Homework

Homework. Homework, or manufacturing in family residences, first became common in the shoe and textile industries. It characterized garment production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and reemerged in the late twentieth to include telecommuting and business services as well as high‐fashion and cheap‐apparel production. Concentrated in urban tenements and immigrant neighborhoods, from New York City's Lower East Side to San Francisco's Chinatown, it reached into southern mill towns, Appalachian farms, Pennsylvania villages, and East Coast suburbs. Relying on a chain of contractors, manufacturers lessened expenses by paying a temporary workforce by the piece and requiring the worker to use his or her own tools and workplace. Employers took advantage of the gender division of labor within the household and between the household and the larger society to hire married women with small children whose husbands earned inadequate wages and whose cultural traditions or family responsibilities kept them homebound. The homework labor force also included the elderly, disabled, children, and older daughters in rural regions—those who lacked other employment options.

Homework undercut the labor standards of factory workers, weakening unionization and threatening higher wages. Reformers condemned it for spreading disease and disorder, turning homes into factories, and perverting motherhood and childlife. Beginning in the 1890s, states regulated health and sanitary conditions for homeworkers because courts blocked outright bans as violations of the rights of privacy and contract. The federal government prohibited homework on army uniforms during World War I, but only in the New Deal Era, initially through National Recovery Administration codes, did the government impose more general restrictions on homework. In the early 1940s, the administrator of the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) banned homework in seven garment industries to protect the standards won by factory workers. The Ronald Reagan administration removed all bans except ladies’ garments in the 1980s, however. As the twentieth century ended, the notion that home‐workers might combine earnings with family care threatened a return to sweatshop conditions.
See also Domestic Labor; Immigrant Labor; Immigration; Labor Movements; Work.

Bibliography

Eileen Boris and Cynthia Rae Daniels, eds., Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home, 1989.
Eileen Boris , Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States, 1994.

Eileen Boris