Domestic and Care Work and the Reproductive Labour Process

Abstract

This article explores the application of labour process theory to reproductive labour, taking as its starting point the dynamics of consent and game playing developed by Michael Burawoy. By developing the theoretical contours of a reproductive labour process, we explore how relations of coercion, consent and resistance manifest in the daily experiences of nine carers, drawing on primary ethnographic research. We illustrate how contemporary reproductive labour reflect dynamics like those identified by Burawoy, though within the context of commodified care work, migration, the gendered nature of care, and the precarious conditions of modern service work. The findings reveal that these reproductive labourers, whether paid or unpaid, face unique challenges, including financial hardship and the necessity of negotiating competing roles within the labour process. Their reason for consent is often affective. Furthermore, they navigate the dual pressures of waged work and the unpaid labour of the home in any way they can, often through the marginalisation of their own needs. The emerging hierarchisation of paid and unpaid reproductive labour in our participants’ daily lives suggests a bleeding together of the productive and reproductive spheres as more and more social reproduction is commodified. Our analysis makes a significant contribution to the literature on social care through its integration of reproductive labour into labour process analysis and the finding that rapid and increasing valorisation of work, which typically took place in the domestic sphere, is destabilising the traditional gendered hierarchy of productive over reproductive, at least in this British case.