To work according to your contracted duties, to master the tasks you are expected to do and be content enough to do them is seen as a form of slacking off in the modern workplace.

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

Zero-hours contract or on-demand work offers flexibility, but that flexibility is often more beneficial to employers than to workers.

Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, coined the term ‘friction-free capitalism’ to describe a future of maximally efficient markets, with the internet sweeping away traditional market imperfections like physical distance and varying local regulation. Whether this easy movement is projected backwards or forwards, it obscures the real friction of the real

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

Brands outsource the production of clothing to suppliers, who themselves often further outsource. At the bottom of the chain are homeworkers who take on additional work in times of high demand or who add decorative detail. Contracts are awarded to buyers based on low prices. With upfront costs low, buyers’ profits rely on squeezing as much work fro

Through feminism’s theoretical and practical mobilisations, the category or concept of ‘work’ itself was called into question.

Even when the project of adding aspiration works, it can only help a small few; for everyone else, it’s a particularly vicious moment of cruelty in which they are made to feel that their failures are their own fault alone.

The project of feminism is, in part, a method of calling into question ‘the natural’.