Past Caring? Women, Work and Emotion

Past Caring? Women, Work and Emotion focuses on the history of women’s care work in New Zealand and on how women’s association with, and responsibility for, care shape their lives and social status. It presents a variety of historical case studies which collectively document shifting concepts and practices about care, unpaid and paid, familial and professional, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The editors note that it “seeks to make care and care work in New Zealand’s past visible,” offering “different vantage points on women’s history and its resonances now” in public debates about issues such as child poverty, pay equity, and parental leaves (7)

Feminist Reflections on the Scope of Labour Law: Domestic Work, Social Reproduction and Jurisdiction

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I argue that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction