| This dissertation deals with the emergence of low-wage, home-based labor (“homeworker”) organizing and the relationship of homeworker organizing to global and local policies of “structural adjustment,” including so-called “welfare reform” in the United States, as well as to existing sexual and racial divisions of labor. The dissertation focuses on one sector of low-paid, home-based workers in the United States: child care providers, also known as family daycare providers. The emergence of home-based child care workers in public policy and labor organizing represents a new and important chapter in long-running national and international histories of gendered home-based and domestic labor. The dissertation critically examines the transformation of traditionally unpaid “domestic labor”—and of “women's work” long thought of as informal, unproductive, and private, such as child care—into formal, public, and productive labor that is organizing for greater recognition, valorization, and power. Based on examination of childcare labor organizing conducted by grassroots organizations in the United States, as well as critical analysis of ethnographies of home-based child care providers and other homeworkers in the United States and elsewhere, the author develops an analysis of home-based labor in which Marxist-feminist theories of gendered class formation are reworked through a deconstructive approach to the political economy of the home, and the home's attendant international, sexual and racial divisions of labor. The author revises macro political economic approaches to “social reproduction” through a re-examination of critical theories of home-based value-production and suggests that prior debates on domestic labor neglected the role of paid, home-based work in the production of value. In a series of related arguments, the author discusses home-based labor in relation to critical social and anthropological theories of the “gift” and “general economy”; analyzes work on the transformation of value and affect in postmodern capitalism; and situates home-based labor and labor organizing in relation to contemporary discussions of the effects of structural adjustment policies, such as debt and forced labor, as well as to class, gender and ‘race’-based theoretical approaches to power and governmentality. |
