Reproduction, the Care Sector and the Question of Unproductive Labor in Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital

Abstract

Braverman’s (1998) Labor and Monopoly Capital offers a seminal account of the processes which shaped the labour process in modern capitalism. Since the 1970s, the expansion of low-wage productive labour has occurred in tandem with an increasing demand for care work, a consequence of the increasing integration of women into the workforce and the consequent pressure on families as sites of reproductive labour. Developing Braverman’s observations about the changing composition of the labour force and his discussion of the universal market and unproductive labour, in this article we argue that an exponential expansion of “unproductive labour” has circumvented the potential barrier, identified by Braverman, to the expansion of low-wage work. The goals of this article are threefold. Firstly, it offers a discussion of the category unproductive labour as a means to explore the shifting patterns of paid and unpaid care work in modern economies. Secondly, it combines Braverman’s underdeveloped discussion of unproductive labour with Marxist Feminism as a means to make sense of the ways in which care work has become critical to the valorisation of capital and subject to the processes of value production. Finally, we argue that Braverman’s deskilling thesis pre-empts aspects of the literature on precarity as it applies to care work, where service workers in already undervalued occupations are pushed into barely survivable social and economic conditions even as their work becomes indispensable to the valorisation of capital and reproduction of labour.