The ‘Grey Zone’ at the Interface of Work and Home: Theorizing Adaptations Required by Precarious Work

Abstract

This conceptual article develops a framework based on the ‘total social organization of labour’ for analysing the implications precarious work in the public sphere has for the reorganization of the private domestic sphere. The core proposition is that a ‘grey zone’ of unpaid labour exists which needs to be negotiated – or at least tolerated – within a household to engage in precarious paid work. A ‘grey zone’ is theorized as a necessary transition space under conditions of precarious work requiring temporal and spatial adaptations within the family household. The article explains how adaptations in ‘time’ and ‘space’ within a ‘grey zone’ context in the private domestic sphere entail new forms of unpaid labour. Employers have increasingly divested themselves of responsibilities to provide security through the wage relation; families and their pre-existing socio-economic position have adapted to support the unpaid labour necessary to access and survive under precarious work conditions.