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 explo

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

One of the first four demands of the British Women’s Liberation Movement, made at the movement’s first conference in Oxford in 1970, was free 24-hour creches.

The problem of work was a fundamental one: under capitalism, work takes something human and turns it into something monstrous. The forces of capital become ravenous, eating up all that is human, sucking on the very lifeblood of society. Marx’s account is compelling; our jobs do leave us feeling chewed up, spit out, and too tired for anything other