Coronavirus and the Colonisation ofPrivate Life1

Margaret Thornton

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

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

INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC/PRIVATE SPHERES

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

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

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

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of politics, on the one hand, and the private sphere, or home, onthe other hand. The public sphere has been invariably privileged overthe private sphere, while nevertheless being dependent on it as thesite of necessity where production and reproduction took place. Thepublic 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 butI will show how it has been thrown into disarray as a result of ‘workingat home’.Modernity saw the emergence of civil society, the realm of freedom,

which signified the ability of individuals in their private capacity toassociate, travel, worship, contract and litigate. Habermas (e.g., 1989, 27)complicated this ordering by including a new sphere between civil societyand the state where private individuals came together to form publicopinion, which he confusingly designated the ‘public sphere’.2 Morerecently, contractualism, industrialisation and globalisation have causedcommercial and market-based activities to crystallise into a distinctsphere that is commonly referred to as the ‘private sector’ to differentiateprivately owned businesses from those that are state-owned, but thiseconomised incarnation of the private sector is quite separate from theprivate sphere qua household.Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on entrepreneurialism and profit

maximisation has contributed to a further reshaping of public andprivate in contemporary society that has led to a dramatic increase in thesignificance of the market and the financialisation of the state (Davies2015). Influenced by Hayek (1976) and Friedman (1962), neoliberalismhas been concerned to re-establish the conditions of capital accumu-lation and the power of economic elites (Harvey 2005). The privatisationof public goods, such as utilities, welfare services and education, is anotable illustration of the shift in favour of the market. Indeed, sosignificant has the market become as a result of the neoliberal turn thatWilliam Davies (2014, 20) suggests instead of separate economic, socialand 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 hasremained comparatively stable since the early 17th century when labourbegan to separate from the household (Kumar 1997, 109). As productivelabour became a sphere in its own right it became largely the preserveof men (McKeon 2005, 10), while the intimate sphere moved to theperiphery and remained feminised (Habermas 1989, 152). Benhabib

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(1998, 85) argues that the averred naturalness of women’s confinementto activities such as reproduction, caring and housework was designed tokeep 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 ofalmost two centuries of feminist critique (cf. Rosaldo 1974; Ortner 1998;de Beauvoir 2010). Feminist scholars also critiqued the idealisation ofthe family and the conceptualisation of the home as a ‘haven in aheartless world’ (Lasch 1977).3 They drew attention to the oppressionand violence frequently experienced by women and children in thehome, pointedly underscored by the well-known slogan of second wavefeminism, ‘the personal is the political’. The gendered nature of thepublic/private dichotomy has therefore not only had ‘a pernicious effecton women, but it has also had the effect of sequestering men from fullparticipation 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 bymainstream critics towards the private sphere has been replaced withthe ‘warm glow of opprobrium’ (Kumar 1997, 205), invoking languagethat continues to resonate with family, place and identity (MargaretDavies 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 growingconsciousness 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 ofthe infiltration of technology into our lives (see also Thornton 2016b).This has been insidious, beginning innocently enough with responses tothe occasional email, but expanding to full-time virtual work. Theinjunction to work at home as a result of COVID-19 has accelerated thisimperative, thereby inviting questions about the status of the privatesphere and the home in liberal theory as it becomes increasinglyeconomised.In this article, I show first how the feminisation of wage labour, in

conjunction with technological change, paved the way for the inclusionof the private sphere in a single economic logic. Flexible work could beregarded as the first step, although this is not to discount the pieceworklong undertaken by women in the home. The injunction for all workersto work at home who were able to do so due to the pandemic was an evenmore 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 CoronavirusSurvey) completed betweenMay and September 2020 when business andinessential services were ordered to be locked down as a result of COVID-19.4 Permission to administer the survey was obtained from the AustralianNational University.5 The survey was directed at employed persons, bothmale and female, (full-time, part-time, casual or self-employed) who wereworking at home. Although the survey was not restricted to a particularindustry, occupational group or region in Australia, the ability to work athome is generally dependent on computerised technology, whichsignifies the white-collar and professional character of respondents;workers such as those engaged in the service sector of the economy werenecessarily precluded from working at home.Respondents were asked questions regarding their gender, employ-

ment status, composition of household, share of domestic and caringresponsibilities undertaken, as well as conditions and hours of work.Because I was particularly interested in the impact of working at home onrespondents’ intimate life, provision for open text was designed tofacilitate more nuanced responses than merely ticking a box. While thesurvey was conducted in Australia, the gendered experiences of workingat home during lockdown have been replicated in many other parts ofthe 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 phenomenonsince the latter part of the 20th century, which laid the groundwork forthe colonisation of the private sphere by the economy because itencouraged temporal flexibility as to when and where work might beperformed (Hardt and Negri 2009, 132). As women moved into thepaid workforce in substantial numbers, they sought flexibility becausethey were also expected to take primary responsibility for domestic workand the preparation of meals, as well as caring for children and familymembers unable to care for themselves. Employers, however, havetraditionally evinced a preference for workers unencumbered by privatesphere responsibilities in order that they might devote themselvesunconditionally to work. These ‘ideal workers’ assume a necessarilymasculinist character as they take ‘little or no time off for childbearing orchild-rearing’ (Williams 2000, 1). While it was always the hope of thewomen’s movement that fathers would play a more active role in child-care, this has not been realised in other than a minimal sense (Thornton2020; Collier 2019; Atkinson 2017; Brandth and Kvande 2016). Women

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in heterosexual relationships who embarked on careers were compelledto respond to the lack of support from their male partners by workingpart-time or casually as the long-hours culture became the norm in manyindustries (Gregg 2011, 4; Thornton 2016a).‘Work/life balance’ (WLB) was the catchcry that animated feminist

activism around the millennial turn, which began to disrupt theestablished norms pertaining to hours and place of work. So prominenthad the WLB slogan become that it was described by the then AustralianHuman Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission as ‘the topic of the21st century for families, employers and government’ (Squires and Tilley2007, xi).6 While ostensibly gender-neutral, the question of a ‘balancedlife’ is nevertheless invariably addressed to women, not men (Russum2019, 134). The phrase also occludes the ‘greed’ of institutions indemanding more and more from employees (Dubois-Shaik and Fusulier2017, 100). Nevertheless, WLB signified new ways of working andtemporal flexibility began to be accepted on the part of white-collar orknowledge-based workers, provided that they had a computer andInternet access. WLB was supported by legislation allowing a limited‘right of request’ on the part of employees with young children or a childwith a disability to request a change in working arrangements (Fair WorkAct 2009 (Cth), s65(5A)). Full-time workers, invariably women withyoung children, were therefore able to work at home for a day or more aweek.Virtual firms began to proliferate when it was realised that they could

operate profitably without the need for costly premises. NewLaw, as thename suggests, is a novel way of practising law, which may mean neverhaving to go to the office or meet with clients face-to-face (Thornton2019). 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 totransform the way lawyers work. More significantly for my thesis,technology served to cement the link between the economy and theprivate sphere, asmany lawyers chose towork at home, at least some of thetime. Marx (1962, 268) percipiently recognised decades earlier thatcapital would take advantage of abstract time in order to maximiseproductivity: but for theneed for sleep, hepostulated, capital wouldutilisethe full 24 hours of the day. Sleep, however, is an uncompromisinginterruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism (Crary 2014, 10).Indeed, its 24/7 character is incompatible with any social behaviour thathas a rhythmic pattern of action and pause (Crary 2014, 125).Lawyers, particularly the mothers of young children, whom I inter-

viewed for ‘Balancing Law and Life’,7 were pleased to be able to engage

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in satisfying work with the help of the technology at the same time as theywere raising their children (cf. Russum 2019). In contradistinction tothe high rates of depression reported among lawyers working conven-tionally (e.g., Kelk et al. 2009; Skead et al. 2018), the flexibility ofNewLaw appeared to contribute to lawyer wellbeing. In fact, all theNewLaw practitioners whom I interviewed expressed how ‘happy’ theywere with the flexibility of NewLaw (Thornton 2019). This evaluationcontrasted markedly with that of lawyers working long hours intraditional firms, who frequently encountered resistance on the part ofmanagement 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). Thesewomen navigated back and forth between their business and child-rearing responsibilities ‘allowing their work in the private sphere to bleedinto the public’ (Russum 2019, 120). They were most appreciative of theability to combine work and caring, as well as being beyond theimmediate 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-scaleworking at home and acceptance of the colonisation of the sphere ofintimacy. The transition from freely chosen flexible work to state-mandated working at home nevertheless proved to be somewhat morecomplex from the perspective of workers, particularly women, who werealso confronted with the preponderance of domestic labour, caringresponsibilities and home schooling.

WORKING AT HOME DURING LOCKDOWN

COVID-19, the first major pandemic for a century began to spread likewildfire early in 2020. Highly contagious and with no available vaccine,social distancing and staying at home were recognised as primary ways ofmitigating the effects of the virus. The nexus between paid work and thehome changed dramatically as a result of governments enjoining allworkers able to work at home to do so to inhibit contagion. The residualprejudice against working at home that I encountered on the part ofprincipals in corporate law firms (Thornton 2016a) virtually disappearedovernight. Once men were also working at home, the private sphereseemed to shed the seeds of invidiousness characteristically associatedwith 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 bestraightforward. 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 thehome would save up to AUD$9 billion per year, the majority of whichcould be accounted for by avoiding the need for a lengthy commute(Fitzsimmons 2030). There was also some evidence of increasedproductivity on the part of those who worked flexibly. Working athome therefore rapidly became the ‘new normal’.

A Room of One’s Own

The first impediment to the economisation of private life duringlockdown arose from the assumption that employees could moveseamlessly from office to home in the absence of material support.What occurred instead was the effective requisition of employees’ homesby their employers (Jenkins 2020). It was assumed that employees wouldbe able to accommodate any costs associated with the provision of officeequipment, computer technology and power (although legitimateexpenses may be tax deductable). One respondent mentioned that theemployer had given staff a token A$25 Internet payment but expectedthem to mimic the office set-up with two computer screens. Someemployers even expected the productivity of their employees to increaseduring lockdown, rather than decrease:

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

Resentment was expressed by survey respondents that employersexpected them to transition from a well-equipped office to their homevirtually 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 ofwealth 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 ofclass 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 workcomputer 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 therewas no buffer between work and home. Even if a dual-career family hadan office, this did not necessarily suffice if both partners were working athome, as its use had to be negotiated between them:

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

The configuration of the homemade a huge difference in terms of theability to work, although 73 per cent of respondents indicated that theydid have a dedicated home office, suggesting a high response rate fromprofessional workers. Few households, however, were fortunate enoughto have two separate workspaces, which may be preferable for thewellbeing of two adults working from home simultaneously:

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

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

The experience of working from home while home-schooling was intensebut satisfying. My family used a fairly strict 7-day schedule, giving bothparents equal time to work or look after themselves (irrespective of theirpart time percentages of paid employment). This allowed for deep parent-child connection through home-schooling and playing, as well asreasonable paid work/family time separation. Having a large house witha dedicated office on an upper floor massively helped in that respect.While certain aspects of work weremade 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 isbest conducted in a fairly private environment for instance). Globallyspeaking, work-life balance improved for my family through the lockdown,with more time together, more time cooking, and a less franticrelationship to paid work. The outcome could be described as a slightdecrease in quantity with a marked increase in quality for paid workoutput, and a substantial increase in both quantity and quality in terms ofparenting. 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 highdegree of autonomy and flexibility as to how they worked, wereappreciative 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 husbandwas still going to work and I was at home working full time and alsohome-schooling full time. As I am an academic, I usually work from homeanyway so that transition was smooth and everything is well set-up.Education and teaching come very naturally to me so I wanted to makethe most of the time that I could teach my children - previously this wasdone in very small spurts of time outside of school which never feltenough. We all got a lot out of it but it was exhausting for me. I had tocatch up onmy own work in the evenings and weekends. On Sunday nightsI had to prepare for a week of home school and my own work. I was verythankful for the autonomy and flexibility in my job to enable me to dothis…My kids also learnt how to be more independent and not tointerrupt once it was time for me to work - it took time but they got thereeventually, #230, F, 13/8/2020.

In addition to the constraints of working at home, respondents missedthe camaraderie and collaboration with colleagues; Zoommeetings werea poor substitute, although they assisted in maintaining contactwith colleagues. As well as missing the daily interaction with colleagues,some respondents felt that they might have been missing out onpossible training, mentoring and networking opportunities. As workingfrom home could be stressful and alienating, counselling was occasionallymentioned, although it is difficult to gauge the psychological effects ofthe pressure to be productive, while enduring periods of isolation.

Regendering the Private Sphere?

While it was the assumption of government and employers that newknowledge work could be unproblematically transferred from the office

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to the home, provided that one had a computer and an Internetconnection, the reality was more complicated for those who were alsoprimary carers. Fifty nine per cent of respondents to the CoronavirusSurvey advised that they had dependent children, 12 per cent of whomco-parented with another person living in a different household, whileeight per cent had other dependants, such as an elderly parent or adultchild 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 nooption but to attend to the needs of children while simultaneouslyengaging in paid work, This put paid to any idea of confining work to aregular time period, such as nine to five:

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

The idea of a parent working from home was an alien conceptfor many young children, who thought that if a parent were home duringthe day, it must be playtime. The children were visible reminders toemployers and the wider community that a substantial proportionof workers have caring obligations; they are not the unencumberedmonads that accord with the ideal worker model (Williams 2000, 1):‘My son struggles to understand my work meetings and appearsfrequently on Zoom calls’, #122, F, 9/6/2020. Parents with school-agedchildren confronted the additional burden of having to supervise home-schooling, although some respondents, such as those with teachingexperience, found this to be enjoyable rather than a chore. For themost part, however, the working environment was thrown into disarrayas a result of the presence of young children, unless parents wereclassified as ‘essential workers’, such as those involved in health care, inwhich 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 athome, it was a matter of choice for them, albeit shaped by personalcircumstances and the availability of caring arrangements, but theCOVID-19 respondents were equivocal about working at home in view ofthe absence of choice, particularly when they no longer had access to

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child-care. Some were beset with guilt as they struggled to attend to workand care for children simultaneously:

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

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

A pronounced gender dimension pervaded the issue of workingat home, for it was once again assumed that women were responsiblefor the preponderance of caring, whether a male parent happened to bepresent or not. The evidence suggests that long-standing genderinequalities were exaggerated, as women endeavoured to balance adisproportionate share of domestic and care work (Fazackerley 2020;Oleschuk 2020). Everyone in a heteronormative household seemed toregard the mother as ‘interruptible’, with her paid work being viewed asless 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% ofthe housework, 90% of meals, 75% shopping for household, despite thefact that my partner is unemployed, #136, F, 9/6/2020.

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

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

Women expressed their frustration at being unable to maintaintheir normal rate of productivity at work as they endeavoured to copewith the demands of caring and domestic life (cf. O’Reilly 2020, 17),which placed a lot of pressure on relationships. One measure ofdeclining productivity relates to a lower rate of journal submissions byacademics (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 thepandemic began:

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

The pressure of the ‘double shift’ – working full-time in the paidworkforce 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 aleadership role I spent the best part of every working day in back-to-backZoom meetings and had to work many hours each night to keep up onother admin. I was not properly able to supervise home schooling andeffectively gave up on that. I had to work weekends and averaged only 3–4hours’ sleep per night, #205, F, 9/7/2020.

The views expressed by respondents to the survey, a very substantial88 per cent of whom were women, are echoed by international studies,such as that conducted by O’Reilly (2020) which drew on responsesfrom members of a Facebook group from approximately 30 countries.Although the Coronavirus Survey was intended to target men workingat home, as well as women, the phrase ‘working at home’ appearedto carry conventional connotations of the home as a feminised space inwhich women were responsible for performing the preponderanceof housework and caring (McMunn et al. 2020; Diversity CouncilAustralia 2019). Hence, male respondents, who either undertook littleresponsibility for caring, even when they had dependants, or who playedno role at all, may have been disinclined to respond to questions regard-ing the proportion of domestic labour and caring that they undertook.9

Of course, the heightened sense of frustration experienced by womenjuggling paid work and small children, may have encouraged them toventilate their feelings through textual responses. Indeed, it is notablethat very few men elaborated on their tick-the-box survey responses byincluding text, although encouraged to do so. Working at home is asalutary reminder that ‘the personal’ is still very much ‘the political’ so

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far as women are concerned. Indeed, one would think that this sloganought to have received a metaphorical shot in the arm as a result ofCOVID-19. Instead, the unequal sharing of housework and caringexposed by working at home compels one to question the long-termimpact of the women’s movement. Marianna Muravyeva (2020) is moreexplicit in this regard, describing the pandemic as the most significant‘backlash’ to date against women’s rights. However, the wealth of criticalfeminist literature emerging during COVID-19 (e.g., Couch, O’Sullivanand Malatzky 2000; Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen 2000) suggests that there isconsiderable evidence of pushback.

No End to Work

Working at home has major ramifications for the public/privatedichotomy as the line between the two spheres recedes when there isnowhere to retreat from the pressure of work. Arendt (1958, 71; cf. Crary2014, 100) recognised the importance of the private sphere as a place ofrefuge from the harsh glare of public activity to allow regeneration of theself to occur. Constantly surrounded by reminders of work, respondentsto the Coronavirus Survey were all too aware of the absence of a physicalor even a metaphysical buffer between work and home:

You can’t shut the door and leave it behind. As much as an office isseparate; it’s in the safe space called home. The routine of leaving andtravelling [to and from] home provided disconnect time and preparationfor 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 rightoutside my bedroom so I walk past it each night before bed and try not tonotice, #236, F, 26/8/2020.

A high percentage of respondents – 60 per cent – indicated that theywere unable to separate work from private life when working at home asall the markers indicating separate spheres had disappeared. Once homebecame the workplace, some respondents fell into the trap of notknowing when to stop working:

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

The fact remains of being in one location and not having your home as theplace 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; onlytime will tell. I notice that many of my friends enjoyed a glass or two moreoften than ever and that some of us end up taking on crafts, baking,walking and gardening like the world was going to end! …Combininghome, family and work together due to the lockdown I can only compare itto ‘having your in-laws for a weekend in a one room apartment while yourhusband 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 therequirement that I be available at all times, my ability to separate work fromhome has been severely impaired during COVID-19. As a result my mentalhealth has suffered. In addition, my motivation and engagement with lifeoutside of the home has significantly decreased and notwithstandingI have two other adults in the home with me, I feel more alone than whenI 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 thesimultaneous demands of family life, but also by the survivor guilt theyexperienced. After all, they had a job, which allowed them the relativeluxury of working at home, unlike countless others who had lost their jobas 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 beforeeating/bathing/dressing/exercising or any self-care. If I have any minutefree in the day, I feel like I have to go and prepare materials or answerstudent 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 throughthe night with no interruption. I am exhausted. I wake up on Sundaymorning and panic that I’m missing a work meeting or class. I’m alsoacting as social worker to my students. While household and childcarework is shared, I do all the emotional work with children and familymembers, take care of all the fights, crying children, lonely grandparents,etc. I also take care of organising access to food, including hours and hoursof research on where to obtain food safely, rationing decisions, purchasingdecisions, menu decisions, #145, F, 10/6/2020.

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

I dressed for work each morning and went on a short walk beforework. 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 tolook 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 oncethe pandemic comes to an end. As the NewLaw study revealed, flexibilityand autonomy are undoubtedly the most appealing aspects of working athome for workers, as no one is leaning over them and telling them whatto do. Respondents without dependants in the Coronavirus Surveysimilarly enjoyed the freedom to organise their time, including activitiessuch as exercising and caring for pets. For some respondents, a sense ofbalance was created by interleaving paid work with mundane domestictasks, such as ‘folding clothes and doing household tasks whilst listeninginto meetings’, #73, F, 28/5/2020. These workers also felt that theirproductivity had improved because of the reduced interruptions fromcolleagues and the time saved from not having to commute. However,respondents with young children found any sort of balance to beimpossible:

Working from home is feasible if we have childcare/pre-school. Duringlock-down when pre-schools were closed, working from home was verychallenging. The 60+ hours that my husband and I (combined) arerequired to do for work was completely unrealistic when care for our 4-yearold daughter was 24/7. This created additional pressure on ourrelationship as it meant that there was a constant negotiation over workpriorities and deadlines, and more often than not, it meant my work(as I am part-time with less immediate responsibilities) was de-prioritisedout of sheer need. I imagine the situation was similar for other motherswho are more likely to work part-time and take on the majority ofdomestic and childcare responsibilities. It meant I was effectively doingmore, with less support, as was my partner. I don’t think this wasadequately recognised in [workplace] policy and communications, #74,F, 28/5/2020.

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

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confirmed by the experience of COVID-19. Indeed, some respondentswere thoroughly enamoured of working at home:

I love it and want it to continue. It avoids a long commute to the office andthe 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 boybefore day-care. I eat better, as I can actually cook good food and don’thave to grab take-away lunch each day. My relationship is improved. I neverwant to go back to the office! #58, F, 25/5/2020.

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

I am a research scientist so when working from home I can’t do labwork 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 ismostly due to the lack of childcare at the moment due to COVID-19restrictions. I’m trying to work and care for small children and it’s verychallenging. I’m looking forward to when our childcare can start chargingfees 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 wasapparent from the fact that 24 per cent of respondents indicated thatthey would prefer to return to their conventional workplace full-time.Those who gave reasons for this choice mentioned the desire for a strictboundary between workplace and home, so that the latter could be keptas a sanctuary, and not be regarded as an extension of the workplace.The largest group of respondents – 40 per cent – opted for a hybridsystem in which they would divide their time equally between home andoffice. While working at home for a few days at a time is tolerable, evenpleasurable, permanent separation from one’s colleagues produces asense of anomie:

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

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time and energy but also the fact that the employee rather than theemployer is paying for costs of electricity, digital connections, heating andcooling. But I like the concentration this affords and the fact that I havemore control over hours of work in relation to meals and exercise. I amfortunate in having a large house and a garden where I can read when it’ssunny. I had a very productive writing time in my first three months ofisolation. But was relieved to have more social contacts after lockdowneased, #229, F, 12/8/2020.

It is apparent that employers are also turning their minds to employeesworking at home on a regular basis post-COVID-19 in the interests of theeconomisation thesis. There are considerable savings for businesses inreducing the size of their offices and having staff work at home. NewLawfirms are an example of a growingproportion of start-up businesses able tooperate virtually, a trend that canbe expected to continue.However,moretraditional enterprises, such as corporate law firms, some of which wereformerly suspicious of their lawyers working flexibly, are also nowprepared to embrace flexible work in the light of proven productivity.For example, Andrea Arosio, Managing Partner (Italy) of the inter-national law firm, Linklaters, announced that employees across the globalnetwork 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 experimenthas given us an opportunity to take stock and revisit how we approachagile and remote working’ (Slingo 2020). A similar stance has beenadopted by other global law firms, such as Herbert Smith Freehills(Doraisamy 2020). The greater acceptance of working at home as a resultof COVID-19 signifies a definite softening in attitude since the interviewswere conducted for ‘Balancing Law and Life’ when principals evincedconcern about employees working without direct supervision (Thornton2016a).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 willbe 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 insurancethemselves to cover the cost of sick leave, as well as assumingresponsibility for on-costs, such as superannuation and workers’compensation. Thus, we may well see more employers push to changethe status of workers from employee to independent contractor in orderto minimise overheads (which is already happening in the case of the gigeconomy), although contractualism necessarily weakens employer super-vision over workers. Nevertheless, if working at home is profitable,employers will support it.

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CONCLUSION

The assumption that employees will seamlessly assume the costsassociated with working at home has boosted the impetus for theeconomy to colonise the sphere of intimacy. The Coronavirus Surveysupports the view that the interests of the economy are consistentlyprivileged over caring work in the home. As Marilyn Waring (1988, 22)observed in her insightful study of more than 30 years ago, unpaid caringand domestic work ‘counts for nothing’ in either national or inter-national systems of accounting:

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

Working at home during lockdown highlights Waring’s thesis. While theproportion of women in the paid workforce might suggest that genderequality has been attained,12 working at home during COVID-19 revealshow substantive equality remains elusive as women struggle to undertakethe bulk of unpaid caring, emotional and domestic labour at the sametime 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 iscooking, cleaning and taking care of their loved ones. Nevertheless, asthis is deemed to be ‘unproductive’ labour incapable of producingsurplus value, it continues to be discounted. Capitalism is interested onlyin that which is deemed to be economically productive, regardless as towhere surplus value is produced, who produces it and under whatconditions. As noted, the insights of Marx are very relevant inilluminating the role of temporal flexibility as a source of enhancedproductivity in this new phase of capitalism (Wendling 2009). As Marxrecognised long before the Internet, capitalism had the ability to seizeany available space and colonise it. Indeed, capitalism would haveworkers 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 allhours 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 labourforce. The Internet, however, has allowed the home to be seized upon asa renewed site of productivity. Piecework, such as that undertaken bywomen for the garment industry in the past was not sufficient to

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transmute the home into a major site of capitalist production. However,the prospect of having approximately 46 per cent of all Australianworkers working at home during the pandemic (ABS 2020) was quitedifferent. Just as the economisation of the state, civil society and themarket has been ramped up as a result of the neoliberal turn (Davies2014, 20), lockdowns provided capitalism with the impetus to colonisethe 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 towork at home. Furthermore, many interviewees who were able to work athome were not supportive of it as they were anxious to ensure that avestige of private life should be free from encroachment by the economy.They believed that the homewas sacrosanct and should remain a place ofrefuge from surveillance by their employer. Nevertheless, while there isresistance to the sphere of intimacy falling victim to the voraciousness ofcapitalism in the same way as civil society, the market and the publicsphere, 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 positiveside, it enables primary carers, who continue to be predominantlywomen, to integrate paid work with caring responsibilities. Thedifference with past iterations of flexibility, however, was that those whochose to work flexibly could rely on day care and schools being open. Theseamless absorption of this work into the working day contributed to theinvisibility of unpaid caring work. On the debit side of the ledger,working at home has enabled capitalism to enter the home insidiously bythe 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 forhousework’, as mooted by some feminist activists in the 1970s (Toupin2018, 1). Rather than an individual wage, I suggest that domestic andcaring work be included in the computation of the Gross NationalProduct (GNP) as Waring (1988) exhorted. During lockdown, thesignificance of this unpaid work was underscored when undertaken inconjunction with paid work. As childcare centres, schools and otherfacilities were closed, workers, who were overwhelmingly women, wereleft to assume responsibility for full-time unpaid work at the same time asthey 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 inliberal theory as we move towards a single economic logic that includes

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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 oftemporal flexibility, one must ask whether it is fair to exclude caring anddomestic labour from the GNP when it takes place in a sequesteredworkplace that is otherwise economised, no less than a conventionalworkplace. Should this essential labour, which is paradigmaticallyfeminised, 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 thankDorota Gozdecka for organising the webinar, Fiona Jenkins and other participants fortheir 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 paysufficient 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 tothem.

4. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission became the Australian HumanRights Commission in 2008.

5. Australian Research Council DP 120104785, 2012–18. This project originally set out toresearch work/life balance in corporate law firms, but an extension was granted toundertake additional research on NewLaw.

6. The requirement to lock down varied according to Australian States and territoryjurisdictions.

7. Margaret Thornton & Anne Macduff, ‘Coronavirus and the Contradictions ofWorking 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 essentialworkers.

9. There is some evidence in the literature that men are disinclined to participate infamily 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 informationprovided 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 allfull-time employees and 67.9% of all part-time employees (Workplace GenderEquality Agency 2020).

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