What is important to note about the semantic slipperiness of work is that the generic or broad use of ‘work’ as expending effort and the narrow use of ‘work’ as meaning paid expending of effort tracks a cleavage between paid activity and the often unpaid reproductive activity that is a precondition of that paid activity.

‘Work’ can be immensely general, near enough to a generic form of expending effort, it is also particular, typically being used to mean paid work, a place of work, a job. This means that the same activity can be both work and not-work depending on the conditions in which it is undertaken.

The service sector makes up nearly 80% of the UK’s economy.

That Uber and other employers are willing to spend quite so much money on making sure activity is not legally defined as work shows the lengths companies are prepared to go to avoid paying for the minimum support the law would oblige them to.

In the summer of 2020, another landmark ruling found that the time home care workers – the majority of whom were Black or minority ethnic women and were employed on zero-hours contracts – were entitled to pay for the travelling and waiting time between appointments. They’d previously been paid effectively less than half the minimum wage.20

In October 2020, the company spent $200m to overturn a similar law in California, the largest amount spent on any ballot campaign in US history.19

Just as Marx called into question the naturalness of work under capitalism – showing it not as a natural attribute of humanity but a historically specific and violent arrangement – women associated with the Wages for Housework movement sought to show that the unpaid work women did in the home was not out of a natural feminine benevolence, but

This meant it was exploitative in the way that waged work was (as well as having additional harms of its own) and that housewives were themselves members of the working class, that their struggle was not merely promoting some sectional interest but part of working-class struggle. It was made against the chauvinism of a male-dominated left that paid

In ‘The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework’, the final chapter of her 1981, Women Race and Class, Davis writes that ‘[a] substantial portion of the housewife’s domestic tasks can actually be incorporated into the industrial economy’.6 She argues that such a transformation – making housework the responsibility of society at large rather than the