What is Work?

Most of us, from childhood, are taught to think of 'work' as synonymous with paid employment -- the job someone eventually takes up. This is indeed the most widely understood sense of the word in modern times, but sociologically it is an oversimplified one, because a great deal of real work does not take the form of a wage or salary at all.

Consider the vast amount of labour that goes on in what sociologists call the informal economy -- a term covering transactions that lie outside the sphere of regular, registered employment. Some of this work does involve cash changing hands for a service rendered, but a great deal of it involves the direct exchange of goods or services rather than money at all, and none of it is systematically captured in official employment statistics. A domestic worker labouring for food and hand-me-down clothes rather than a wage, or a child kept at odd household tasks from a very young age, is performing real work by any sensible definition, even though none of it would show up if one simply counted registered jobs. …