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.

Workers’ contentions over unpaid labour time in food delivery and domestic work platforms in Belgium

“…Recent studies on platform work have revealed that workers spend a significant share of their time on labour platforms without receiving any financial compensation for it, for example when waiting and applying for work, building online profiles, or interacting with clients (Pulignano and Marà, 2021;. Scholars point to processes of labour commodification and 'algorithmic insecurity' as underlying unpaid labour within paid platform employment (Wood et al, 2019, Wood andLehdonvirta, 2021b), rendering unpaid labour a precondition for accessing income in contexts of precarious platform work (Pulignano and Morgan, 2022). Studies indicate that platforms' systems of time control contribute to workers' exposure to unpaid labour time.…”

“…Platforms expose workers to unpaid labour time by paying workers by the task and inducing them to conduct unpaid activities in order to build an on-platform reputation that facilitates access to paid work (Moore and Newsome, 2018;. Thus, platforms undermine the traditional 'wage-effort bargain' as they refrain from compensating the risk of unpaid labour time workers bear by divesting themselves of responsibilities to provide security through the wage relation (Pulignano and Morgan, 2022). Whereas it is well known that platforms organise work in such a way that portions of labour time are unpaid, less knowledge exists on how workers in diverse sectors of the platform economy deal with and make sense of their exposure to unpaid labour time.…”

Faces of Precarity

“…This links into the third important resource for the use of unpaid labour in precarious paid work by employers, which is the individual who accepts reduced expectations in relation to acceptable standards of living relative to prevailing norms. This is because precarious workers who have to give time and money to be ready for work are likely the ones who then reorganize their home lives in the light of their expectations of income and income stability (for a wide range of examples see Pulignano and Morgan, 2021). Whiting and Symon (2020), for example, discuss 'digi-housekeeping', the unpaid work required to maintain the digital tools that are necessary to participate in the gig economy.…”

“…Instead, we argue, there exists between home and work a range of grey zones where the boundaries between work and home blur, and where unpaid work emerges. This blurring can take different forms and it can reveal a variety of ways in which work can been shifted out of the responsibility of the employer and create new (inter)-dependencies within and between the sphere of public (paid) and private (domestic) work that are now the responsibility of the individual and the household (see also Pulignano and Morgan, 2021). Hence, unpaid work is likely to occur and to account for precarity within the emerging and broad realm of dependency, which reflects individual necessity within paid employment.…”

Care theft: Family impacts of employer control in Australia's retail industry

“…In retail, flexibility often equates to schedules which are irregular, short-notice, subject to last-minute changes, and which require presence at times typically reserved for family life, such as nights and weekends (Campbell and Chalmers, 2008; Schneider and Harknett, 2019; Sharma et al, 2022). Workers need additional resources to mitigate the material consequences of such insecurity, and to adjust household organisation to maintain work readiness (Pulignano and Morgan, 2023). Indeed, unpredictable working time has been observed to create ‘time out of life’, in that even outside of paid hours, workers remain at employers’ disposal, unable to devote time to their own non-work lives, including caregiving (McCann and Murray, 2010: 29–30).…”