About the webinar:
The home has haunted the formulation of global labor standards, including occupational health and safety. It has stood as the space of family privacy, the realm of reproduction, and where women’s responsibility for the daily aspects of life, and for life itself, distinguished her from the male breadwinner. At a time when people worldwide have increasingly moved their workplace home, this presentation considers the home as a workplace in two interlocked ways: first, the outsourcing of income generating work to personal homes, and second, domestic and household workers who earn income by going into other people’s homes.
This webinar will explore home workplaces in the context of the gig economy, and as the organization of conventional labor unravels. The pandemic has revealed the limits of the home as a place of employment, even as this arrangement gestures to a new world of work. The conditions of home-based labor have depended on the very inequalities between genders and geographies, which have made working at home seem like the best of bad options for combining earning and caring. Rather than a progress narrative, Dr. Boris will tell a tale of the return to home-based work with a twist: from outwork as an evil to be eradicated in favor of home-based work, and of home workers as deserving of decent work, like all laborers.
