At first, large-scale garment production took place in the Global North. In cities like London, New York and Paris, migrant workers toiled long hours for low wages, in small shops, often in the homes of their employers. As New York’s garment workers began to organise, manufacturers moved their shops to states with less well-organised workforces and

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.

Even without the technical know-how of exactly how something was made or brought to the consumer, how much effort it requires, it is possible to reorient our knowledge of the world; to look at a building and wonder who built it, and under which conditions. When we do this, we can see everything around us as a product of human effort, of

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

The creation of new needs is part of capitalism’s hunger for growth, creating more and more commodities and felt-needs, expanding across more and more of the globe.

In the event of a job loss, over a third of households would be unable to pay the coming month’s rent.

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

One reason for the social undervaluation of particular work is the association of that work with women – the fact that it is understood to be women’s work.

Covid-19 called into question the soothing idea of progressively improving work and it revealed the prevalence of bad new work.