work

work The supply of physical, mental, and emotional effort to produce goods and services for own consumption, or for consumption by others. Productive work falls into three main categories: economic activity or employment, unpaid domestic and leisure activities, and volunteer community service. Boundary lines between the three categories are fuzzy and determined by national conventions for surveys and official statistics.

Employment is distinguished from unpaid domestic labour by the ‘third-person criterion’: whether the activity could be done by someone else without diminishing its utility. On that basis, schoolwork, studying, participating in sport for exercise, cooking or gardening for pleasure cannot be employment, even if they involve strenuous effort. Similarly, the manufacture of goods and services purely for domestic consumption are excluded from the definition of employment. Volunteer community services involve productive work for community development or to provide services to others, but are normally unpaid, and hence treated as a separate category from employment. See also BLACK ECONOMY; HOMEWORK; HOUSEHOLD WORK STRATEGY; INFORMAL ECONOMY.