New Technology, Old Problems: Telework and Homework Activism in the 1990s

In the 1990s, ‘telework,’ or working from home using a computer, seemed to have the potential to radically reshape the labour market. Telework would decentralise work, revitalise rural communities, and bring families back together. This optimistic vision occluded a far older form of home-based labour. Manual homework, such as packing and sewing, remained a significant part of the British economy. Unlike teleworkers, who were stereotyped as male and professional, homeworkers were almost all women working informally for very little pay in poor conditions. This work was usually done around the other burdens of family and home life. 

This paper explores these two competing but intersecting visions of home-based labour in the 1990s. Since the 1970s, homework activists in the UK had been lobbying politicians to improve employment protections for homeworkers, while also acting at a local level to provide support groups and advice. As telework emerged as a greater force in the labour market from the late 1980s, these activists had to consider whether teleworkers deserved the same attention. Did the two groups face similar vulnerabilities such as isolation and exploitation, or were teleworkers just professional men who could lock themselves in their studies while their wives took care of the home? On the other side, a new strain of activism around telework emerged. These activists faced their own questions: was their role more to promote telework or to support teleworkers? Equally, did they conceptualise manual homework within the same framework as telework? This paper considers exactly what home-based work meant during this period and how activists on both sides approached these questions, which have greater implications for our understandings of gender, labour, and the role of activism in the 1990s. 

Rose Dryzek is a third-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores the history of homework activism in the UK from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The project is an Open-Oxford-Cambridge Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with NGO Homeworkers Worldwide.