Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life1

Margaret Thornton

Abstract: The idea of a distinction between public and private life has a long history in political thought, but the boundary between them has become increasingly blurred as a result of temporal ﬂexibility. Technological change lies at the heart of the ability to choose when and where work is performed, including ‘working at home’. This refers only to productive work so that the unpaid domestic and caring work that women disproportionately undertake has been excluded. Its invisibility has led to it ‘counting for nothing’ in the computation of the Gross National Product. With particular regard to the gender ramiﬁcations of working at home, this article analyses the responses to an on-line survey conducted in Australia when lockdown was a key prong of the government response to COVID-19 in 2020. As unpaid work was integrated with productive work, it is suggested that the rationale for discounting it in national accounts no longer holds, especially as the sphere of intimacy is insidiously being colonised by capitalism.

Key words: COVID-19, working at home, the public/private dichotomy, ﬂexible work, technology, gender.

INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC/PRIVATE SPHERES As Weintraub (1997, 1) observes, the public/private dichotomy has been a central preoccupation of western thought since classical antiquity. Hannah Arendt (1958, 45; cf. Long 1998), following Aristotle, argued that a symbiotic relationship exists between the public sphere, the realm

Margaret Thornton is Emerita Professor, ANU College of Law, The Australian National University, Canberra.

Legalities 1.1 (2021): 44–67 DOI: 10.3366/legal.2021.0006 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/legal

44 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life of politics, on the one hand, and the private sphere, or home, on the other hand. The public sphere has been invariably privileged over the private sphere, while nevertheless being dependent on it as the site of necessity where production and reproduction took place. The public sphere has long been viewed as the prerogative of free men, while women, children and slaves were relegated to the private sphere. Although the public/private dichotomy has never been politically stable, its gendered character has been remarkably resistant to change but I will show how it has been thrown into disarray as a result of ‘working at home’. Modernity saw the emergence of civil society, the realm of freedom, which signified the ability of individuals in their private capacity to associate, travel, worship, contract and litigate. Habermas (e.g., 1989, 27) complicated this ordering by including a new sphere between civil society and the state where private individuals came together to form public opinion, which he confusingly designated the ‘public sphere’.2 More recently, contractualism, industrialisation and globalisation have caused commercial and market-based activities to crystallise into a distinct sphere that is commonly referred to as the ‘private sector’ to differentiate privately owned businesses from those that are state-owned, but this economised incarnation of the private sector is quite separate from the private sphere qua household. Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on entrepreneurialism and profit maximisation has contributed to a further reshaping of public and private in contemporary society that has led to a dramatic increase in the significance of the market and the financialisation of the state (Davies 2015). Influenced by Hayek (1976) and Friedman (1962), neoliberalism has been concerned to re-establish the conditions of capital accumu- lation and the power of economic elites (Harvey 2005). The privatisation of public goods, such as utilities, welfare services and education, is a notable illustration of the shift in favour of the market. Indeed, so significant has the market become as a result of the neoliberal turn that William Davies (2014, 20) suggests instead of separate economic, social and political spheres, these constituents might now be evaluated ‘according to a single economic logic’. Davies did not, however, include the private domestic sphere in his reconceptualisation of civil society and the market. This sphere has remained comparatively stable since the early 17th century when labour began to separate from the household (Kumar 1997, 109). As productive labour became a sphere in its own right it became largely the preserve of men (McKeon 2005, 10), while the intimate sphere moved to the periphery and remained feminised (Habermas 1989, 152). Benhabib

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(1998, 85) argues that the averred naturalness of women’s confinement to activities such as reproduction, caring and housework was designed to keep women off the public agenda in the liberal state. Pateman (1983, 281) shows that the devaluation of the private sphere, or the sphere of intimacy, and women’s assignation to it was the focus of almost two centuries of feminist critique (cf. Rosaldo 1974; Ortner 1998; de Beauvoir 2010). Feminist scholars also critiqued the idealisation of the family and the conceptualisation of the home as a ‘haven in a heartless world’ (Lasch 1977).3 They drew attention to the oppression and violence frequently experienced by women and children in the home, pointedly underscored by the well-known slogan of second wave feminism, ‘the personal is the political’. The gendered nature of the public/private dichotomy has therefore not only had ‘a pernicious effect on women, but it has also had the effect of sequestering men from full participation in the life of the family’ (Long 1989). In recent years, however, ‘the personal is the political’ has receded in importance in feminist discourse (Armstrong and Squires 2002, 265; Higgins 2000) and the ‘lofty disdain’ formerly displayed by mainstream critics towards the private sphere has been replaced with the ‘warm glow of opprobrium’ (Kumar 1997, 205), invoking language that continues to resonate with family, place and identity (Margaret Davies 2014, 154–155). I am interested in the way technological change has directly challenged the traditional separation between public and private life, bringing with it not only a blurring of the boundary, but a growing consciousness of the accelerating pace of life (Wajcman 2015). Indeed, as a result of the expectation that everyone should be connected, Turkle (2011, 152) suggests that we are ‘all cyborgs now’ as a result of the infiltration of technology into our lives (see also Thornton 2016b). This has been insidious, beginning innocently enough with responses to the occasional email, but expanding to full-time virtual work. The injunction to work at home as a result of COVID-19 has accelerated this imperative, thereby inviting questions about the status of the private sphere and the home in liberal theory as it becomes increasingly economised. In this article, I show first how the feminisation of wage labour, in conjunction with technological change, paved the way for the inclusion of the private sphere in a single economic logic. Flexible work could be regarded as the first step, although this is not to discount the piecework long undertaken by women in the home. The injunction for all workers to work at home who were able to do so due to the pandemic was an even more significant step in the economisation of the private sphere.

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I consider the impact of working at home by drawing on 260 anon- ymous responses to an Australia-wide on-line survey (the Coronavirus Survey) completed between May and September 2020 when business and inessential services were ordered to be locked down as a result of COVID- 19.4 Permission to administer the survey was obtained from the Australian National University.5 The survey was directed at employed persons, both male and female, (full-time, part-time, casual or self-employed) who were working at home. Although the survey was not restricted to a particular industry, occupational group or region in Australia, the ability to work at home is generally dependent on computerised technology, which signiﬁes the white-collar and professional character of respondents; workers such as those engaged in the service sector of the economy were necessarily precluded from working at home. Respondents were asked questions regarding their gender, employment status, composition of household, share of domestic and caring responsibilities undertaken, as well as conditions and hours of work. Because I was particularly interested in the impact of working at home on respondents’ intimate life, provision for open text was designed to facilitate more nuanced responses than merely ticking a box. While the survey was conducted in Australia, the gendered experiences of working at home during lockdown have been replicated in many other parts of the world (e.g., Boncori 2020; Vohra & Taneja 2020).

THE FEMINISATION OF WAGE LABOUR I turn first to the feminisation of wage labour, a world-wide phenomenon since the latter part of the 20th century, which laid the groundwork for the colonisation of the private sphere by the economy because it encouraged temporal flexibility as to when and where work might be performed (Hardt and Negri 2009, 132). As women moved into the paid workforce in substantial numbers, they sought flexibility because they were also expected to take primary responsibility for domestic work and the preparation of meals, as well as caring for children and family members unable to care for themselves. Employers, however, have traditionally evinced a preference for workers unencumbered by private sphere responsibilities in order that they might devote themselves unconditionally to work. These ‘ideal workers’ assume a necessarily masculinist character as they take ‘little or no time off for childbearing or child-rearing’ (Williams 2000, 1). While it was always the hope of the women’s movement that fathers would play a more active role in childcare, this has not been realised in other than a minimal sense (Thornton 2020; Collier 2019; Atkinson 2017; Brandth and Kvande 2016). Women

47 Legalities in heterosexual relationships who embarked on careers were compelled to respond to the lack of support from their male partners by working part-time or casually as the long-hours culture became the norm in many industries (Gregg 2011, 4; Thornton 2016a). ‘Work/life balance’ (WLB) was the catchcry that animated feminist activism around the millennial turn, which began to disrupt the established norms pertaining to hours and place of work. So prominent had the WLB slogan become that it was described by the then Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission as ‘the topic of the 21st century for families, employers and government’ (Squires and Tilley 2007, xi).6 While ostensibly gender-neutral, the question of a ‘balanced life’ is nevertheless invariably addressed to women, not men (Russum 2019, 134). The phrase also occludes the ‘greed’ of institutions in demanding more and more from employees (Dubois-Shaik and Fusulier 2017, 100). Nevertheless, WLB signified new ways of working and temporal flexibility began to be accepted on the part of white-collar or knowledge-based workers, provided that they had a computer and Internet access. WLB was supported by legislation allowing a limited ‘right of request’ on the part of employees with young children or a child with a disability to request a change in working arrangements (Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), s65(5A)). Full-time workers, invariably women with young children, were therefore able to work at home for a day or more a week. Virtual firms began to proliferate when it was realised that they could operate profitably without the need for costly premises. NewLaw, as the name suggests, is a novel way of practising law, which may mean never having to go to the office or meet with clients face-to-face (Thornton 2019). Indeed, automated platforms may remove altogether any sem- blance of a personal relationship between lawyer and client. The freedom, autonomy, flexibility and satisfaction associated with NewLaw began to transform the way lawyers work. More significantly for my thesis, technology served to cement the link between the economy and the private sphere, as many lawyers chose to work at home, at least some of the time. Marx (1962, 268) percipiently recognised decades earlier that capital would take advantage of abstract time in order to maximise productivity: but for the need for sleep, he postulated, capital would utilise the full 24 hours of the day. Sleep, however, is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism (Crary 2014, 10). Indeed, its 24/7 character is incompatible with any social behaviour that has a rhythmic pattern of action and pause (Crary 2014, 125). Lawyers, particularly the mothers of young children, whom I interviewed for ‘Balancing Law and Life’,7 were pleased to be able to engage

48 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life in satisfying work with the help of the technology at the same time as they were raising their children (cf. Russum 2019). In contradistinction to the high rates of depression reported among lawyers working conven- tionally (e.g., Kelk et al. 2009; Skead et al. 2018), the flexibility of NewLaw appeared to contribute to lawyer wellbeing. In fact, all the NewLaw practitioners whom I interviewed expressed how ‘happy’ they were with the flexibility of NewLaw (Thornton 2019). This evaluation contrasted markedly with that of lawyers working long hours in traditional firms, who frequently encountered resistance on the part of management when they sought to work flexibly. Russum writes about women who formerly took in sewing at home but turned to the Internet to create on-line businesses (Russum 2019). These women navigated back and forth between their business and child- rearing responsibilities ‘allowing their work in the private sphere to bleed into the public’ (Russum 2019, 120). They were most appreciative of the ability to combine work and caring, as well as being beyond the immediate reach of a manager. I suggest that the feminisation of labour, in conjunction with flexible work and reliance on the Internet, prepared the ground for full-scale working at home and acceptance of the colonisation of the sphere of intimacy. The transition from freely chosen flexible work to state- mandated working at home nevertheless proved to be somewhat more complex from the perspective of workers, particularly women, who were also confronted with the preponderance of domestic labour, caring responsibilities and home schooling.

WORKING AT HOME DURING LOCKDOWN COVID-19, the first major pandemic for a century began to spread like wildfire early in 2020. Highly contagious and with no available vaccine, social distancing and staying at home were recognised as primary ways of mitigating the effects of the virus. The nexus between paid work and the home changed dramatically as a result of governments enjoining all workers able to work at home to do so to inhibit contagion. The residual prejudice against working at home that I encountered on the part of principals in corporate law firms (Thornton 2016a) virtually disappeared overnight. Once men were also working at home, the private sphere seemed to shed the seeds of invidiousness characteristically associated with the feminine. As the model of ‘working from home’ on an ad hoc basis was already in place for many new knowledge workers, the transition appeared to be straightforward. Indeed, before lockdown, the Australian Bureau of

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Statistics revealed that 4.1 million people regularly worked from home (Fitzsimmons 2020). It was estimated that the transition of work to the home would save up to AUD$9 billion per year, the majority of which could be accounted for by avoiding the need for a lengthy commute (Fitzsimmons 2030). There was also some evidence of increased productivity on the part of those who worked ﬂexibly. Working at home therefore rapidly became the ‘new normal’.

A Room of One’s Own The first impediment to the economisation of private life during lockdown arose from the assumption that employees could move seamlessly from office to home in the absence of material support. What occurred instead was the effective requisition of employees’ homes by their employers (Jenkins 2020). It was assumed that employees would be able to accommodate any costs associated with the provision of office equipment, computer technology and power (although legitimate expenses may be tax deductable). One respondent mentioned that the employer had given staff a token A$25 Internet payment but expected them to mimic the office set-up with two computer screens. Some employers even expected the productivity of their employees to increase during lockdown, rather than decrease:

My workplace gave me very little support in the sudden transition to working from home. What I found most offensive was that a white, middle age male in senior management sent an email to all staff during COVID-19 lockdown stating that now we had more time on our hands we could use it productively to write grants and ﬁnish publications. Clearly this man had job security, no children or caring responsibilities, or a woman caring for his children and home-schooling them, doing the housework, making his dinner. It was very disappointing (but not surprising) that people (men) in positions of power and privilege are oblivious to the gendered constraints and challenges that working from home (and ﬂexibility) entails, #117, F, 5/6/2020.

Resentment was expressed by survey respondents that employers expected them to transition from a well-equipped ofﬁce to their home virtually overnight:

I have only been able to achieve this by setting up my ofﬁce in the garage, which brings other challenges, #75, F, 28/5/2020.

I am working at the kitchen table. The workplace tends to assume a level of wealth in which you have a large house and a spare room to convert into an

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ofﬁce or enough space to set up an additional desk, which I don’t! A bit of class warfare I felt, #6, F, 21/5/2020.

Working from home was forced on me. I have no dedicated space. I work on my dining room table and therefore have to push my work computer over each day so my children and I can eat at the table, #36, F, 22/5/2020.

The absence of a dedicated workspace emphasises the sense that there was no buffer between work and home. Even if a dual-career family had an ofﬁce, this did not necessarily sufﬁce if both partners were working at home, as its use had to be negotiated between them:

I was only able to work half-days during lockdown, so that we could share the work space and childcare, #38, F, 22/5/2020.

The conﬁguration of the home made a huge difference in terms of the ability to work, although 73 per cent of respondents indicated that they did have a dedicated home ofﬁce, suggesting a high response rate from professional workers. Few households, however, were fortunate enough to have two separate workspaces, which may be preferable for the wellbeing of two adults working from home simultaneously:

At ﬁrst it was really hard because I have a quiet-concentration job and my husband has a talk-on-the-phone job. We’re lucky that we have a big enough house we can be separate. Otherwise I would kill him! We also live regionally but work in Melbourne. I think we’ve coped better having a bigger house than a small apartment like our friends and colleagues. Commuting before the pandemic was awful, but we’re so grateful now. If we can continue to work from home, at least a few days a week, it would be perfect, #251, F, 10/9/2020.

Some couples were able to negotiate use of their home ofﬁce and caring responsibilities in order to effect a satisfactory outcome and a positive sense of balance between work and life:

The experience of working from home while home-schooling was intense but satisfying. My family used a fairly strict 7-day schedule, giving both parents equal time to work or look after themselves (irrespective of their part time percentages of paid employment). This allowed for deep parent- child connection through home-schooling and playing, as well as reasonable paid work/family time separation. Having a large house with a dedicated ofﬁce on an upper ﬂoor massively helped in that respect. While certain aspects of work were made more challenging by the situation (Zoom meetings can be tiring and ineffective, for instance), others

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improved thanks to the lack of ofﬁce disruption (reading and thinking is best conducted in a fairly private environment for instance). Globally speaking, work-life balance improved for my family through the lockdown, with more time together, more time cooking, and a less frantic relationship to paid work. The outcome could be described as a slight decrease in quantity with a marked increase in quality for paid work output, and a substantial increase in both quantity and quality in terms of parenting. We thus plan to change our way of operating moving forward, working from home a lot more (but not fully), and home-schooling semi- regularly, #64, M, 26/5/2020. Professional workers, such as academics, who normally have a high degree of autonomy and ﬂexibility as to how they worked, were appreciative of being able to integrate work with caring commitments, unlike those constrained by daily deadlines:

Home-schooling was a rewarding but challenging time as my husband was still going to work and I was at home working full time and also home-schooling full time. As I am an academic, I usually work from home anyway so that transition was smooth and everything is well set-up. Education and teaching come very naturally to me so I wanted to make the most of the time that I could teach my children - previously this was done in very small spurts of time outside of school which never felt enough. We all got a lot out of it but it was exhausting for me. I had to catch up on my own work in the evenings and weekends. On Sunday nights I had to prepare for a week of home school and my own work. I was very thankful for the autonomy and ﬂexibility in my job to enable me to do this…My kids also learnt how to be more independent and not to interrupt once it was time for me to work - it took time but they got there eventually, #230, F, 13/8/2020.

In addition to the constraints of working at home, respondents missed the camaraderie and collaboration with colleagues; Zoom meetings were a poor substitute, although they assisted in maintaining contact with colleagues. As well as missing the daily interaction with colleagues, some respondents felt that they might have been missing out on possible training, mentoring and networking opportunities. As working from home could be stressful and alienating, counselling was occasionally mentioned, although it is difﬁcult to gauge the psychological effects of the pressure to be productive, while enduring periods of isolation.

Regendering the Private Sphere? While it was the assumption of government and employers that new knowledge work could be unproblematically transferred from the ofﬁce

52 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life to the home, provided that one had a computer and an Internet connection, the reality was more complicated for those who were also primary carers. Fifty nine per cent of respondents to the Coronavirus Survey advised that they had dependent children, 12 per cent of whom co-parented with another person living in a different household, while eight per cent had other dependants, such as an elderly parent or adult child with a disability. Although largely invisible in the modern workplace, young children necessarily took centre-stage once the home became the place of work. When day-care and schools were in lockdown, primary caregivers had no option but to attend to the needs of children while simultaneously engaging in paid work, This put paid to any idea of conﬁning work to a regular time period, such as nine to ﬁve:

Ihavetobeflexible and responsive to the needs of my children. Assisting children takes priority (except for important meetings and urgent work tasks). So work ends up being spread across the hours of the day and into the weekends. I had not worked on weekends for many months prior to lockdown and now I find myself having to work weekends each week to complete tasks and fulfil my paid working hours, #7, F, 21/5/2020.

The idea of a parent working from home was an alien concept for many young children, who thought that if a parent were home during the day, it must be playtime. The children were visible reminders to employers and the wider community that a substantial proportion of workers have caring obligations; they are not the unencumbered monads that accord with the ideal worker model (Williams 2000, 1): ‘My son struggles to understand my work meetings and appears frequently on Zoom calls’, #122, F, 9/6/2020. Parents with school-aged children confronted the additional burden of having to supervise home- schooling, although some respondents, such as those with teaching experience, found this to be enjoyable rather than a chore. For the most part, however, the working environment was thrown into disarray as a result of the presence of young children, unless parents were classiﬁed as ‘essential workers’, such as those involved in health care, in which case they were entitled to access day care, preschool and school. Unremunerated caring work at home has never been classiﬁed as ‘essential work’, despite the suggestion that it should be.8 While the NewLaw interviewees were very positive about working at home, it was a matter of choice for them, albeit shaped by personal circumstances and the availability of caring arrangements, but the COVID-19 respondents were equivocal about working at home in view of the absence of choice, particularly when they no longer had access to

53 Legalities child-care. Some were beset with guilt as they struggled to attend to work and care for children simultaneously:

I’m always feeling guilty that I should be spending more time doing my work, or more time with my children. I feel like I’m doing a crappy job at both, #108, F, 4/6/2020.

[T]his is affecting my mental health. Work is always there; kids are always there; always splitting attention and always thinking of the other when engaging in one, #7, F, 21/5/2020.

A pronounced gender dimension pervaded the issue of working at home, for it was once again assumed that women were responsible for the preponderance of caring, whether a male parent happened to be present or not. The evidence suggests that long-standing gender inequalities were exaggerated, as women endeavoured to balance a disproportionate share of domestic and care work (Fazackerley 2020; Oleschuk 2020). Everyone in a heteronormative household seemed to regard the mother as ‘interruptible’, with her paid work being viewed as less important than that of a male parent (cf. Oleschuk 2020, 7):

My children tend to request my attention, not my partner’s. I do 75% of the housework, 90% of meals, 75% shopping for household, despite the fact that my partner is unemployed, #136, F, 9/6/2020.

The most difficult thing for me is having the kids at home while trying to work. My husband tries so hard to keep them out of my office space, but they come in anyway. The multitude of interruptions is the most difficult thing in terms of my productivity. And even my husband comes in for random things now and then, haha! #138, F, 9/6/2020.

In order to accommodate this increased burden, one of us had to work less. My husband’s work was inﬂexible and have expected him to work more while my work is casual and thus I simply stopped working as much. This is completely unfair but I wouldn’t be surprised if it reﬂects differences in male-dominated and female-dominated workplaces and therefore household labour divisions everywhere, #60, F, 25/5/2020.

Women expressed their frustration at being unable to maintain their normal rate of productivity at work as they endeavoured to cope with the demands of caring and domestic life (cf. O’Reilly 2020, 17), which placed a lot of pressure on relationships. One measure of declining productivity relates to a lower rate of journal submissions by academics (Gabster et al. 2020; Moodley and Gouwa 2020; Oleschuk

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2020, 3), which has been the case for women, but not for men, since the pandemic began:

Most academics with shared care of children have suffered a disastrous drop in productivity this year, and baulk at the frequent talk from academic managers and colleagues of using lockdown to get research written up or concentrate on that overdue book project! But the drop in productivity is not evenly distributed: academics who have a non-full-time- employed partner did not suffer the same curtailment of work hours yet in my experience they claim the same narrative. As with everything around academic parenting, those who do a smaller share of parenting still expect the same share of recognition of the difﬁculties it imposes on academic careers! #250, F, 10/9/2020.

The pressure of the ‘double shift’–working full-time in the paid workforce as well as caring for a family became unmanageable when both ‘shifts’ had to be carried out concurrently:

Working from home during lockdown was impossible. As an academic in a leadership role I spent the best part of every working day in back-to-back Zoom meetings and had to work many hours each night to keep up on other admin. I was not properly able to supervise home schooling and effectively gave up on that. I had to work weekends and averaged only 3–4 hours’ sleep per night, #205, F, 9/7/2020.

The views expressed by respondents to the survey, a very substantial 88 per cent of whom were women, are echoed by international studies, such as that conducted by O’Reilly (2020) which drew on responses from members of a Facebook group from approximately 30 countries. Although the Coronavirus Survey was intended to target men working at home, as well as women, the phrase ‘working at home’ appeared to carry conventional connotations of the home as a feminised space in which women were responsible for performing the preponderance of housework and caring (McMunn et al. 2020; Diversity Council Australia 2019). Hence, male respondents, who either undertook little responsibility for caring, even when they had dependants, or who played no role at all, may have been disinclined to respond to questions regarding the proportion of domestic labour and caring that they undertook.9 Of course, the heightened sense of frustration experienced by women juggling paid work and small children, may have encouraged them to ventilate their feelings through textual responses. Indeed, it is notable that very few men elaborated on their tick-the-box survey responses by including text, although encouraged to do so. Working at home is a salutary reminder that ‘the personal’ is still very much ‘the political’ so

55 Legalities far as women are concerned. Indeed, one would think that this slogan ought to have received a metaphorical shot in the arm as a result of COVID-19. Instead, the unequal sharing of housework and caring exposed by working at home compels one to question the long-term impact of the women’s movement. Marianna Muravyeva (2020) is more explicit in this regard, describing the pandemic as the most signiﬁcant ‘backlash’ to date against women’s rights. However, the wealth of critical feminist literature emerging during COVID-19 (e.g., Couch, O’Sullivan and Malatzky 2000; Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen 2000) suggests that there is considerable evidence of pushback.

No End to Work Working at home has major ramiﬁcations for the public/private dichotomy as the line between the two spheres recedes when there is nowhere to retreat from the pressure of work. Arendt (1958, 71; cf. Crary 2014, 100) recognised the importance of the private sphere as a place of refuge from the harsh glare of public activity to allow regeneration of the self to occur. Constantly surrounded by reminders of work, respondents to the Coronavirus Survey were all too aware of the absence of a physical or even a metaphysical buffer between work and home:

You can’t shut the door and leave it behind. As much as an ofﬁce is separate; it’s in the safe space called home. The routine of leaving and travelling [to and from] home provided disconnect time and preparation for home life, #247, F, 9/9/2020.

Very difﬁcult - particularly with a work laptop in my bedroom, #243, F, 3/9/2020.

But it is tricky to switch off. My desk is piled high with papers and sits right outside my bedroom so I walk past it each night before bed and try not to notice, #236, F, 26/8/2020. A high percentage of respondents – 60 per cent – indicated that they were unable to separate work from private life when working at home as all the markers indicating separate spheres had disappeared. Once home became the workplace, some respondents fell into the trap of not knowing when to stop working:

There are no boundaries; everything just blurs together so the day becomes longer and messier, #215, F, 20/7/2020.

The fact remains of being in one location and not having your home as the place to escape from your daily work. It’s hard to determine how affected

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mentally you are, since it is not comparable to anything done before; only time will tell. I notice that many of my friends enjoyed a glass or two more often than ever and that some of us end up taking on crafts, baking, walking and gardening like the world was going to end! …Combining home, family and work together due to the lockdown I can only compare it to ‘having your in-laws for a weekend in a one room apartment while your husband has the ﬂu and your three kids can’t use the internet’, #158, F, 11/6/2020.

Given the number of hours I am required to work per week and the requirement that I be available at all times, my ability to separate work from home has been severely impaired during COVID-19. As a result my mental health has suffered. In addition, my motivation and engagement with life outside of the home has signiﬁcantly decreased and notwithstanding I have two other adults in the home with me, I feel more alone than when I work outside the home, #51, F, 25/5/2020.

Other respondents felt that the stress they experienced was exacer- bated not only by the pressure to work excessive hours and the simultaneous demands of family life, but also by the survivor guilt they experienced. After all, they had a job, which allowed them the relative luxury of working at home, unlike countless others who had lost their job as a result of COVID-19 and had little prospect of ﬁnding another:

The work is endless. If I wake up early, I feel pressure to go to work before eating/bathing/dressing/exercising or any self-care. If I have any minute free in the day, I feel like I have to go and prepare materials or answer student or administration emails. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I consider working. I often wait until the kids are asleep to work through the night with no interruption. I am exhausted. I wake up on Sunday morning and panic that I’m missing a work meeting or class. I’m also acting as social worker to my students. While household and childcare work is shared, I do all the emotional work with children and family members, take care of all the ﬁghts, crying children, lonely grandparents, etc. I also take care of organising access to food, including hours and hours of research on where to obtain food safely, rationing decisions, purchasing decisions, menu decisions, #145, F, 10/6/2020.

Although wearing pyjamas for a Zoom meeting might not accord with the working-at-home dress-code (Blank 2020), ‘dressing for work’ was one slightly eccentric way of satisfying the need to maintain a metaphysical boundary between work and home:

I dressed for work each morning and went on a short walk before work. This helped me to prepare for the work-day. At the end of the

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work-day, I changed out of my work clothes and tried not to look at the work end of the dining table again that evening, #239, F, 26/8/2020.

A POST-PANDEMIC FUTURE We will almost certainly not return to the pre-COVID-19 position once the pandemic comes to an end. As the NewLaw study revealed, ﬂexibility and autonomy are undoubtedly the most appealing aspects of working at home for workers, as no one is leaning over them and telling them what to do. Respondents without dependants in the Coronavirus Survey similarly enjoyed the freedom to organise their time, including activities such as exercising and caring for pets. For some respondents, a sense of balance was created by interleaving paid work with mundane domestic tasks, such as ‘folding clothes and doing household tasks whilst listening into meetings’, #73, F, 28/5/2020. These workers also felt that their productivity had improved because of the reduced interruptions from colleagues and the time saved from not having to commute. However, respondents with young children found any sort of balance to be impossible:

Working from home is feasible if we have childcare/pre-school. During lock-down when pre-schools were closed, working from home was very challenging. The 60+ hours that my husband and I (combined) are required to do for work was completely unrealistic when care for our 4-year old daughter was 24/7. This created additional pressure on our relationship as it meant that there was a constant negotiation over work priorities and deadlines, and more often than not, it meant my work (as I am part-time with less immediate responsibilities) was de-prioritised out of sheer need. I imagine the situation was similar for other mothers who are more likely to work part-time and take on the majority of domestic and childcare responsibilities. It meant I was effectively doing more, with less support, as was my partner. I don’t think this was adequately recognised in [workplace] policy and communications, #74, F, 28/5/2020.

The question as to whether working from home will become the norm for new knowledge workers in the future is unclear. Certainly, several interviewees hoped that COVID-19 had contributed to a permanent change in the culture of work, which signiﬁes a step towards acceptance of the economisation of the private sphere by workers themselves. The trend for new knowledge workers with caring responsibilities to have a degree of ﬂexibility over when work is performed has been well established since the millennial turn, as I have suggested, and is

58 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life conﬁrmed by the experience of COVID-19. Indeed, some respondents were thoroughly enamoured of working at home:

I love it and want it to continue. It avoids a long commute to the ofﬁce and the usual, stressful rush of trying to get to day-care before it closes. I actually get time to exercise and then eat breakfast with my little boy before day-care. I eat better, as I can actually cook good food and don’t have to grab take-away lunch each day. My relationship is improved. I never want to go back to the ofﬁce! #58, F, 25/5/2020.

Thirty-ﬁve per cent of Coronavirus Survey respondents indicated that they would prefer to continue working from home full-time. For some of them, however, this decision was conditional on having a dedicated workspace, with children at day-care or school, so that they could concentrate on their paid work for a few hours per day. During lockdown, respondents often had to wait until the children went to bed before they could begin serious work, which was very exhausting. Access to childcare has been a perennial problem for women in paid work, but the issue returned with a vengeance for those working at home when childcare centres were closed:

I am a research scientist so when working from home I can’t do lab work which is what I enjoy the most. I ﬁnd it very difﬁcult to do ‘deep-thinking’ work from home as I am interrupted a lot. This is mostly due to the lack of childcare at the moment due to COVID-19 restrictions. I’m trying to work and care for small children and it’s very challenging. I’m looking forward to when our childcare can start charging fees again and having more staff so I can get all my usual days back, #108, F, 4/6/2020.

The ambivalence about working at home on a full-time basis was apparent from the fact that 24 per cent of respondents indicated that they would prefer to return to their conventional workplace full-time. Those who gave reasons for this choice mentioned the desire for a strict boundary between workplace and home, so that the latter could be kept as a sanctuary, and not be regarded as an extension of the workplace. The largest group of respondents – 40 per cent – opted for a hybrid system in which they would divide their time equally between home and ofﬁce. While working at home for a few days at a time is tolerable, even pleasurable, permanent separation from one’s colleagues produces a sense of anomie:

There is a distinct advantage in not having to travel to campus in peak hours, to get a parking spot. This means reduced carbon footprint, saved

59 Legalities

time and energy but also the fact that the employee rather than the employer is paying for costs of electricity, digital connections, heating and cooling. But I like the concentration this affords and the fact that I have more control over hours of work in relation to meals and exercise. I am fortunate in having a large house and a garden where I can read when it’s sunny. I had a very productive writing time in my first three months of isolation. But was relieved to have more social contacts after lockdown eased, #229, F, 12/8/2020. It is apparent that employers are also turning their minds to employees working at home on a regular basis post-COVID-19 in the interests of the economisation thesis. There are considerable savings for businesses in reducing the size of their offices and having staff work at home. NewLaw firms are an example of a growing proportion of start-up businesses able to operate virtually, a trend that can be expected to continue. However, more traditional enterprises, such as corporate law firms, some of which were formerly suspicious of their lawyers working flexibly, are also now prepared to embrace flexible work in the light of proven productivity. For example, Andrea Arosio, Managing Partner (Italy) of the international law firm, Linklaters, announced that employees across the global network will be able to work remotely for up to 20–50 per cent of the time: ‘The COVID-19 pandemic and our enforced remote working experiment has given us an opportunity to take stock and revisit how we approach agile and remote working’ (Slingo 2020). A similar stance has been adopted by other global law firms, such as Herbert Smith Freehills (Doraisamy 2020). The greater acceptance of working at home as a result of COVID-19 signifies a definite softening in attitude since the interviews were conducted for ‘Balancing Law and Life’ when principals evinced concern about employees working without direct supervision (Thornton 2016a). Many issues in relation to working from home have yet to be resolved, such as the extent to which personal/carer’s leave10 or paid sick leave will be available for employees.11 Some of the lawyers I interviewed for ‘Balancing Law and Life’ were independent contractors, not employees, which meant that they were responsible for taking out insurance themselves to cover the cost of sick leave, as well as assuming responsibility for on-costs, such as superannuation and workers’ compensation. Thus, we may well see more employers push to change the status of workers from employee to independent contractor in order to minimise overheads (which is already happening in the case of the gig economy), although contractualism necessarily weakens employer supervision over workers. Nevertheless, if working at home is profitable, employers will support it.

60 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life

CONCLUSION The assumption that employees will seamlessly assume the costs associated with working at home has boosted the impetus for the economy to colonise the sphere of intimacy. The Coronavirus Survey supports the view that the interests of the economy are consistently privileged over caring work in the home. As Marilyn Waring (1988, 22) observed in her insightful study of more than 30 years ago, unpaid caring and domestic work ‘counts for nothing’ in either national or international systems of accounting:

[E]conomists usually use labour to mean only those activities that produce surplus value (that is, proﬁt in the marketplace). Consequently, labour (work) that does not produce proﬁt is not considered production…

Working at home during lockdown highlights Waring’s thesis. While the proportion of women in the paid workforce might suggest that gender equality has been attained,12 working at home during COVID-19 reveals how substantive equality remains elusive as women struggle to undertake the bulk of unpaid caring, emotional and domestic labour at the same time as engaging in ‘productive’ labour. Lockdown has given rise to anxious pleas to open up the economy, but as O’Reilly (2020, 22) observes, it is not in fact closed, for everyone is cooking, cleaning and taking care of their loved ones. Nevertheless, as this is deemed to be ‘unproductive’ labour incapable of producing surplus value, it continues to be discounted. Capitalism is interested only in that which is deemed to be economically productive, regardless as to where surplus value is produced, who produces it and under what conditions. As noted, the insights of Marx are very relevant in illuminating the role of temporal ﬂexibility as a source of enhanced productivity in this new phase of capitalism (Wendling 2009). As Marx recognised long before the Internet, capitalism had the ability to seize any available space and colonise it. Indeed, capitalism would have workers working 24 hours a day if it were feasible (Marx 1962, 268; cf. Crary 2014, 100) and, as some Coronavirus Survey respondents indicated, the pressure to demonstrate productivity induced them to work at all hours and get by with very little sleep. The sphere of intimacy has traditionally been of little interest to capitalism other than as the site of necessity that sustains the labour force. The Internet, however, has allowed the home to be seized upon as a renewed site of productivity. Piecework, such as that undertaken by women for the garment industry in the past was not sufﬁcient to

61 Legalities transmute the home into a major site of capitalist production. However, the prospect of having approximately 46 per cent of all Australian workers working at home during the pandemic (ABS 2020) was quite different. Just as the economisation of the state, civil society and the market has been ramped up as a result of the neoliberal turn (Davies 2014, 20), lockdowns provided capitalism with the impetus to colonise the sphere of intimacy. Of course, this logic is impeded by the fact that it is never going to be feasible for those working in shops, restaurants and essential services to work at home. Furthermore, many interviewees who were able to work at home were not supportive of it as they were anxious to ensure that a vestige of private life should be free from encroachment by the economy. They believed that the home was sacrosanct and should remain a place of refuge from surveillance by their employer. Nevertheless, while there is resistance to the sphere of intimacy falling victim to the voraciousness of capitalism in the same way as civil society, the market and the public sphere, it remains highly vulnerable, as suggested by Marx’ insight. Although COVID-19 has given a significant boost to temporal flexibility, working at home carries contradictions with it. On the positive side, it enables primary carers, who continue to be predominantly women, to integrate paid work with caring responsibilities. The difference with past iterations of flexibility, however, was that those who chose to work flexibly could rely on day care and schools being open. The seamless absorption of this work into the working day contributed to the invisibility of unpaid caring work. On the debit side of the ledger, working at home has enabled capitalism to enter the home insidiously by the back door. The pandemic nevertheless gives us the opportunity to address an historic anomaly, namely, the fact that unpaid labour is viewed as ‘counting for nothing’. I am not suggesting a revival of ‘wages for housework’, as mooted by some feminist activists in the 1970s (Toupin 2018, 1). Rather than an individual wage, I suggest that domestic and caring work be included in the computation of the Gross National Product (GNP) as Waring (1988) exhorted. During lockdown, the significance of this unpaid work was underscored when undertaken in conjunction with paid work. As childcare centres, schools and other facilities were closed, workers, who were overwhelmingly women, were left to assume responsibility for full-time unpaid work at the same time as they were working to enhance the profits of their employers. Working at home as a result of COVID-19 has dramatically revealed that the public/private dichotomy of liberal theory is becoming passé in liberal theory as we move towards a single economic logic that includes

62 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life the private sphere, as well as the economic, social and political spheres. As the sphere of intimacy is being colonised by capitalism as a result of temporal ﬂexibility, one must ask whether it is fair to exclude caring and domestic labour from the GNP when it takes place in a sequestered workplace that is otherwise economised, no less than a conventional workplace. Should this essential labour, which is paradigmatically feminised, continue to be treated as invisible and ‘count for nothing’?

NOTES 1. Paper presented at Rights, Democracy and Equality in the Shadow of the Pandemic, University of Helsinki-Australian National University Webinar, 31 August 2020. I thank Dorota Gozdecka for organising the webinar, Fiona Jenkins and other participants for their comments, and Anne McDuff and Kate Ogg for assistance with the survey. 2. Habermas has been extensively critiqued by feminist scholars for his failure to pay sufficient attention to gender (e.g. Landes 1998). 3. Moller Okin (1989) is critical of the way influential theorists, such as Rousseau, idealised the family while, at the same time, making standards of justice irrelevant to them. 4. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission became the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2008. 5. Australian Research Council DP 120104785, 2012–18. This project originally set out to research work/life balance in corporate law firms, but an extension was granted to undertake additional research on NewLaw. 6. The requirement to lock down varied according to Australian States and territory jurisdictions. 7. Margaret Thornton & Anne Macduff, ‘Coronavirus and the Contradictions of Working at Home’, ANU Ethics Protocol 2020/284. 8. O’Reilly (2020, 12) argues that women caring for children at home during COVID-19– 19 should be recognised as ‘frontline workers’ in the same way as other essential workers. 9. There is some evidence in the literature that men are disinclined to participate in family research (Davison et al. 2017). 10. For the way this leave might be computed, see Mondelez Australia Pty Ltd v AMWU & Ors. [2020] HCA 29. 11. Special arrangements are in place for those with coronavirus. See information provided by the Australian Fair Work Ombudsman: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/ leave/sick-and-carers-leave/paid-sick-and-carers-leave#. Accessed 12 February 2021. However, it is not presently clear how benefits might be computed post-COVID-19. 12. In 2020, women comprise 47.1% of all employed persons in Australia (37.6% of all full-time employees and 67.9% of all part-time employees (Workplace Gender Equality Agency 2020).

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