The Regulatory Politics of Home-Based Moneymaking After the American Family Wage

Abstract

For much of the 20th century, the mixing of domestic and market life, by turning homes into sites of production, exchange, or speculation, was seen as a threat to both family life and to economic security. These practices were stigmatized as racialized informality, regulated by armies of labor, land-use, and code enforcement inspectors, and pathologized for promoting an aberrant domesticity and child labor. However, since the 1970s, diverse forms of what I term “home-based moneymaking” have not only proliferated, but perceptions of them have shifted too. Debates over the ambiguities of home-based work have only become heightened by the rise of the platform economy and the COVID-19 pandemic. This dissertation traces the rise, regulatory conflict, and contested incorporation of divergent strategies of “home-based moneymaking,” which sought to unleash new economic resources for households experiencing rising economic insecurity starting in the crisis-ridden 1970s. Drawing on archival sources and comparative-historical methodology, this dissertation presents four case-studies that trace distinct elements of the politics of home-based moneymaking, demonstrating how efforts to commercialize home life came to be welcomed as solutions to social problems. The first two cases deal with the fate of labor laws that insulated the family wage from competition against child and home-based workers. The latter two cases deal with land-use and mortgage laws that sought to protect the single-family home as a safe asset, constraining practices of commercial and speculative homeownership. Case one examines the fate of child labor laws amid the rise of a crisis of “youth unemployment” starting in the 1960s and culminating in efforts to weaken child labor laws in the 1980s. Case two traces the fate of a New Deal Era ban on industrial homework when 1980s regulators sought to eliminate the ban, as well as the “strange coalitions” that formed around a rising pro-homework movement. Case three examines contestation and incorporation of practices of commercial homeownership, primarily the rental of garages to tenants within single family homes, the precursors to contemporary “granny flats” and “accessory dwelling units.” Finally, case four turns to efforts to unleash new risky mortgage instruments that turned previously “locked-in” home equity into a liquid resource for “house rich, cash poor” homeowners. Together, these four case studies delineate the transformation of American homes into sites of production, exchange, and speculation. Consequently, they also track the replacement of a 20th century model of economic citizenship, resting on a carefully regulated family wage and unproductive single-family home, to one where the management of economic insecurity, reproductive labor, and a variety of social crisis could be privatized through the commercialization of home life. This dissertation moves toward an expansion of socio-economic models of the neoliberal revolution from a transformation of the relationships between state and market, to a tripartite transformation between states, markets, and households.