Re-politicising ‘Home’ as workplace: Gendered-Colonial logics in ‘Work from home’ and Domestic Labour
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18753/2297-8224-8508Keywords:
Domestic work, Work from home, Coloniality, Intersectionality, Policymaking, AlternativesAbstract
Drawing on feminist, anti-caste, and decolonial lenses and using Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? framework, we analyze how global policy discourses construct ‘work from home’ (WFH) and ‘domestic work’, and how those constructions rest on and reproduce colonial, gendered, and caste racial hierarchies that depoliticize the home as a workplace. We analyse eleven policy documents (2011-2024) published by multilateral institutions and by the domestic workers unions. The comparison shows that multilateral reports construct WFH as a matter of flexibility and productivity, domestic work, by contrast, is framed as a deficit of formality, skills, or regulation. Domestic-worker unions produce alternative problematizations by repoliticising the home as a workplace, demanding legal recognition and social protection, and propose an intersectional re-organisation of the global care economy. The article reveals an epistemic struggle over what counts as work and concludes that dismantling colonial gender logics is essential to redefining labour and achieving justice.
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