In the Workers’ Museum, this is described as an octopus woman. I was able to find out that this provocative image was used by the Kvindeligt Arbejderforbund (Female Workers Confederation) as part of their fight for equal pay in Denmark in the early 1970s, but it speaks to me today on many levels. Of course there is the important level of the continuing need to fully respect work done in the home as just that—work. Unpaid care work is work that can be hard, but also rewarding; work that contributes to our families, communities, and economies, and that should be valued because of these contributions, rather than devalued because it does not directly earn a paycheck.

On another level, this image can also be a metaphor for work more generally. What is work? Too often work is looked at as only one thing, specifically as just a way to earn a living. This is not only unduly narrow, it is destructive. Seeing work only in this way means that job quality is reduced to the dollars and cents on a paycheck, and the bidding down of wages and benefits in a global economy is seen as a natural course of events than cannot be checked. When work is thought of as only about money, it creates a culture where it is necessary and acceptable to closely monitor, supervise, and incentivize employees. This is captured by another object in the Workers’ Museum—a clipboard with a built-in stopwatch used by managers to break work down into simple, repetitive, mindless tasks.

In my recent book, “The Thought of Work” (Cornell University Press, 2011), I try to fight the “one best way” approach to thinking about work that frequently dominates not only public and private policies on work, but also scholarly research. While we need to guard against work becoming all-consuming—the octopus woman image also demonstrates how easy it is to become overburdened by work—I try to embrace the metaphor of the octopus woman by recognizing and valuing work as many things. When we work, we do more than earn a living, we also create, care for, and serve others. We hopefully derive some satisfaction, but also a deeper understanding of our own identities. It is time for researchers to do a better job talking with each other across disciplinary lines, and more importantly, it is time for social norms as well as private and public policies on work to truly embrace work’s fundamental importance.

References

1. Budd, John W. (2011) The Thought of Work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Let me explain why I described the meet-up as fiery and then perhaps you’ll see the point. In the red corner, ‘Muriel’, the pink-haired vegan activist and Lynne, the lecturer in the sociology of gender. In the blue corner ‘Des’, attention-seeker with wandering hands, every other word a swear word. Face-off: I shout at him not to fondle me. Later, there’s been more drinking. Des throws my King Creosote[i] cd on the fire. Acrid smoke and no-one knows quite what to do, certainly not Des, who laughs. I don’t understand such pointless destruction. Now the fall out: I get Des to replace the cd; John must manage his future involvement in the site.

Whilst organisations appear to operate in the sphere of rationality, anyone who has ever worked in one knows this is an illusion: emotion is never absent; and nor is sex (Brewis and Linstead, 2000). The office party appears – in public discourse — as a liminal space where boundaries, particularly around sex at work, are transgressed. Holliday and Thompson, however suggest that

far from being a space where one is beyond organisational control, the real function of the office party is to further refine the organisational subject.

(2001: 127)

That is, Des forced the group to notice him as the opposite of a desexualised, disembodied, rational worker: at the office party he was re-embodied (as was I, through his actions). And he then must be scrutinised and his future behaviour regulated. I had no qualms in complaining about Des’ behaviour, as I didn’t have to face him on Monday morning.

That we did not have an established daily relationship might also have contributed to his actions; would he have dared to behave badly if he had more to lose from being known as a wrong ‘un?  On the other hand, I wonder if Des wouldn’t have been shamed more effectively if surrounded by people who see him day-in, day-out; if the collective strategies for managing him had been refined over time, if there was a well-established idea about what was acceptable. Working in proximity to colleagues produces a sort of cohesion in the way home-working never can, even as it also makes for daily frustrations.

It might seem like this is an unusual case and therefore has little to say about the ordinary experience of sex at work. Certainly, few organisations are as decentralised as this one, even as homeworking, flexibility and outsourcing have been growing for years, producing organisations that are not made up of company men, but individualised workers. Cohesion and collectivity are hard under such atomised circumstances. But too often harassment is seen as rare and individualised, not systemic and therefore impossible to generalise from. Sex, violence and work are entwined in ways that are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, wound into the fabric of working lives.

References

1. Brewis, J. and Linstead, S. (2000) Sex, Work and Sex Work: Eroticizing Organization. London:

   Routledge.

2. Holliday, R. and Thompson, G. (2001) ‘A Body of Work’ in Holliday, R. and Hassard, J. (eds.) Contested Bodies. London, Routledge: 117–133

When you become a carer (and if you haven’t already, the chances are you will for a time at least – there are 2.3 million new carers each year), you’ll work hard. You’ll strain your back lifting; you’ll be tired from waking at night to give medicine. You’ll learn how to manage complex treatment schedules. You’ll try not to scream at the individuals representing the institutions of the state who are supposed to help, but who ask you to fill in another form; who cancel your appointment at the last minute so you didn’t need to have a morning off work. Caring will make you cry. It will give you ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai, 2009), make you resent (once, sometimes, often) the person you care for and will cause your other relationships to suffer. You will gain new capacities, but at some cost. You will need praise, but you won’t get it from your boss. Life will be something to be coped with as well as something to enjoy.

Carer, by Kai Hendry

And yes, as a form of work it is complicated. It is unpaid, occurring in the private sphere, dominated by discourses of love and duty (Lyon, 2010), and carers are casually treated by welfare policy as being neither working nor unemployed. For example, carers allowance is awarded to those caring for 35+ hours per week. Once a carer starts claiming their pension, the allowance is removed even as the care duties remain, and so it isn’t a substitute for earned income. At best, it seems to be a symbolic payment, a rather miserly donation for being nice. Many carers combine care with paid work (60% of women, 74% of men of working age who care do this, according to Yeandle, 2008), and part of their care tasks may be to manage paid caregivers and service providers. Caring is not simple.

Glucksmann (2005) argues it’s not the location of an activity in the public sphere that means it should be called work, but the social relations that make it up. This means different configurations between state, market, family and voluntary sector give rise to different modes of organising care, and different interactions between paid and unpaid care (Lyon, 2010). Unpaid care work is not separate from market or state provision, rather the need for it is contingent on what sorts of other provision is possible or available in a country.

However, the formal organisation of care work is buttressed by discourses around who should care. Love and duty are in complement (and may be in tension) within a socio-cultural context that says that to be a good parent/wife/son/whatever is to take on the responsibility and activity of care; in the UK this impulse is enhanced by how alternative forms of caregiving are limited. And perhaps this is right: the quality of life of the person being cared for may be greater like this (although Nelson and England (2002) raise the question of whether paid-for care might well be morally right). It worth noting that this is not an inevitable, uncontestable moral position, but one that is regularly reproduced in media, government policy, by carers and those cared for as something which ought to be. The naturalisation of unpaid care as the way of showing love tends to override the difficulties of being a carer, and may be used to produce ‘fictive’ family ties when paid care is brought into the home.

Recognising care as work helps to understand the complexity of what care is, even though some carers would resist the label work, seeing caring as a gift of love. Thinking about care as work may help sort out the mess over benefits: it’s work, it needs support, and respite. And it may offer status to carers by acknowledging that there’s more to caring than loving. And that might offer carers a recognition that what they do has status; it’s not a natural gift and it doesn’t come for free.

References

1. Carers UK (2009) Facts About Carers.
2. Glucksmann, M. (2005) ‘Shifting Boundaries and Interconnections: Extending the ‘Total Social Organisation of Labour’’. In Pettinger, L., Parry, J. Taylor, R. F. and Glucksmann, M. (eds) (2005) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review.
3. Lyon, Dawn (forthcoming, 2010) ‘Intersections and Boundaries of Work and Non-work: The Case of Elder Care in Comparative European Perspective’ European Societies 12(1): 1–23.
4. Nelson, J. A. and England, P. (2002) ‘Feminist Philosophies of Love and Work’. Hypatia. Vol. 17, no 2 (spring) 1–18.
5. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass. and London.
6. Yeandle, S. (2008) Transforming Lives: Time for a New Social Contract for Care. Paper presented at Carers UK conference on Carers in Communities: The local transformation agenda.

But what do we know about being a customer or client of a homeworker? How is the interaction influenced by this confusion of boundaries between home and work?

I have a research project on men who pay for sex and write about it on the internet. These men are sensitive when going to a flat or house (rather than to a brothel) to signs of home. Most want no sign of private life (teddy bears on the bed, for example, or cat ornaments), but sometimes one speaks of liking the feel of being in a home for its implication that prostitution is not a performance, but a reflection of authentic desire, so close to the sex worker that she does it in her own house, not in a rented place. Most important, though is ‘safe, discreet and clean’.

And what about other clients and customers? I was staying in a B&B run by a retired couple who paid great attention to delimiting space and also to circumscribe the services the customer is invited to take advantage of, and – more significantly – those which he or she is not.

photography by Lynne Pettinger

The first indication of this came as I call to book (telephone booking; how 20th Century). I am asked to specify an arrival time. And if I can’t make this time I must let them know. When I ring to tell them the bus is late, the phone call itself is as much of an irritation to the landlord as the earlier threat of lateness had been. Then there’s the discussion about breakfast; I’m invited to state my preference, but I am not allowed to coincide with other guests, although I do not know this until the landlady’s face twitches and I sense I’ve made an error. Then too there’s the time I want to shower: this, it seems, needs establishing.

Di Domenico and Lynch suggest that spaces used by guest and host are ambiguous, and that guests may feel uncertain about their presence and conscious of boundary betrayal (2007: 331), and that this is more marked when the guest house seeks to present an authentic experience of place and ‘home’ (rather than hotel) (2007: 328).

photography by Lynne Pettinger

So when home is work (and work is a way of life, as it must be when you rent your home and services out to passing strangers) it is hard to balance the public and private and to set rules in ways which make sense to customers. It is hard too for the customer, who expects service but senses their trespassing. Like the men who pay for sex, I quite enjoy the limited intimations of identity – certainly the decorative tray affixed to the wall and the carpet pattern seem revealing.

But for sure “The social niceties and obligations inherent in the interaction perpetuate the conflicts inherent in the provision of a commercial service within a domestic context” (di Domenico and Lynch, 2007: 333) and for the first time in my life I have an argument with a landlord.

References

1. Di Domenico, M. and Lynch, P. (2007) ‘Host/Guest Encounters in the Commercial Home’. Leisure Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3, 321–338. DOI: 10.1080/02614360600898110
2. Felstead, A. and Jewson, N. (2000) In work, at home : towards an understanding of homeworking. London: Routledge
3. Nippert-Eng, C. (1996) Home and work: negotiating boundaries through everyday life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.