WIEGO - Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing
WIEGO has also contributed to the creation of global networks in order to help build a stronger, united voice: the International Domestic Workers Federation for domestic workers, Street Net International for street vendors and market traders, and HomeNet International for home-based workers. At present, we are also contributing to the establishment of a global network of waste pickers. https://www.wiego.org/news/wiego-turns-25
Direct Link to Full 62-Page 2021 Report: https://www.wiego.org/sites/default/files/publications/file/Spatial-reading-of-work-homes-Part-A.pdf
The relationship between place of work and place of residence has been of particular interest in studying modes of urbanisation and place-making in the city. What does this relationship look like when the two places coincide? This proximate co-existence of the spheres of work and home has spatial and social effects on not only the worker but also other individuals using the space or the vicinity, scaling at times to the neighbourhood and the city. In a global wave of ‘working from home’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple studies have acknowledged and measured the social, psychological and spatial impact of work and home occupying proximate spaces. Many of us would have experienced the complexities that are engendered by an overlap of two distinct identities — that of a worker and that of a householder — when spheres of work and home bleed into each other across space, time and sociality. It is especially pertinent to discuss at this moment those who have always had to navigate both work and home from adjacent spaces, maneuvering the complexities, benefits and vulnerabilities that are resultant from a general mixing of work and home environments.
To answer these questions comprehensively, this study looks at all the ways in which home aids work, spatially and infrastructurally. Home is workplace for not just the more universally recognised categories of home-based work or home-based enterprises, but also those who use their homes in some way to aid their livelihood. This includes those using the home to furnish infrastructural needs or simply as storage, viz. street vendors, rag-pickers, vegetable vendors among others. The study introduces the term ‘work-home’ as a category where domestic and productive activities happen in the same or adjacent space.1 As such, home-based enterprises, home-based work, work[1]live, etc., come within the purview of this study.
This study investigates the spatial characteristics of what it describes as the ‘work-home boundary’ in work-homes. The term ‘domestic activities’ refers to the activities performed to reproduce the home and the household, including all forms of household work, unpaid care-work as well as social relations of the household such as interactions with neighbours. The term ‘productive activities,’ refers to all activities that pertain to wage or own-account work, including all forms of paid work, piece-rate work, as well as unpaid work in family or household enterprises. This includes all ancillary activities — storage of goods and equipment, preparatory activities including access to physical infrastructure, interaction with suppliers and vendors, customers, and managing authorities — required for work or enterprise2 . The geographical scope of the study remains countries in the Global South.
Source: WUNRN – 12.01.2023
