Globalizing the cottage: Homeworkers' challenge to the international labor regime

Homeworkers, i.e. those who work at home for pay, are excluded from the labor regulations of most countries and are marginalized because they are defined as housewives who do not work. This dissertation identifies formal and informal rules which guide and define labor relations internationally and which function to make homeworkers marginal. I argue that these rules are part of an international labor regime. This study provides a theoretical reformulation of the regimes concept, embeds it in a constructivist framework, and incorporates elements of Foucauldian theory to account for the distribution of privilege engendered by regime rules. Two sets of rules are identified; one is formulated around the opposition between employer and employee, the other around the opposition between home and work. My method is interpretive, focusing on debates about homework at the international level. Described here are a variety of attempts to "discipline" homeworkers, i.e. efforts to make them fit into categories defined by the regime. Such attempts have never been entirely successful because homeworkers combine characteristics of employees and employers, housewives and breadwinners, categories which are constructed as diametrically opposed. Homeworkers are at a disadvantage because they are not defined as employees. My research shows that rules formulated around the employer-employee dichotomy have heteronomous force, i.e. those who are defined as subordinate by these rules have a stake in perpetuating their own subordination. It would be in the interest of homeworkers to be defined as subordinate to their work givers because then they would be entitled to the same rights that other employees have under labor law. In contrast, rules based on the housewife-breadwinner dichotomy have little heteronomous force. It is to the disadvantage of homeworkers to be defined as housewives because this legitimizes low pay and makes their crucial contribution to family income invisible. Inasmuch as homeworkers resist being categorized as employees or housewives through their daily practice or through political action, they challenge rules of the international labor regime.