Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home

The Characteristics and Location of Home Workers in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver

“…It is therefore useful at this point to dissect the home work phenomenon. Boris and Daniels (1989) classify home workers as employees, employers or independent contractors with widely different incomes, occupations and needs. Others have created various typologies based on a combination of workplace and employment status, extent of home work, service versus production industry, information versus non-information workers and use of satellite offices (Helling and Mokhtarian, 2001;Mirchandani and Slade, 2002;Haddon and Brynin, 2005).…”

Flexibility, the Family Ethic, and Rural Home-Based Work

“…Proponents of home-based work sometimes lightly assume that working at home gives women complete control over their time and tasks, such that they can neatly separate home-and paid-work for the benefit of all concerned (Boris & Daniels, 1989;Christensen, 1988b;Gringeri, 1994). The assumption that home-based work guarantees flexibility for women workers fails to recognize that the conditions of work become embedded in the dynamics, relationships, and labor divisions of the household as the locus of work.…”

The FairWear Campaign: An Ethical Network in the Australian Garment Industry

“…Homework is both an ancient and a modern form of production (Boris and Daniels, 1989), for which the literature advances various explanations. Amongst these is the behaviour of firms (Baylina and Schier, 2002;Burchielli et al, 2008).…”

“…A key characteristic of homework is its 'invisibility' (Boris, 1994;Boris and Daniels, 1989;Burchielli et al 2008), as homeworkers work from their own or neighbours' homes. Homeworkers contribute to the global economy, but are invisible to labour market regulators, to consumers, and perhaps even to themselves, in the sense that they may not identify as workers (Hill, 2005).…”

“…The type of homework discussed in this article is highly specific: it is informal work undertaken in the home, predominantly by women, engaged in various types of informal employment arrangements (Boris and Daniels, 1989;HWW, 2002). Informal employment is characterised by precariousness, lack of social protection and poverty; in the form we are discussing here, it occurs in developed and developing economies outside formal systems of employment and social security protection, where there is little documentation of where the output is going or where it originates (ILO, 2002b).…”