6: Precarious ‘life-worlds’ and unpaid labour: Expanding research on precarious work at the interface between work and home

Abstract

The growth of precarious work poses a challenge to generate significant rethinking on the future directions of work. We focus on the growing importance of the blurring of the boundaries between the sphere of public (paid) work and private home (domestic) work. Between these two spheres, there is emerging work that is unpaid but necessary to engage in the public sphere of paid work. At the same time, this work relies on the existence of a private sphere that can support such unpaid work, often by making the domestic sphere more oriented to the marketability of its participants. We explain how this can provide a distinctive framework for understanding the reconfiguration of precarious work into that we label ‘precarious life-worlds’ by indicating the dimensions of temporality, spatiality and conditionality featuring the blurring between work and home. Thus, we propose a new direction for theory and research that expands the range of dimensions, processes, conditions and actors accounting for precarious work.