental needs, for instance – don’t remove the demand for the work of intensive parenting, they just place more guilt on those who can’t perform it." 73f

Interstingly, "intensive parenting" turns out to be precisely not the result of material conditions (in the vulgar sense) alone - but also reinforced by state policies: "Schools in many countries, for instance, reinforce particular ideas of parenting through the adoption of ‘zero tolerance’ policies on any type of disruption, with parents apt to be dragged in for ‘a chat’ if their child breaks these expectations. In America, custody laws similarly impose intensive parenting as a social norm. Those parents who spend the most time with their children are more likely to get custody of them, and time spent with children is also more likely to reduce any child support payments.114 And for Black women and poor women, attempts to evade intensive parenting and grant their children increased independence are far more likely to lead peers and authorities to question the adequacy of their parenting." 74

Fix Up, Look Busy (this subchapter, based on Thorstein Veblen's analysis of the leisure class, looks at the change of the "upper classes" or the "more affluent" as being once a leisure class, having become a "harried class" , it has only one part, actually, called "Conspicious Busyness")

A) Conspiciuous Busyness

"In the US, for instance, while there has been a general increase in long (fifty-plus-hour) working weeks, this has been concentrated particularly among salaried professional and managerial workers." 78

"In part, this appears to be a result of the shift to service-based economies, where the productivity of any given worker is increasingly difficult to discern. Instead, workers have learned that performances of productivity can be a key means by which to demonstrate their contributions to a company." 76

Hustle culture:

"This is not only an affliction of the professional classes, though, as people from lower classes also find themselves increasingly working long hours, though typically due to holding a number of different jobs. There is a material compulsion to the growth of multiple jobs – namely the stagnating wages facing many workers and the rise of a gig economy that evades labour laws – but there is also an ideological infrastructure emerging to justify this situation." 76

I like the term "ideological infrastructure", of course. But there is also a lot happening in these paragraphs; it goes on:

"If the leisure class was the beneficiary of property ownership and an idle return on rents (broadly speaking), today’s harried class is more often than not dependent on human capital that requires constant work in order to generate an income. This helps explain why it tends to be those in jobs that reward these sorts of skills – managers and professionals – whose roles are more likely to involve long hours." 78

Not entirely persuaded by the following statement:

"In a transformation of the original Protestant work ethic and its positing of work as a calling that could enable social mobility, today we have the work ethic as a key medium of self-expression in itself." 78

Conclusion (subchapter, cloncluding the chapter "Standards")

The ballooning nature of house work:

"Given the shifting focus of standards and the endless nature of housework, unpaid reproductive labour tends to fill whatever temporal container it is placed within." 78

The authors talk about the possibilty of changing norms and the history of breaking or raising standards. Especially important, I think, is their idea to overcome "guilt" in its many manifestations (they used this term considering childcare or the productivity-performance of the harried class, and here again). They use it synonomously with "lowering expectations". But I think a lot remains to be said about "guilt", especially when talking about the Protestant Ethic (and reformulating it).

And another thing strikes me as important: What is the relation to technology? As they argued in the first chapters, technological progress gets overruled by cultural norms (e.g. gendered norms) and has to be seen in a context with these cultural techniques. But what this chapter also makes clear is that there are class dynamics which regulate these standards:

"Middle-class notions of cleanliness, bourgeois images of elaborate meals, and capitalist pressures to ‘invest’ in one’s children and to put on conspicuous displays of busyness are all part and parcel of our class-based societies." 80

Okay, so there are parties who enforce norms ("On top of this, as we have seen, marketing has routinely been a key agent in the creation of new ‘needs’ and higher expectations. And these social expectations take on the weight of legislative force when representatives of the state come to adjudicate their performance." 80), and parties who try to perform norms in order to survive; there is a certain movement of norms (often in the sense of "trickling down", as in the standards of cleanliness. But in the case of the long working hours it is not so clear, is it? It could be the case that this standard moved from the working class to the top, as probably "parenting" did). I think this is remarkable because this would mean there are different movements through society - some for norms and some for technology (but how does technology move through society?) -, this is probably one reason why these paradoxes (especially the Cowan paradox) become even more puzzling to me throughout the book.

IV - FAMILIES

The chapter looks at the economic unit of the family and its artificial construction.

The problem of a post work approach with the family - inefficieny:

"Yet, in terms of reproductive work, the family is wildly inefficient and a vast repository of gendered inequalities." 82

"Between 1985 and 2004, employed women in America saw no change whatsoever in the number of hours they spent doing unpaid social reproduction." (83f.)

"In the current best-case scenario, the average Swedish woman does 1.6 years more of this labour than the average man over the course of her lifetime." 84

Quantitatively speaking the gendered inequity is depressing, when women across the world have 30 minutes less free time per day in the mean than men. But the authors hint at the crucial qualitative differences behind those numbers: women do more nocturnal care giving, men do it more often when other people are also around and women tend to stick to the more repetitive tasks while men do less routine tasks (DIY work, shopping or installing or maintaining tech tools).

The Birth of the Breadwinner (this subchapter considers the time until the 1890s and contains the part: "A New Politics of Time")

18th century:

Most reproductive work was done communally and for others (paid or unpaid)

1. Only 30% of women's work time was spent on care work and house work
2. The household was not the family, consituted by work relations rather then blood relations.

This ends at the turn of the 19th century. "As the nineteenth century drew to a close, men’s wages were rising, the use of child labour was dwindling, and women were finding it more difficult to earn a non-wage income." 90

"Labour force participation for white women in 1890, for instance, dropped ‘from 38.4 percent to 2.5 percent when they married’." 89

The intrafamilial reserve army of labour:

"When needed, married women could also function as what we might call an intrafamilial reserve army of labour." 89f.

Bargaining with trad virtue signalling (how plausible is this causality?):

"While relatively few working-class families could achieve this ideal, the expectation that a male breadwinner should be able to support his entire family gained significant traction around the turn of the century. Trade unions, for instance, came to rely upon the idea of a family wage as a means to bargaining for higher wages – with the added bonus that it signalled to progressive bourgeois allies that the working-class was also seeking the same family form."

Side note: The manifestation of the family form in the early 20th century is remarkable, as I have not often read about this paradigm shift (maybe I just haven't read enough), but it reminds me of a theory I read about according to which Freud's psychoanalysis took off precisely because of the shift from communal forms of living to urban nuclear families. Thus, Freud did not discover something within families that had been unspoken for centuries, but he instead responded to the very creation of a family idea within the material circumstances of the metropolis. It is not surprising, I guess, that the breadwinner model was, even then, a fantasy. But it is important that these fantasy are more and more focussed on the family.

A New Politics of Time

This part looks at the radicalization of the breadwinner model in 1950s upper class Western societies, together with the automobile, there is an "emerging spatial division" between workplace and home - for men. 93 Women on the other hand experienced no such boundary, so their work had no clear spatial, and sometimes temporal end.

"The very design of the home came to reflect an increasing insistence that all associations with work be banished. Furniture, decor, colour scheme, and so on were all intended to present the home as a space of non-work." 93

Peak Family (this subchapter asks how the breadwinner model could persist and even blossom throughout the War Economies)

After the "work front" in War Times, which drew on the "intrafamilial reserve army of labour", there was a widespread backlash - also supported by women who had experienced their mothers' employment as failure or hardship. 96

But again the ideological infrastructure is underpinned by policy measures:

"Perhaps most crucially, the welfare states constructed in the wake of World War II’s devastation were explicitly reliant upon the breadwinner/homemaker model and made significant efforts to enforce this approach. [...] The American New Deal of the 1930s, for example, instituted a two-track welfare system. One track provided unemployment insurance and old-age insurance without question, receipt of which was untarnished by stigma – but which excluded most women and minorities. [...] The Netherlands, for instance, allowed women to work part-time in the 1950s and 1960s because such positions weren’t accorded full social welfare benefits. Assumptions about who was working and who was a homemaker structured everything from benefits to housing policy to pensions. " 97-98

Work for All (this covers the "neoliberal" era, as they say, after the breadwinner model in the second half of the 20th century)

"In some countries, the first shifts away from this form were almost immediate. After a brief postwar dip, female employment in America began to climb again as early as 1947, and by 1950, 21 per cent of all white married women were in the labour force. [...] In fact, despite this being the mythical era of the stay-at-home housewife, women were typically spending more time engaged in wage earning activities than had previously been the case." 100

The dependency on dual income earners, as a perpetual mobilisation of the intrafamilial reserve army of labour:

"The economic crises of the 1970s and the subsequent attacks on the workers’ movement ‘ultimately made it impossible for most working-class people to afford to keep an unwaged housewife out of the labour market’. Already by the late 1970s, commentators were beginning to notice a gradual fading away of the family wage. Women were no longer acting as an intrafamilial reserve army of labour." 100

"As such, the demise of the male breadwinner model must be understood in relation to the disintegration of the economic conditions that enabled that form to become temporarily hegemonic; the family is itself partly reflective of the material conditions of the economy." 101 ("partly reflective" is rather surprising - it is absolutely dependent on it, I 'd say)

The authors stress how important social welfare policies were in establishing this. "Today, nearly every welfare state of the Global North follows this approach, facilitated again by welfare cuts that have increasingly pushed women into waged work. In the America of the early 1970s, for example, cuts to welfare for women with children meant that mothers struggled to survive on dwindling benefits; Black mothers in particular found themselves driven to engage in political struggle for the means to sustain themselves. [...] Most notoriously, changes introduced in 1996 involved a work requirement for single parents receiving payments and set a time limit on receipt of the benefit. [...] In the UK, meanwhile, income support for single parents used to apply for children up to sixteen years of age; now it only applies for children up to five, with the explicit expectation that parents of school-age children will take on waged labour. " 102

Under Pressure

The breadwinner model is dependent on the market and on the state (while the state does not want to play its role properly): Indeed, with the exception of the Scandinavian countries, the breadwinner model is nowhere established. The most common form in the Global north is a sort of "one-and-a-half-earner" model, with someone working part time or gigs. 105 With the gender pay gap and other structural inequalities persisting, it is women who rationally reduce their paid work. But still, the breadwinner model is important as a imaginary which provides ideological structure at "pinch points for care work": For example during the Covid-shutdowns where women took a much higher amount of work created by closed schools and caretaking facilities.

Now families feel more stressed than ever - maybe also because of a "sandwich generation" who sees caretaking duties for their "older parents and their younger children" (this is probably worth an indepth analysis. Is this really that different from the 19th century household?) 106

And at last, the authors name another reason, why people feel more time pressure than ever before: Time tables are more flexible (several jobs, flexible work times), so coordination between the members of a family create new overhead costs (time costs).

"For instance, American mothers have seen their free time decrease from a high of 37.7 hours per week in 1975 to 31.4 hours per week in 2008. Fathers saw a similar decrease from 35.7 hours in 1975 to 32 hours in 2008. Lone mothers are particularly burdened, with around 30 hours a week less discretionary time than childless dual-earning households." 108

In contrast to the gendered free-of-work house of the 1950s, the new conditions are "messier, but no less oppressive". 108

Conclusion (this subchapter concludes the chapter "Families")

The familiy has changed substantially: With less marriages and more divorces, single parents and single households are on the rise. Average household size in high-income countries is now below 3. 109

"If it was absurd that individual families should each cook their own food and run their own washing machines, what are we to make of solitary individuals each doing this work? Adding to temporal concerns, there are also growing ecological concerns about the energy and resource wastefulness that such arrangements can involve." 109

And they conclude with probably the most important argument in this chapter:

"The pandemic situation also illustrates a shift in the generally accepted role of women as shock absorbers within reproductive units – as the people assumed to be the most resilient part of a most resilient social form. We have seen over the course of this chapter that, throughout the history of the family under capitalism, mothers have served as an invaluable reserve army of labour for their households. Today, we would argue, the emphasis has shifted from women as an intrafamilial reserve army of wage labour to women as an intrafamilial reserve army of unwaged care." 110