Revisiting the Second Shift – Rethinking Value in the Outsourcing of Social Reproduction

ABSTRACT

This article examines the link between outsourcing social reproduction and the valuation of time by approaching the employers of domestic workers as workers who themselves labour to produce surplus value. It contributes to current research on outsourcing social reproduction, which emphasizes the (re)privatization of public services, by situating outsourcing within the sphere of production. The analysis is based on in-depth qualitative research on employers of migrant care and domestic workers in Finland (N = 31). Developing an integrated link between migrant workers’ labour-power and employers’ labour-power, we demonstrate that the employers work a second shift of paid employment in the evening, enabled by the outsourcing of reproductive labour. We argue that outsourcing social reproduction often takes the form of purchasing inexpensive time, enabled by hiring migrant domestic workers, which those who outsource convert into productive labour-time, thereby subsidizing their own labour to increment economic value for capital. We analyse the ways in which outsourcing reproduction is organized to enhance the amount of productive social labour-time in a context where capital places increasing demands on labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic labour
• migrant work
• outsourcing
• social reproduction
• the second shift

Introduction

Social reproduction analysis has examined the structurally central role of unpaid social reproduction for capital accumulation and linked it to the particular form of oppression that women face as performers of unpaid domestic labour under capitalism (e.g. Dalla Costa & James, 1975; Eisenstein, 1979; Federici, 1975; Hartmann, 1976). Efforts to recognize this type of unpaid labour as valuable are manifold; some scholars have examined the ways in which unpaid social reproduction subsidizes capital accumulation (Mezzadri, 2019), while others have created measures to grasp the value entailed in this labour as part of a nation-state’s GDP (Elson, 2017), or with respect to gender equality indices (Schmid, 2021) and extended earnings measures (Folbre et al., 2013; Ragnarsdóttir et al., 2023). Moreover, economists have created ways to estimate the value of time spent on unpaid domestic work (Ragnarsdóttir et al., 2023).

Qualitative research on social reproduction has not engendered a similar effort at situating the social relations that shape outsourced social reproductive work within the relations of production, even though it is generally agreed that social reproduction also involves paid work. The growing phenomena of outsourcing social reproduction in the Global North is explained as a response to women’s increasing participation in the labour market combined with a gendered division of domestic work (Lutz, 2011; Triandafyllidou & Marchetti, 2015) and a (re)privatization of social reproduction due to state disinvestment and neoliberal austerity politics (Bakker, 2007; Bezanson & Luxton, 2006; Fraser, 2017; Gill & Bakker, 2003). Studies often emphasize how outsourcing is valuable for the people who outsource social reproduction, which pertains to an elevated class status (Anderson, 2000; Goñalons-Pons, 2015) or to an accumulation of emotional surplus value that is distributed along the global care chains (Hochschild, 2000).

The existing qualitative research does not consider the relation of paid reproductive work to productive work and, consequently, it overlooks the increasing demand of capital on labour that configures the need for outsourcing reproductive labour. Drawing on in-depth empirical research with employers of migrant care and domestic workers, this article contributes to the existing literature on outsourcing social reproduction (Anderson, 2000; Bakker, 2007; Bezanson & Luxton, 2006; Hochschild, 2000) through an analysis of the various values that the employers of domestic workers attach to outsourcing, which are often linked to time and, more specifically, labour-time.

In this article, we focus on employers of care and domestic workers as workers who themselves labour to produce surplus value in their own paid employment. We argue that outsourcing social reproduction often takes the form of purchasing inexpensive time (enabled by hiring migrant domestic workers), which those who outsource convert into productive labour-time, thereby subsidizing their own labour to increment economic value for their employers, in other words, to facilitate the accumulation of capital. Employers of domestic workers meet increasing demands to engage in productive labour-time, which they also themselves value more highly than unpaid domestic labour. We attend to the connections between the spheres of production and reproduction by developing an integrated link between migrant workers’ labour-power and employers’ labour-power; the analysis demonstrates that the employers of migrant care and domestic workers often work a second shift of paid employment in the evening, enabled by the outsourcing of social reproductive work. Hence, the employers of domestic workers invest in their own human capital in an effort to construct themselves as more valuable workers for their employers by working more and by restoring themselves as workers more efficiently (see also Paju et al., 2020).

While much research examines the work and labour conditions of migrant care and domestic workers, studies have consistently overlooked the increasing pressures faced by the employers of domestic workers as they navigate their own paid employment. This gap persists despite a bourgeoning body of empirical evidence on the strains that workers experience in the capitalist economies of the Global North (e.g. Anttila et al., 2015; O’Carroll, 2015; Vidal, 2013). In Finland, as in other Nordic countries, the employers of care and domestic workers are unequivocally workers themselves. Understanding the employers of domestic workers as workers themselves in capitalist relations of production enables us to conceptualize them as an integrated part of the working upper middle class and middle class. Employers of domestic workers are indisputably part of a privileged class of workers. They are nevertheless workers who struggle within time to meet the demands of increasing productive labour-time. This perspective permits us to move beyond depictions of outsourcing as reproducing “the upper class” (Ferguson, 2020, p. 108) and provide a more nuanced analysis of the class relationships constructed through social reproduction. In what follows, we first discuss research on value in outsourcing social reproduction, after which we address the Finnish context of our study. We then present our methodology and the findings on employers of domestic workers’ valuation of time, followed by our conclusions.

Tracing the value in outsourcing social reproduction

The related but often distinct strands of literature on social reproduction¹ and migrant care and domestic work (however, see Colen, 1995; Kofman, 2014) have theorized in different ways about social reproductive labour and its outsourcing. They generally agree that performing both unpaid and paid domestic labour is devalued for workers and remains societally unrecognized, while it simultaneously subsidizes capital accumulation and is valuable for the employers of domestic workers. The literature on migrant care and domestic work emphasizes the precarity of working conditions and the racialized and gendered exploitation of migrant workers (Anderson, 2000; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2014; Lutz, 2011). Research on social reproduction, on the other hand, has discussed depletion through social reproduction, which is often borne by women (Rai et al., 2014), and how the process of externalizing the costs of reproducing labour power via commodification and marketization may devalue the labour for workers (Dowling, 2016, p. 456).

Moreover, migrant care and domestic work research argues that outsourcing social reproduction in the Global North is a response to women’s increasing participation in formal employment combined with a gender division of domestic work (Anderson, 2007; Lutz, 2011; Triandafyllidou & Marchetti, 2015). Adding to this proposition, social reproduction research highlights how the concurrent neoliberal austerity politics and disinvestment from social welfare transfers responsibility for reproductive labour to private families, causing a crisis of social reproduction (Bakker, 2007; Bezanson & Luxton, 2006; Dowling, 2016; Fraser, 2017; Gill & Bakker, 2003). Based on these perspectives, capital resides mainly in relation to the state, which is scaling back public expenditure on welfare while ignoring the ways in which the increasing demands of capital in relation to labour gives rise to the need to outsource social reproduction. As we will discuss in the following section, the crisis of social reproduction does not fully account for the Finnish case, in which there is a growing demand to outsource reproductive work despite the existence of an extensive public childcare system. What drives the demand in this case is a perceived scarcity of time and mounting pressures on individuals to engage in productive labour-time at their paid employment.

Similarly, while research has explored the ways in which outsourcing is valuable for the employers of care and domestic workers, the findings are rarely connected to careful consideration of the value production that outsourcing may enable employers to engage in. Both strands of literature instead discuss how private employment reproduces and enhances social class and modern domesticity (Anderson, 2000; Ferguson, 2020; Goñalons-Pons, 2015; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010; Luxton, 2006; Ray & Qayum, 2009). In addition, studies on migrant care and domestic work have highlighted the types of positive affective value that employers gain by freeing themselves of the need to engage in domestic work (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2014) as well as the moral values and value tensions present in outsourcing (Näre, 2011; Triandafyllidou & Marchetti, 2015). According to the global care chain concept, the employing family yields emotional surplus value that is distributed along the care chains (Hochschild, 2000). Scholars have analysed the possible valorization of care and emphasized the difficulty of assigning orthodox notions of value to care work (Tronto, 2003; Yeates, 2004).

Both strands of literature also place emphasis on the gendered division of reproductive labour, which affects the efforts of employers of domestic workers to balance work and family life (Goñalons-Pons, 2015; Kristensen, 2016; Pelechova, 2015). Time use itself is gendered, with men having more control over their time and greater access to free time (Bryson, 2008). Especially in the Nordic countries, where heterosexual dual-earner couples are expected to share household tasks equally, outsourcing allows couples to achieve a certain level of gender equality without men having to take on more reproductive tasks (Isaksen, 2010; Kristensen, 2016). In comparison, professional middle-class women tend to perform unpaid reproductive labour as a “second shift” at home after completing their first shift in paid employment (Hochschild, 1989). Women in the global North perform the majority of unpaid domestic work, despite usually being engaged in paid employment as well (Ragnarsdóttir et al., 2023). Moreover, the dominating discourse on intensive motherhood (Elvin-Nowak & Thomsson, 2001) intersects with class to affect women’s time use differently to that of men (Ellingsæter et al., 2022). These perspectives suggest that private employment is particularly beneficial to the male employer. Some scholars also mention employers’ work management needs (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010, p. 134) and their demanding jobs (Kristensen, 2016, p. 180). Moreover, studies often mention that employers gain “flexible time” through outsourcing, but they rarely specify why flexible time is needed or investigate the value of such time. Our article fills this gap by analysing how outsourcing social reproduction is linked to, organizes and enhances the valuation of time.

In addition, we contribute to the existing literature by examining how class and the gendered division of labour intersect with the increasing demands that capital places on work. Currently, neither of the existing strands of literature on outsourcing reproductive labour give central focus to the employers of domestic workers as workers themselves, nor do they attempt to truly analyse the mounting pressures faced by the employers of domestic workers as they navigate their own paid employment. This means that present research puts the labour market in a secondary position and frames it as an inevitable context rather than an object of analysis. By failing to extend an analysis of outsourcing reproductive work to include changes in the current mode of production, such studies offer little insight on the actual labour relations impacting those who employ domestic workers—thus running the risk of overlooking the ways in which social relations are embedded within economic and material structures (Marx, 1990 [1876]). For Marx, labour necessarily stands in relation to time: the commodification of labour-power both produces and requires socially necessary labour-time, which is linked to the production of value (Marx, 1990 [1876], p. 129). It is therefore meaningful to analyse the valuation of time in relation to outsourcing social reproduction. This makes it possible to trace the value produced through outsourcing social reproduction, which extends beyond the employer’s personal benefit to include the ways in which outsourcing is organized to enhance the amount of productive social labour-time, and ultimately, the accumulation of capital.

The Finnish context: accentuating the expansion of work

Historically, the egalitarian ethos of the Nordic welfare states has replaced some of the reproductive labour formerly done by individual women and families with collective actors, with states developing affordable public childcare services. The Nordic welfare state model encouraged women’s participation in the labour market by creating public services and welfare benefits that have allowed them to combine wage labour and family life without having to pay for private care (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Since the 1990s, however, the state has increasingly promoted individual responsibility and the privatization of social reproductive tasks via various cash-for-care programmes and tax credits (Julkunen, 2006; Näre & Wide, 2019). Nevertheless, Finland has an extensive and affordable public childcare system due to municipal subventions based on income, number of children and family size. Municipal childcare centres continue to be the main providers of childcare: in 1985, approximately 55% of all children who took part in early childcare pedagogy participated in public childcare, whereas in 2020 the percentage had increased to 77% (Säkkinen & Kuoppala, 2021). While parents in general are content with the quality of public care services (Sulkanen et al., 2020), the Finnish care regime suffers from a severe lack of care labour (Wrede & Näre, 2013), which affects the quality of public childcare.

Recent research has emphasized how neoliberal austerity politics and state disinvestment from public service provision has increasingly transferred responsibility for reproductive labour to families, particularly in North America (Bakker and Gill, 2003; Bakker, 2007; Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Fraser, 2017). Outsourcing then occurs as a response to the neoliberalisation of state policies (Bakker, 2007). Simultaneously, it is often assumed that greater investment in public childcare would reduce the private employment of care and domestic workers. Comparatively, in the Finnish context there is a growing demand to outsource social reproduction among upper-middle-class professionals, despite the availability of public childcare services. Such individuals exhibit a demand for increased flexibility in childcare and social reproduction that points towards the emergence of a classed time discipline (Näre & Wide, 2019). Concurrently, the tax credit that subsidizes care and domestic work decreases the price of social reproductive work, which creates added incentives to employ care and domestic workers (Gavanas, 2010; Näre & Wide, 2019).

Recent research has also suggested that the growing demand for outsourcing is explained by women’s increasing participation in the labour market (e.g. Lutz, 2011). While allowing for some variations, generally in Finland women and especially working-class women have participated in the labour market for a long time and the dual-career family is a relatively strong norm (Salmi & Lammi-Taskula, 2011, p. 126). In the 1950s, half of all married women were employed, and the most recent data from 2018 reveals that 92% of fathers and 77% of mothers participated in the labour force at that time (Salmi & Lammi-Taskula, 2011, p. 126; Statistics Finland, 2022). Therefore, the often-evoked assumption of a “care deficit” due to women’s participation in formal employment does not adequately explain the Finnish situation. Nevertheless, gender does offer a partial explanation for outsourcing. According to the most recent OECD data, Finnish women spend 235.8 minutes per day doing unpaid labour, while the equivalent time for men is 157.5 minutes per day (OECD, 2021). In Finland, women are expected to pursue full-time careers while simultaneously continuing to bear a greater responsibility for unpaid domestic reproductive labour (Niemistö et al., 2021). In addition, women account for the majority of the parental allowance; in 2019, women accounted for 97% of this allowance, while only 25% of men took a one-month paternity leave (Keskinen, 2020). The effort needed to arrange a work-life balance thus affects women and men differently, as time spent on unpaid reproductive labour is valued differentially according to gender.

In addition, the changing labour market and the increasing pressures faced by workers create the demand to outsource social reproduction, as the Fordist regime and standard working hours are downscaled (Vidal, 2013). Empirical studies on working life in Europe demonstrate that workers are currently experiencing increasing levels of work intensity (e.g. Anttila et al., 2015; Burchell et al., 2009), which occurs for workers both in managerial (Worrall & Cooper, 2007) as well as low-paid positions (Smith & McBride, 2021). Work is characterized as fragmented, intensified and moving beyond temporal and spatial borders (Jarvis & Pratt, 2006). A key finding of research on managerial work is that official work hours are not becoming longer; rather, time pressure at work is increasing, which leads to increasing amounts of time spent working (Mustosmäki et al., 2011; O’Carroll, 2015, p. 126).

According to recent findings, these changes are especially evident in the Nordic countries, particularly among those in the higher socioeconomic groups (Anttila et al., 2015; Härmä & Karhula, 2020). Although flexibility and the lack of temporal boundaries allows for more control over work hours, time pressure often leads to increasing time spent working (O’Carroll, 2015, p. 126). In Finland, it is common for both men and women with children to work overtime in the evenings or at weekends (Salmi & Lammi-Taskula, 2011, pp. 127–128). On average, employees spend 39 hours per week engaged in paid employment, with directors working an average of 45 hours per week (Statistics Finland, 2018). However, work is often not confined to official work hours: 23% of Finnish workers report being contacted about work-related matters during their free time that require immediate action, while 13% report being contacted about less urgent matters (Eurostat, 2020). Moreover, the Finnish Working Time Act, which sets working hours at a maximum of 40 hours per week, does not apply to work in expert positions comparable to performing management tasks (Finlex, 2022). Subsequently, managerial expert positions are not subject to the Working Time Act.

Methodology

The empirical data includes in-depth thematic interviews with private Finnish employers of migrant nannies and/or domestic workers (including au pairs) (N = 31). The interviews were conducted in 2016 and in 2018–2021. The interviewed employers of migrant nannies/au pairs/domestic workers were between 31 and 63 years of age and included 26 women and five men. All except one were native-born Finns. The participants had one to four children. Seven had hired a full-time nanny and/or domestic worker, 17 had hired one part-time and seven had hired au pairs. Some had hired both au pairs and migrant domestic workers. Ten participants had hired live-in au pairs or nannies and domestic workers. The decision to hire was made jointly. Many of the participants’ children attended public childcare part-time and were partly cared for by a nanny or an au pair. It was thus common to combine private and public childcare.

Most participants were married in heterosexual relationships. Two women and one man were divorced. While the man shared custody over his children, the divorced women were single parents. Most participants and their partners held advanced university degrees, and all participants and their partners were working. Both women and men mostly worked as specialists or professionals in organizations or companies or in executive positions. Five worked as self-employed consultants. One participant owned a small-scale company with six employees, and the participant worked on the same work tasks as the employees. Hence, we also include this participant within the category of the working (upper) middle class.

The interviews lasted for an average of one hour and were conducted in Finnish and Swedish. Excerpts were translated into English by the authors. Participants were found through snowball sampling, personal contacts and social media and in various organizations. The interviews were conducted in locations that were convenient for the participants, such as cafés or participants’ homes or workplaces. Participants were told about the content and aims of the research beforehand and signed a consent form. They were told that they could withdraw from the research project at any point. All names used in the article are pseudonyms.²

In the interviews, we asked questions about the participants’ work, their decision to hire privately, their employees’ working conditions and the relationship with their employee. The analysis involved first coding the interviews using Atlas.ti, based on a continually developed coding frame, and then applying content analysis to the coded sections. Since this article is centred on demand, the analysis focuses on sections in the data regarding employers’ decisions to hire a private migrant nanny/domestic worker. While the participants articulated various reasons that had led them to the decision to hire privately and the numerous desires and needs they were hoping to satisfy by having done so, the main aims revolved around combining work with their own social reproductive tasks. The analysis addresses the meanings of paid care and domestic work for the participants, especially with respect to how they construct them as valuable and linked to value. Hence, the analysis is linked to theorization on the value engendered through social reproduction.

The valuation of time

This section discusses the interconnectedness of value, time and labour in outsourcing social reproduction. We find that time is constructed as a purchased commodity that is organized to enhance value in diverse ways, either as productive labour-time or as reproductive value in its ability to decelerate the pace of everyday life.

The employers we interviewed articulated a variety of culturally acceptable motives for employing nannies, au pairs and domestic workers. As we discuss in this section, the main reason behind depletion through social reproduction in the data was time scarcity, or the participants’ reported lack of time for taking care of their own reproductive needs. Participants connected this key problem to their own paid employment, which they described as burdensome, overly taxing and unpredictable. The research participants reiterated the idea of time as a scarce resource: time is what they most urgently lacked, and they sought to free up more time through outsourcing social reproduction. Since the employers of domestic workers faced increasing pressures and a lack of flexibility at work, they chose to hire a nanny and domestic worker to produce greater flexibility for themselves. Statements such as the below comment by Evelina are abundant in the data:

The pace is very hectic; there are a lot of changes and a lot of interruptions. It is quite burdensome, and if I travel it affects [the pace]. It’s another thing if the workday or the working week would be very predictable; then I would not have to opt for these decisions. [hiring an au pair]

Evelina, who worked for an IT company at the time of the interview, constructed the unpredictability and hectic pace of work as the main reason why she and her husband decided to hire an au pair to care for their young child. Adelina, who worked as a specialist in a company, described her work as “often quite hectic and fluid” and requiring “a lot of cognitive resources and temporal resources”. In the analysis, we generated time and temporality as central themes from the interview data. The participants constructed a relationship between time and labour and demonstrated how their paid employment affects the organization of time. Work, according to the participants, requires to an increasing extent temporal resources: work consumes time, it flows over the time/space boundary, and work accelerates the pace of time, making it hectic and fluid (Jarvis & Pratt, 2006; O’Carroll, 2015). While such changes in a newly emerging temporal work culture have previously been documented in the UK and US contexts (Hochschild, 1989; Moen et al., 2013), our findings suggest that such developments are occurring also in Finland, in a Nordic welfare state context.

This points to the relevance of analysing outsourcing in relation to paid employment. Employers of domestic workers are workers who struggle within time as they face increasing pressures to engage in productive labour-time. Another employer of a domestic worker, André, described his attempts at navigating the pressures set by his paid employment as follows: “Time is not enough, and I am not enough.” To appease this experienced time scarcity, employers of domestic workers outsource social reproduction to “buy time with money”. Mathias, an employer of a full-time nanny and domestic worker, perceived the growing requirements at work as one of the main reasons behind his decision to hire a nanny and domestic worker:

One reason of course is that the requirements increase all the time […] if I would survive nicely with my work doing this, I would be happy to make food at home and so forth, but the screw is tightened at work and everywhere else, so one has to buy time with money to have time to spend with the children and work.

Feeling stressed by this experienced state of inadequacy, where both time and one’s own resources appear insufficient for meeting everyday productive and reproductive demands, employers of domestic workers exhibit a valuation of their paid work by outsourcing reproductive tasks. Instead of questioning the continuous burden of their paid employment and attempting to reorganize it, they choose to hire domestic workers to provide them with flexible labour-power. This decision is constructed in accordance with the value structure of contemporary society: devalued social reproduction is outsourced, as paid employment will supposedly yield higher value in the future. In exchange for a salary, the labour of domestic workers produces the commodity time desired by employers. This immaterial time-commodity is never separated from value since employers utilize it to increment value either, as we demonstrate, for their own paid employment or else for their self-reproduction as workers. The logic of capital appears in the construction of time as valuable, as something linked to value (Adam, 1993). However, for the research participants it is far from easy to question and criticize their working conditions. Even opting for part-time work can prove challenging. One female participant remarked that working part-time in her line of work would be a “joke”, since her work cannot be cut short; she would end up doing the same amount of work in a shorter amount of time for less pay.

The second shift revisited: purchasing affordable time to produce economic value

Employers of domestic workers circumvent the strains they would otherwise face in performing a second shift of unpaid reproductive labour (Hochschild, 1989) by outsourcing parts of it to migrant workers. Nevertheless, several respondents mentioned that they instead worked regularly a “second shift” of paid employment at home in the evenings after putting their children to sleep. The time that participants purchased through outsourcing and paid for out of pocket was then utilized to increase their own productive labour-time. This points to a connection between migrant domestic workers’ labour-power and both the labour-power and labour-time of employers of domestic workers. In effect, the employers of domestic workers subsidize their own labour-time to increment economic value for their own employers.

Respondents described the practice of dividing up their workday so that the work that requires more cognitive capacity is done during the daytime in the office, while emails are answered in the evenings when they are tired. Most interviewees’ work was not tied to clearly defined working hours but was rather project-based work. Their work was then structured around deadlines. Evelina described her working day as being divided into two parts:

It is normal that, first, we do a complete working day at work, and then we are at home for a while and strive to be present during the two, maybe three hours that the child is awake, and then we continue our adjacent working day.

This resembles how Linda, an employer of a full-time nanny and domestic worker, described her working day:

At 19.30, I put the children to bed, and 20–23 are usually my most efficient working hours. That is when I answer all of my emails and go through everything; the mobile phone is so good because you can do it there in the bedroom, [where] the child is sleeping there next to me and I am actively working.

Several participants described their jobs as “having no timecards” and no exact working hours, saying that the Finnish Working Time Act (Finlex, 2022: see also page five in this article) does not apply to their work. They constructed their work as involving “responsibility and freedom” and emphasized that they also enjoy the flexibility of taking a day off or running errands in the middle of the day. However, the findings show that most respondents rather use the time liberated from performing unpaid domestic work to do more paid work. The second shift of paid work in the evenings is made possible by hiring a nanny or a domestic worker, since that time would otherwise be dedicated to doing care work, cooking, cleaning or doing the laundry and dishes at home.

Participants also rationalized the availability of this purchased time and equated it with the possibility to produce economic value at work. Oscar, an employer of a part-time domestic worker, calculated that it was more profitable for him to spend time working than using the same amount of time on unpaid reproductive work at home:

It is quite a lot to do, a lot of time is spent. Economically, it is more profitable for me to work than to [do domestic work] … I earn more than 15 euros an hour. So, it is an alternative. […] The more I work, the more I, at least in theory, gain. Perhaps not linearly, but at least I do the stuff I need to. [do]

Jenna, an employer of a part-time nanny and domestic worker, made a similar calculation:

If you think that I now pay the worker about 350 euros per month plus employer expenses, so roughly about 500 euros a month, I earn a lot more by being at work myself. I’ll still profit by working.

This rhetoric revalues the monetary value of the employers’ labour-time while it simultaneously devalues migrant domestic workers’ labour-time. It also constructs a link between outsourcing social reproduction and productive labour-time. Some participants analogously devalued reproductive tasks in relation to their revalued free time (see also Sherman, 2010, p. 100). Anna, a consultant who hired a part-time domestic worker, described her free time as too “precious” and “valuable” to be used on domestic work, contrasting it to the “inexpensive” hourly rate of a domestic worker. In similar statements, participants associated value with time and labour-time. The respondents’ construction of free time as a “precious” resource relates to the increase in the amount of labour-time that organizes their daily lives.

Some of the interviewees who owned their own businesses reported hiring a domestic worker to work both in their offices and in their homes. In such cases, the company paid the domestic worker’s salary. For tax reasons, it is more profitable that the company pays the salary of the domestic worker since it can be deducted from company taxes as other wages. In such instances, a domestic or care worker hired by the company is equal to an in-kind benefit, similar to a company car. In general, the self-employed interviewees hired nannies and domestic workers for longer periods of time than the participants who were employees. In such cases, outsourcing social reproduction is more directly connected to the production of surplus value for the self-employed participants. However, self-employed employers of domestic workers also face the requirements of increased productive labour-time. Many described having “no work hours” and working irregular hours and long days to secure the continuation of their livelihood. Respondents then perceived the labour-time of a third person as a factor that stabilizes the continuous effort and competition within and over time.

In addition, we identified the cost of hiring a domestic worker as central in the data. Employers of domestic workers often calculate the time they save and the money they spend in relation to the price of such services. Several participants acknowledged that one of the main reasons for hiring a migrant worker instead of a native Finnish worker was the price of their labour. Native Finnish workers are able to demand a higher wage for their labour and often specialize in certain tasks (for example, Finnish nannies seldom clean the house). In comparison, migrant workers on temporary residence permits are more flexible in terms of time spent at work and work tasks. Moreover, migrant domestic workers from outside the EU receive residence permits that are tied to a specific employment sector, which may function as a source of bargaining power for employers of domestic workers. As previous research has shown, care and domestic work is structured along the axes of racialization, migration status and gender (Anderson, 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007). The economic value that the employers of domestic workers derive from purchasing affordable time via employing care and domestic workers not only points to the links between production and reproduction but also demonstrates that outsourcing social reproduction is a site for class formation that is configured by the local political, economic-legal context.

Reproductive value

Respondents also reported spending the time they purchase on satisfying their own social reproductive needs. Both female and male interviewees said that they outsource social reproduction to gain more time together with their children and their partner. Thus, as Hochschild (1989) has shown that dual-earner families suffer from a “speed-up” of work and family life, our data demonstrates that participants outsource social reproduction to decelerate the pace by inserting additional time into everyday life. Respondents then maximize the time available for both wage labour and “quality time” with their children, which, according to the ideologies of intensive parenting, is detached from devalued cleaning tasks (Näre & Wide, 2019). While many participants mentioned the importance of leisure and recreation time, they commonly constructed such free time as something they needed in order to reproduce their labour-power. They described how their work consumes them and how outsourcing social reproduction allows them to regain what they have lost during the workday. As Susanna, an employer of a part-time domestic worker remarked: “with a fairly minimal (input), you can preserve yourself.” Consequently, it becomes possible to discern a type of reproductive value embedded in outsourcing social reproduction, which is linked to both the deceleration of time and to the reproduction of labour-power.

These developments relate to Hochschild’s (1997) analysis of the growing importance of the cultural world of work: work offers feelings of belonging that were previously attached to the social worlds of families and local communities. Paid employment is constructed as a meaningful and valuable way of contributing to society. Both female and male respondents described their work ambitions coupled with the irregular hours of work as one of the main reasons for outsourcing. The construction of paid employment as valuable is connected to class and gender; several female participants said that they desire something more out of life than being at home with their children on a full-time basis. According to them, paid employment provides them with meaningful activity and allows them to be better mothers to their children and “remain sane”, which they stressed is beneficial for their children. While none of the male participants justified their decision for outsourcing by emphasizing their fatherhood, many said it offers them more time together with their children. Concurrently, highly remunerated specialist positions are organized around the assumption that another person is at home caring for the family’s reproductive needs, a task traditionally handled by women. Women can now assume such positions due to changing gender roles.

Some women who employed nannies described how they would have stayed on parental leave for a longer time had they not hired a nanny, since they perceived combining employment with public childcare centres as increasingly difficult. They criticized the public childcare centres’ lack of resources and expressed a certain reluctance to place their small children in a public day care. Hence, the political economy of care is interrelated with class and cultural understandings of quality care. Participants often combined public childcare with private care and regarded private childcare as an additional expense they paid to provide their children with quality care and emotional value (Hochschild, 2000). However, what emerged as crucial for the participants was the inability of the public sector childcare centres to meet the demands of the changing work life. Paula, an executive-level employee at a major company, described her attempts to combine care responsibilities with work prior to hiring au pairs:

We observed that this is not [possible]; one needs to be able to live. It is not supposed to be an achievement every day so that one feels that, wow, yeah, I made it through this day.

According to Paula, her everyday life before employing an au pair was an “achievement” in the sense that she was able to combine both work and childcare. Her children attended two different public childcare centres that close at a certain hour. This placed additional time constraints on her and her husband, both of whom worked full time and needed to be at their offices for eight hours and then pick up the children before the centre closed. Both Paula and her husband were working full-time, which, as the above quote shows, created stress that spilled over into their free time. The quote demonstrates how the intensification of work impacts the day-to-day micro-mobilities around care (Isaksen & Näre, 2019), as the interviewees reported a lack of time for “excess” movements and therefore hired nannies to take care of such activities.

The gender division of domestic labour is one of the main analytical categories applied by previous research to explain the outsourcing of social reproduction (e.g. Bakker, 2007; Goñalons-Pons, 2015; Isaksen, 2010; Kristensen, 2016; Pelechova, 2015). Studies have linked gender to an assertion of class difference between the domestic workers and female employers, organized around the construction of domestic work as “dirty work” beneath the status of female employers (Anderson, 2000; Ray & Qayum, 2009).

Our findings from the Finnish context differ in part from such outcomes. The participants’ attitude regarding social reproduction was constructed around pragmatism, and they described domestic work as work that they lacked the time for rather than as work that they despised. Our data indicates that outsourcing social reproduction is less an outcome of men’s reluctance to engage in domestic work or the construction of domestic work as “dirty”, and more a result of the increasing demands of work and capital. Moreover, the practice of outsourcing domestic work is also connected to the reproduction of a middle-class household being conflated with the ideal of cleanliness, orderliness and well-adjusted children.

Yet, although most female and male employers reportedly construct social reproductive tasks pragmatically as a shared responsibility, reproductive labour continues to be gendered work to some extent. Many female participants described themselves as the project managers of the household, responsible for organizing unpaid reproductive labour (Triandafyllidou & Marchetti, 2015). Approximately half of the women interviewed said that they aimed to share such reproductive labour with their partners, while half described doing more unpaid domestic reproduction. Only one woman said that reproductive labour was her sole responsibility. Of the male participants in relationships, three said they shared reproductive tasks but recognized that their wives did a bit more. Relatedly, the majority of the women interviewed stated that they oversaw the administrative tasks concerning employment, researching options and finding suitable candidates, and arranging documents for residence permits. Three of the male participants said they oversaw the administrative tasks, while two said it was their wife’s responsibility. In most instances, the wife had a closer relationship with the employee/au pair. Most of the women had been on parental leave after their children were born, while their husbands continued working; six women said that both they and their husbands had taken parental leave, albeit their husbands for shorter periods of time. Two of the male participants said they had taken parental leave. Moreover, two single women employed a nanny to substitute for the absent fathers unwilling to participate in care work. This indicates how the valuation of time is gendered (Bryson, 2008), as women spend more time on devalued reproduction while men spend greater amounts of time in the more highly rewarded productive sphere.

Conclusions

This article contributes to research on outsourcing by focusing attention on two dimensions that have previously received less attention. First, we have pointed to a valuation of time constructed in relation to outsourcing social reproduction. Employers of domestic workers construct outsourcing as a means to purchase the commodity time, which is simultaneously devalued and revalued. Hiring migrant domestic workers devalues the price required to purchase the time-commodity. Time is, however, also revalued, as the employers of domestic workers tend to convert this time-commodity into productive labour-time or a second shift in their paid employments performed in the evenings. Employers of domestic workers may also revalue the purchased time as free time that is nevertheless spent on their self-reproduction as workers. The focus on the valuation of time extends the analysis beyond the existing focus on outsourcing as valuable for employers of domestic workers to examine the value(s) that such outsourcing may enable employers of domestic workers to produce.

Second, we have approached employers of domestic workers as workers who struggle within time to meet the demands of increasing productive labour-time. How these upper-middle and middle-class workers organize their social reproduction thus depends on a complex process of valuation of time, labour and capital. The increasing demands of capital on labour organizes the demand for social reproduction. Employers of domestic workers meet growing demands to engage in productive labour-time; simultaneously, commodified labour-time is deemed more valuable than the time required for unpaid social reproduction both by the participants in this research and by society at large. Through a focus on the valuation of time, we demonstrate the diverse links between the employment of care and domestic workers and the logic of capital and point to the connection between migrant domestic workers’ labour-power and the labour-time and labour-power of the employers of domestic workers. Marxist value analysis generally perceives buying services as a depletion of capital, since domestic workers’ salaries are paid out of employers’ own salaries. Nevertheless, we propose that outsourcing is perceived as an investment in individual human capital and surplus value production. Hence, to properly analyse the outsourcing of domestic work and potentially change the global inequalities around outsourcing, we need to take questions of accumulation seriously in contemporary capitalism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Helsinki, Doctoral Programme in Gender, Culture and Society; University of Helsinki, Doctoral Programme in Social Sciences.

Notes on contributors

Elisabeth Wide

Elisabeth Wide is a PhD researcher in Sociology at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD research analyses migrant care and domestic work in contemporary Finland, and focuses on the thematics of social reproduction, class and free/unfree labour.

Lena Näre

Lena Näre is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include the sociology of work, care, migration, ageing, and gender, ethnic and racial studies. Her current research projects analyse precarious and informal work in the Nordic countries and irregularised migrant households in Finland.

Notes

1. We follow the definition developed by Braedley and Luxton (2021), who, in an effort to situate the concept more clearly within capitalist production and class analysis, suggest that social reproduction is work comprising the daily and generational activities that reproduce the working class within capitalist societies.

2. The Research Ethics Committee in the Humanities and Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Helsinki does not require a formal ethical review when the research follows the principle of informed consent.