Maud Simonet, Free Labor: The New Exploitation? – 2/14/19 @ 4:30pm

The program is thrilled to host Maud Simonet, researcher with the National Scientific Research Center at the Institutions and Historical Dynamics of Economy and Society research center at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, for the first department colloquium for Spring 2019. Refreshments will be served.

Abstract: What do a volunteer in extra-curricular activities at a school, a welfare recipient cleaning up New York’s parks, or a writer of an online blog have in common? They do thousands of hours of free work to run nonprofits, utilities and businesses.

What do these different “civic” and “digital” forms of free work teach us? Who benefits and who is assigned?

Starting from the great lessons of the feminist analysis of domestic work, and based on several field surveys carried out in France and the United States, Maud Simonet proposes a critical approach to work, based on various forms of unpaid labor. It analyzes these forms of exploitation that develop in the name of love, passion or citizenship, and which participate in the neoliberalisation of work in the public and private worlds.