Feminist research has broadened the narrow definition of work by arguing for the recognition of domestic work and care work, mainly performed by women, in particular subaltern women (working class, migrant, colored, low caste, etc.)Footnote ¹. Feminist research has clearly and convincingly shown that the very existence of capitalism rests on a wide range of invisibilized, unpaid activities, which can be qualified as real work since they are routine, time-consuming activities that require specific skills. The very existence of wage work and the accumulation of surplus value could not exist in the absence of housework, child and elder care, emotional care, and care to nature. Although there is still a long way to go before this type of work is fully recognized and valued, enormous progress has been made in defining, conceptualizing, and measuring itFootnote ². The Covid-19 pandemic has also had the (sad) merit of raising public awareness of the crucial role of domestic and care work.

Two recent ethnographies in India and Argentina highlight another form of unpaid, invisible, primarily female work, which plays a crucial role in the social reproduction of families (and capitalism): the everyday work involved in accessing basic rights and social welfare, mostly by women. In Bangalore, Kaveri Haritas describes the emergence of the “rehabilitated” neighborhood of Laggere after the demolition of a slum. It took several years before the houses were (more or less) built and the water and electricity networks were set up (although they still regularly fail). The title deeds were never granted, but the families were nevertheless able to settle in the area (Haritas 2021). All this resulted from intense, daily, routine work, requiring many skills, and implemented mainly by women. They conducted their own surveys to compensate for inadequate or false statistics from the administration, organized petitions, mobilized neighbors for mass demonstrations, and bargained with administration representatives and political leaders. When the neighborhood finally took shape, many services were often defective. As a result, women now wait several hours a day to access water and regularly go to the electricity department in case of power outages. They constantly complain to subsidized food shops that cheat on quantities and mix rice with dirt and garbage. They organize school trips, quizzes, and competitions for pupils and students to compensate for the lack of motivation due to the poor quality of the local school. They spend considerable time at administrative counters to claim their rights to social assistance. These rights are never formally acquired, but require permanent efforts to prove their eligibility. Kaveri Haritas frames these activities as “political work”.

In Barrio Soldati, Buenos Aires, Emilia Schijman describes fascinatingly similar processes in a neighborhood rehabilitated in the 1970s (Schijman 2019). There too, the inhabitants, often women, engage in a myriad of everyday activities to avoid evictions and claim their rights to housing, inheritance, social aid, health, education, and justice in case of disputes with family or neighbors. They go through the administration, the health center, the church, and the school canteen. They build and display proof of their eligibility. They write letters to state officials and political leaders, even to the president of the republic, when nothing else works. The Post Office deserted the district 20 years ago, on the basis that it was dangerous and tortuous, and therefore insufficiently profitable. The women have therefore organized themselves to take charge of mail delivery. Public transport is also lacking and cabs refuse to serve the neighborhood. The women and men have therefore set up a cab service that also serves as an ambulance, as transport to the city center, and as transport to the nearby supermarket. In other words, women are working very hard to claim their rights. Emilia Schijman frames these activities as “the work of rights” (travail des droits).

In both cases, men are not absent. They assist and accompany women in specific negotiations, usually at a higher level in the bureaucratic and political hierarchies. Yet the men who play an active and regular role rarely do so for free, while this work is unpaid for most women. Women do this political work for their rights as an extension of their reproductive responsibilities.

Why call it work? It is work because it produces value. Without this work, women and their families would not have access to many of the goods and services that are instrumental in their ability to make ends meet. Women’s work contributes meaningfully to the material improvement of livelihoods and neighborhoods. It transforms simple plots of land (Laggere) or derelict neighborhoods (Barrio Soldati) into residential areas that are now more or less well-serviced and liveable. It sets local governments and other institutions in motion, forces them to ensure that services are delivered and then maintained, and makes administrations accountable to a certain extent. At the same time, the efforts involved absorb a substantial amount of women’s time and energy. Such activities are time-consuming and unpredictable: one must be present at the right time and for the right amount of time. In both case studies, women frequently have to give up paid work in order to devote the time necessary to obtain their rights.

Kaveri Haritas suggests the concept of “political work” to highlight the permanent struggle that this work entails and the fact that it shapes state-citizen relations and conditions state accountability. Social safety nets and basic rights are not universal: they must be deserved. Only the poor—women in this case—who perform political work are entitled to them. Emilia Schijman speaks of a “work of rights” to emphasize that the ultimate goal is to transform formal rights into real rights and ultimately to “produce rights”. There is now ample evidence that the poor must exert considerable pressure on various parts of the government machinery to assert their rights and claim some form of citizenship. This “everyday politics of the poor” focuses on the visible interactions between local leaders and mediators and government officials, elected officials and political leaders. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The two authors highlight a myriad of everyday struggles that are too often invisibilized by the literature on the politics of the poor.

Both authors convincingly demonstrate that this is real work, insofar as it is repetitive, time-consuming and requires specific skills. Time is the essence of political work and work of rights. The urban poor are in a permanent situation of “waiting” (Haritas: 54), and their physical presence at the counters is a real “resource” (Schijman: 32). The availability of time is likely to go along with constant acts of deference and submission, helping to maintain a system of allegiance and asymmetrical dependencies.

Political work and work of rights are not only a matter of time and waiting. They also require the deployment of multiple skills, know-how, and abilities. The first is knowledge and learning of the law since a large part of the work consists of understanding, translating, appropriating, and sometimes transgressing the law in order to implement rights. In both cases, the intensity of the “paperwork” performed by women is fascinating, showing how the law is a “living” entity (Schijman: 15). The lived experience of the law is not only the reflection of legal obligations and penal constraints but the result of a daily fabric of personal relationships, social obligations, and moral coercion.

As both authors suggest, political work and work of rights are also emotional work, in the sense suggested by sociologist Arlie HochschildFootnote ³: emotional work consists of using one’s own emotions to generate an appropriate emotion in the person or group of people one is trying to convince. In both case studies, emotional work is a subtle mix of anger, rage, and sometimes humor, and often implies tactical staging of misery and motherhood to elicit empathy and sympathy. In Laggere, in many circumstances women’s claims work best when they exhibit their poverty “carrying their children, no oil in their hair, sarees old and torn, the boys wearing tattered clothes” (Haritas: 127). The threat of immolation can also be effective. During neighborhood meetings or with officials, during demonstrations, women use poetry and song. Their mere presence in mass demonstrations, as mothers and wives, seems to make their advocacy more convincing. Similarly, for the women of Barrio Soldati, “camping out with their children, crying for mercy” is often an effective technique (Schijman: 33). In their letters written to administrations, political leaders, or the president of the republic, women share their intimacy and their family photos, explicitly soliciting the “sensitivity” of leaders (Schijman: 40).

Although the authors do not use the term, it is clear that political work and the work of rights are intensely relational, in the sense elaborated by sociologist Viviana ZelizerFootnote ⁴. In the labyrinth of institutions and personalities involved in local politics and rights implementation (administrations, local authorities, political or religious leaders, NGOs), women have to identify distinct categories of social relations, erect boundaries and mark these boundaries through language techniques, emotional registers, evidentiary techniques, economic transactions—gifts, favors, and bribes circulate but according to precise ethical and moral rules that women must gradually learn.

Beyond these two ethnographies, it is likely that political work and the work of rights are occurring in many contexts. Other ethnographies, although not using the concept of “work”, highlight the intense and repeated efforts made by poor women to access their rights. In various Central and South American states, accessing conditional cash transfers is so time-consuming that women no longer have time for paid workFootnote ⁵. Although in the global north, states are supposed to be more accountable, this does not prevent access to rights from being an everyday struggle. In Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece, four countries severely affected by the 2008 crisis and austerity policies, citizens develop specific tactics to navigate the power geometries of public administrations, accommodate diverse practices of regulation, coercion and mediation, negotiate their rights and entitlements and maximise opportunities for protection and supportFootnote ⁶. In France too, austerity policies are making welfare policies increasingly selective and arbitrary, forcing citizens to spend considerable time at the counter of administrations, deciphering the complexity of bureaucratic rules, negotiating with administrative staff, proving they are eligible and deserving, familiarising themselves with digital procedures, which are now unavoidable, and sometimes writing letters and petitionsFootnote ⁷.

In many parts of the world, the digitalization of social rights is supposed to facilitate processes and improve transparency and efficiency in targeting and distribution. However, ethnography shows that this is far from being the case. Digitization certainly works well in certain circumstances and for specific categories of citizens, but it also means that an increasing part of the work formerly carried out by administrative staff is now delegated to users. Digitization can just as easily lead to new forms of dysfunction and exclusion, new practices of malpractice and “e-corruption”Footnote ⁸. In France, the automation and digitalization of procedures has transformed the administration into what non-profit activists qualify as “digital monstersFootnote ⁹” that make it even more difficult to contest in case of errors while increasing the control over suspected fraud. Ultimately, digitalization requires new skills and know-how, and thus specific forms of political work and work of rights that deserve to be studied in more detail.

Why is it so important to conceptualize these activities as “work”? Political work and the work of rights are an essential component of social reproduction, and thus of capitalism, social states, and their co-constitution. Feminist studies define social reproduction as all the activities, behaviors, relations, responsibilities, obligations, and institutions necessary for the reproduction of life and dignity, both daily and intergenerationally. Insofar as capitalism does not internalize the cost of reproduction of workers, this cost is delegated to the workers themselves, and more precisely to the people, most often women, who do the care work and domestic work. In this sense, social reproduction also refers to the perpetuation of modes of production and the structures of class and gender inequality inscribed within themFootnote ¹⁰. The co-constitution of private capital and the state is of course situational, locally, and historically determined with great variations across time and space. There are, however, similar trends in the way the state has abandoned—or never assumed—its “role as mediator in the conflict of interests between labor and capital”Footnote ¹¹. Rather than a withdrawal or absence of the state, it is more relevant to emphasize the subtle and multiple ways in which the state primarily serves the interests of private capital. It does so by withdrawing from the regulation of imbalances between labor and capital while providing safety nets that meagerly compensate for low and irregular wages, and the failure of basic rights infrastructure such as education, health, water, electricity, housing, etc.Footnote ¹².

Not only do these safety nets act as indirect subsidies to private capital, but these safety nets are never a given: they require intense work, as the ethnographies of Kaveri Haritas and Emilia Schijman show. In this sense, political work and the work of rights are not only a productive activity: they are also labor, in the Marxist sense, that is, a productive activity valuable for capital insofar it generates surplus value. It is also a productive activity for the state since political work and the work of rights allow the state to be accountable. Ultimately, the indirect subsidization of private capital is fed both by public resources and the unpaid work of the poor, and primarily of women. The anthropology of the state has shown the permanent process of the “co-creation” of the stateFootnote ¹³. The ethnographies of Kaveri Haritas and Emilia Schijman suggest that without the everyday work of negotiation, claiming, mobilization, interpretation, and supplication performed by women, many of the promises of the state would simply fail and co-creation would simply not happen. The concepts of political work and the work of rights invite us to revisit the multiple ways in which private capital, as well as the complicit state, extract various forms of value from the unpaid labor of the poor, and from women in particular.