Today, unpaid work comes in various forms: volunteering, civic service, internships, digital labor, etc. Based on the long-standing lessons of feminism on domestic work, sociologist Maud Simonet renews the analysis of these contemporary forms of exploitation.
This is a little book that gives food for thought. It is presented as a 152-page essay on what Maud Simonet calls “free work”. This expression is used to designate volunteering, workfare (work in return for social assistance recipients), but also volunteering, civic service, internships or even digital labor (work carried out by individuals on the internet, for example, publishing on a blog or recognizing words that cannot be deciphered by robots in the context of “recaptchas”). The book’s challenge is to bring together these diverse experiences under the same label to reveal what they have in common. In doing so, Maud Simonet gives coherence to her entire research journey during which she investigated these different types of activities. This coherence can be seen in the definition she proposes: “forms of work not recognized as such, carried out outside labor law and with little or no monetary compensation and social rights” (p. 10). This book also presents a strong thesis: contrary to what current debates on the digital laborunpaid work is nothing new. Above all, it was already widely analyzed more than forty years ago by feminists regarding women’s domestic work. Maud Simonet thus proposes to return to these already old analyses to think about current forms of unpaid work.
Returning to domestic work to think about free work
By describing as “domestic work” a form of work that had until then rarely been thought of as such, feminist researchers and activists have made visible a work carried out for free mainly by women and have produced an analysis of it. The notion of “free work” used by Maud Simonet has the same ambition. In the first chapter, the sociologist returns precisely to the contributions of feminists that nourish the reflection conducted throughout the book. From this point of view, her writing is extremely clear and educational: the particularly complex writings of Christine Delphy thus appear perfectly accessible under the pen of Maud Simonet.
A fundamental lesson learned from feminists is to think of unpaid work as a “denial of work” carried out “in the name of” values (p. 45). Like domestic work, unpaid work is not only unpaid work: what characterizes it is also that it is invisible as work, because it is carried out in the name of values other than monetary value. Domestic work is thus all the less perceived as work when it is carried out in the name of love (of a mother for her children, for example). In other words, love justifies not considering it as work and therefore not paying it. This result is then reworked by Maud Simonet who shows how different rhetorics of unpaid work are expressed today. Chapter 2 is thus devoted to volunteering, workfare and civic service that are carried out in the name of citizenship. The author analyzes the development of free labor policies using this type of rhetoric in the United States and France, drawing in particular on the investigation she conducted with John Krinsky on the maintenance of parks and gardens in New York City. These policies participate in what she evocatively calls the “civic face of neoliberalism” (p. 77) by contributing to the “gratuitization” of work. If there is something new, it is therefore not so much in the gratuitous aspect of these contemporary forms of work as in the development of public policies participating in this gratuitization.
Defining exploitation beyond theoretical divisions
It is mainly in Chapter 3 that Maud Simonet delivers her conception of exploitation which is at the heart of unpaid work. This chapter focuses on the digital labor and begins with a review of the vast literature on the subject. It thus opens with the notion of “free labor” proposed by Tiziana Terranova, an Italian researcher specializing in media who for the first time emphasized the issues of free work on the Internet in a 2000 article. “Free” has a double meaning: “free labor” is both unpaid and exploited work, but also free work, appreciated for its own sake. These two meanings could define the main theoretical divide regarding the digital labor : on the one hand, some neo-Marxist theorists like Antonio Casilli insist on the objective exploitation of workers, their creativity and their affects, by digital platforms; on the other hand, authors like Dominique Cardon consider that we should rather take seriously the subjective experience of Internet users who can take pleasure in publishing on their blog or on social networks.
Drawing on the lessons of feminism, Maud Simonet suggests going beyond this theoretical divide by considering that it is not necessary to “decide between the pleasure one takes and the exploitation one suffers” (p. 97). In the same way that mothers are both exploited and happy to take care of their children, bloggers and other digital workers can be both exploited and happy to add their personal contribution to the internet. In their case, exploitation is not done in the name of love, but of passion or pleasure.
The analysis of the concept of “exploitation” does not stop there. Drawing on his investigation into the case of the bloggers of Huffington PostMaud Simonet defines exploitation as consubstantial with free work by appropriation. The case in question concerns the purchase of the online newspaper by the company AOL in 2011 for $315 million: the thousands of bloggers who have contributed to the newspaper’s operation for free since its creation in 2005 then asked for a third of the profit made to be returned to them. The main problem posed by this buyout and by the profit generated for the newspaper’s managers lies, according to the analyzed comments of the leaders of the class action bloggers, to the appropriation of bloggers’ work by an institution redefined as a for-profit enterprise. Here again, the author draws lessons from feminism in this conception of exploitation as appropriation (rather than as alienation). This definition has the advantage of being operational and of embracing the different forms of work previously described.
Articulation between free work and employment
The scope of Maud Simonet’s book also lies in the fact that she manages to convince us that unpaid work is not just an epiphenomenon on the margins of employment: it infiltrates all the folds of employment, so much so that its study appears central to understanding contemporary transformations of work and employment. Chapter 4 is precisely devoted to the articulation between unpaid work and employment. Unpaid work is first located “at the heart of employment” (p. 116): as contemporary feminist research on the “feminization of work” (notably that of Donna Haraway) shows, immaterial work or emotional work formerly required essentially by women’s jobs now extends to the majority of jobs. It is indeed unpaid work, denied as work and going beyond the framework of the employment contract strictly speaking. Unpaid work is then carried out “in the name of (future) employment” (p. 123). Based on Anglo-Saxon research on the “ hope labor “, THE ” sacrificial labor » or the « aspirational labor “, the author shows that unpaid work is now seen as a springboard to employment or an investment in one’s career. This is also the case for volunteering, voluntary work or internships that are part of a path to employment and which are now part of the standardized functioning of the labor market. Finally, unpaid work also constitutes a “substitute for employment” (p. 132). In twenty years, we have gone from banning volunteering for the unemployed to encouraging volunteering for unemployment benefit recipients. RSA. The idea of a springboard to employment appears central here again. Finally, Maud Simonet rereads a large number of writings (particularly Anglo-Saxon) on the contemporary world of work from the perspective of unpaid work, and it would seem that these lenses do indeed allow us to shed new light on vast areas of social reality.
What to do? Maud Simonet makes the effort to answer this difficult question in a final prospective chapter. Of the five chapters, this is the shortest. The two scenarios proposed (dissolving unpaid work into salaried employment and vice versa) provide food for thought, but would deserve to be explored in more depth to grasp all their implications. The author nevertheless warns at the beginning of the chapter that she does not intend to go around the issue, which is easy to understand.
For those familiar with the literature cited by Maud Simonet, reading her essay sometimes echoes theoretical propositions made by other authors. The central proposition of rereading contemporary forms of unpaid labor in light of the ancient lessons of feminism is, for example, similar to that of Kylie Jarrett’s 2016 book, Feminism, Labor and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (Routledge, 2016). The book is also cited by Maud Simonet. Nevertheless, the work of bringing together literatures that ignore each other, the effort to clarify the theories cited and the mobilization of her own investigations contribute to making the essay a truly original work. Moreover, the discussion with other theories could be continued, in other spaces or other writings: the logics described evoke in many respects that of the gift, which has been the subject of numerous analyses in economic sociology, notably in a Bourdieusian perspective emphasizing the “denial of the economic” quite close to the “denial of work” highlighted by Maud Simonet.
While several current studies are interested in the growing commodification of non-work – notably via the sale of goods or services of individuals on digital platforms –, Maud Simonet’s approach is the opposite since she observes forms of gratuity of work. While the former questions the possibilities of emancipation through commodification, Maud Simonet provides an analysis of exploitation through gratuitous work. However, the phenomena observed are similar. How can we explain this divergence of analysis? In reality, if the starting point is different, these analyses converge in many aspects. Indeed, those who study phenomena of commodification of non-work discover forms of gratuitous work (for example, the publication of content on social networks with a view to selling one’s objects or services, without substantial remuneration for this work). Conversely, Maud Simonet clearly shows that gratuitous work develops in parallel with forms of commodification and profitability sought. It ultimately seems relevant to think at the same time of commodification and gratuity, extension of the market and extension of gratuitous work. There is no doubt that Maud Simonet’s essay will help many researchers to better (re)think their research subjects, while its subject and writing also make it a book that is intended to be of interest beyond the academic sphere alone.