Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life

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 is excluded. It continues to ‘count for nothing’ in the computation of the Gross National Product. With particular regard to the gender ramifications, this article considers the responses to an on-line survey conducted in Australia when ‘working at home’ was a key prong of the government response to COVID-19 in 2020. As unpaid work is 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.

Keywords: COVID-19, gender, working at home, public/private spheres, flexible work, technology