Pin money of the day: Home-based women workers at Gazi Mahallesi

Abstract

This study analyses the ways in which women who produce commodities at home are subjected both to patriarchal operations in society, and to labor exploitation in capitalist relations of production. It also argues that the main characteristic of today’s industrial home-based work (HBW), with its increasing importance in the global structure of production, relies upon the spatial and temporal unity of women’s domestic and productive labor. In this manner, HBW, as one of new spheres of production developed by contemporary capitalism, opens a new continent for rethinking the theories concerning women’s subordination as based on the separation of home and workplace. On the other hand, the notion of working-day, which constitutes the spatial and temporal unity of their productive and reproductive labor, plays a key role not only for understanding the double nature of their subordination in terms both of gender and class, but also for developing an adequate struggle for their emancipation. In that sense, the study proposes a new conceptualization, the gendered working-day based on a qualitative analysis of the data obtained from a fieldwork conducted in Gazi Mahallesi, Turkey, in December 2012.