Introduction: The crisis of work in perspective

In writing about work, and the crisis of work, we must of course establish what we mean by ‘work’. In previous books, we offered a history of the varied sociological definitions of work, noted that there has been a long-term trend in the social sciences to equate work with paid employment – thus ignoring the enormous contribution that unpaid work makes to our socio- economic landscape – and pointed to how work and employment contribute to identities, both individual and collective (Bradley et al, 2000; Erickson et al, 2009; Williams et al, 2013). While the focus of this book is on paid work, involving jobs people undertake in return for wages or salaries, the importance of unpaid household and caring tasks, often carried out by women, should not be overlooked. Perhaps most importantly, there are notable connections between unpaid domestic work and paid employment. People in part- time jobs – primarily women – often value the opportunity to combine paid work with unpaid household responsibilities, not just childcare tasks but also caring for older family members (Rubery et al, 2016). Another complicating factor is that work which is unpaid household labour when undertaken by a family member – domestic cleaning for example – becomes paid employment when a cleaner is hired from outside the family and rewarded with a wage. In distinguishing between paid and unpaid work, then, it is the social relations that structure the work and how it is undertaken, rather than the specific nature of the work tasks themselves, that are important (Budd, 2011).

In capitalist societies, paid work fulfils some important economic functions. The employment relationship, in which a worker takes up employment with an employer in return for a wage or salary, provides the employer with a resource which, managed appropriately, can be used to realize added value from the tasks undertaken. Paid employment of this kind also provides workers with an income, necessary for their subsistence. Importantly, though, work matters, not just on account of its economic value – both for employers and workers, in different ways – but also for myriad other social and psychological reasons, including identity formation and the development of citizenship (Budd, 2011).