Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
ISSN
0006-8047
Publisher
Boston University School of Law
Language
en-US
Abstract
The idea of work, as it pertains to a place called home, as distinct from the market, has engaged and perplexed scholars for generations. Work in the home raises complicated issues that have accordingly drawn the focus of generations of scholars, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the material feminists of the late nineteenth century1 to historians of labor such as Eileen Boris2 and of law like Reva Siegel,3 from legal scholars like Fran Olson, Dorothy Roberts, and Robert Ellickson4 to social theorists like Friedrick Engels5 and architectural historians like Dolores Hayden,6 to name just a few. The importance of this most thorny of issues explains why so many scholars have tackled it.
Having myself considered these issues in a series of articles,7 I wholeheartedly welcome the unique and perceptive contribution Yiran Zhang makes to this literature in her article Home as Non-Workplace. 8 Zhang approaches the topic as a labor scholar of the twenty-first century, aware of the history as well as the most recent legal, social, and political movements, with a lens that sees shortcomings in regulation of the employment relationship based on place. If some scholars fight the erasure of home production,9 and some fight the construction of the home itself,10 Zhang’s work focuses on drawing the attention of work law scholars to the normality of home-based work.11 My own work has focused on drawing the attention of family law scholars to household labor, as I brought a family law lens that saw shortcomings in the way family law constructed care work.12 Zhang brings perhaps the opposite lens by starting with the blind spots of work law scholars. Yet our work is very compatible. My research focused on the relationships and the place in home work; Zhang’s focuses on the work law. Among Zhang’s distinctive contributions are: (1) demonstrating that home is not an ancillary workplace, but perhaps the normative workplace; 13 and (2) arguing that work law scholars therefore need to place work at home at the center of their own study.14 Zhang wants work law scholars to learn about the ideology of the home/work dichotomy and correct their participation in that ideology, learning to resist the habit of exceptionalizing the home in designing, advocating for, and evaluating work and labor regulations.
As a preliminary matter, I would note that some of the challenges of evaluating work at home may result from the way different employment relationships and care work generate meanings that bleed out from their initial context. Several distinctions among types of work at home influence how their treatment is evaluated: who is the employer, is the work associated with the home, and is the work for pay? Who the employer is in a given context and whether the “home” is central or incidental to the tasks performed both influence the analysis. The issue of work within households has at least three interrelated iterations, and scholars will need to take care to distinguish them even though the treatment of each influences the treatment of the others.
The first two versions of work deal with care work and other work directly connected to the home, such as cleaning and food preparation. In one case, that work is done without compensation on behalf of the household, generally by a member of the household. In the other, it is done for pay by someone who may or may not live in the household but is ordinarily not a member of the family unit, however defined.16 The third kind of work in households is work done for an employer and not relating to the household but simply performed within the home. This could range from piece work17 to twenty-first century pandemic and post-pandemic work-from-home (“WFH”) professional and pink-collar labor. Zhang and other scholars have argued in effect that perceptions of each of these three kinds of work are highly influenced by perception of the other two kinds.18 Thus, it becomes impossible to discuss any one of these forms of work without discussing the others; they become entwined because ideological understandings deploy ideas about home, social reproduction and care, labor, and leisure to link them. Yet it seems that all three are described in the literature as having one common foundation, which is the exploitation or harm to those who work at home.19 This can be a soul-crushing feature to share, and so it becomes important to see these practices in a particular and granular way as much as in the dominant, and essential, theoretical mode to decide what is worth saving.
Recommended Citation
Katharine B. Silbaugh,
Response: Work and Home
,
105
Boston University Law Review
975
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4233
