Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work

Introduction

In the mid-1980s, Arlene Kaplan Daniels (1987) coined the term ‘invisible work’ to describe those types of women’s unpaid labour – particularly housework and volunteer work – which were culturally and economically devalued. Building on Daniels’ analysis, scholars extended the concept of invisible work to characterize various types of feminized reproductive labour, including paid domestic work (Cox, 1997; Rollins, 1996), breastfeeding (Stearns, 2009), emotional labour and care work (Glenn, 2000; Macdonald, 1998; Macdonald and Merrill, 2002; Rutman, 1996). Yet scholars have since applied this concept to a broad array of non-reproductive labour as well, including ‘dirty work’ (Duffy, 2007; Simpson et al., 2012), sex work (Kotiswaran, 2011), the labour of subminimum-wage disabled workers (Pendo, 2016), the work deaf people perform to communicate with the hearing (DeVault, 2014), the labour that medical patients undertake in managing their healthcare (Unruh and Pratt, 2008), the ‘organizing work’ that nurses perform to manage their patients’ care (Allen, 2014), subcontracted home-based work (Hassan and Azman, 2014), paid and unpaid digital work (Scholz, 2013), backstage work (Mears, 2011) and more. The wide resonance of this concept is due, at least in part, to its success in drawing attention to those types of labour that have been overlooked in popular and scholarly accounts of work and employment.

Yet while these studies highlight the complex social dynamics that shape many different types of labour, they have done less to develop the concept of ‘invisible work’ itself. ¹ Although no concrete definition has been put forth, a closer look at this expansive literature suggests that invisible work may involve being physically out of sight (Cherry, 2016; Daniels, 1987; Macdonald, 1998; Nardi and Engeström, 1999; Otis and Zhao, 2016; Poster et al., 2016), ignored or overlooked (Anteby and Chan, 2013; Kristal, 2002; Otis and Zhao, 2016), socially marginalized (Nardi and Engeström, 1999; Otis and Zhao, 2016; Star and Strauss, 1999), economically and/or culturally devalued (Daniels, 1987; Nardi and Engeström, 1999), legally unprotected and unregulated (Pendo, 2016) or some combination thereof. Yet such metrics raise more questions than they answer about the nature of ‘invisible work’. For instance, out of whose sight renders work invisible, and by whom is it ignored? Is it workers’ bodies that are invisible or their labour? What are the similarities and differences between types of ‘invisible work’, and how does invisible work differ from other categories of disadvantaged labour that are not deemed ‘invisible’?

Although it might be argued that the utility of ‘invisibility’ as a concept is its broad – and therefore necessarily imprecise – descriptive capacity, the present article argues that it can be more usefully deployed as a clearly defined analytic category. Thus, it seeks to operationalize what ‘invisibility’ in the world of work means. Through analysis of the far-reaching literature on invisible work, as well as other types of labour not explicitly described as such, this article defines ‘invisible work’ as labour that is economically devalued through three intersecting sociological mechanisms – here identified as cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility – which operate in different ways and to different degrees. For instance, sociocultural mechanisms of invisibility are in effect when labour is devalued by virtue of hegemonic cultural ideologies (of gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, age and more), while sociolegal mechanisms are in operation when labour is devalued because it is excluded from legal definitions of ‘employment’ and sociospatial mechanisms are in effect when labour is devalued because it is physically segregated from a culturally defined worksite. Thus, depending on the particular mechanism at work, ‘invisible labour’ may take place in private households as well as formal workplaces, it may comprise only one aspect of a job or its totality, and it may be criminalized or culturally expected. Despite this diversity, all of these mechanisms obscure the fact that work is being performed and thereby contribute to its economic devaluation.

Although these mechanisms are analysed separately in the sections that follow, in fact they are intersectional and mutually constitutive. Hegemonic ideologies of gender, race, class, age and ability – which are here categorized as sociocultural mechanisms of invisibility – influence where work is performed (sociospatial mechanisms) and how it is legally defined (sociolegal mechanisms). In turn, sociospatial and sociolegal mechanisms reify hegemonic cultural ideologies which recognize only some types of labour as economically valuable. Not only are these mechanisms fundamentally interrelated, they are also variable over time and across space, for they are produced by the cultural contexts from which they emerge. Accordingly, although many of the examples presented here are drawn from the contemporary American context, this analytic framework is meant to be applied across cultures and historical eras.

Yet in constructing ‘invisible work’ as a more robust analytical concept, this article does not intend to diminish its intuitive descriptive capacity, nor ossify its meaning. To the contrary, the framework of invisible work presented here seeks to retain its descriptive power while also lending it analytical purchase. Indeed, by delineating the parameters of invisibility, it exposes such parameters to empirical application, analysis and debate, thus – it is hoped – rendering them pliable rather than petrified.

A revised concept of invisible work yields multiple analytical gains. In particular, defining the mechanisms by which labour is made ‘invisible’ not only clarifies each in turn, it also brings them in communication with other mechanisms of labour devaluation, such as deskilling (Braverman, 1998[1974]), status composition (Tomaskovic-Devey, 1993), the naturalization of skill (Collins, 2003) and institutional context (Carré and Tilly, 2012). Furthermore, unlike most studies of invisible work, which examine only a single case of devalued labour, the framework presented here is inherently comparative. By identifying the analytical connections and distinctions between many types of labour, this framework uncovers key lines of inquiry for future research, while also allowing for comparison between invisible work and other regimes of labour disadvantage. For example, scholars might productively explore the relationships between invisible work, ‘dirty work’ (Duffy, 2007; Hughes, 1958; Simpson et al., 2012) and ‘body work’ (Twigg et al., 2011; Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006), as well as between invisible and insecure work, especially in this era of ‘neoliberalization’ (Peck, 2010) in which even the most precarious work is ‘sacralized’ and the most marginalized workers are ‘responsibilized’ (Purser, in press). Through these and other applications of this revised concept of invisible work, it is hoped that scholars will further untangle the systems that produce and reproduce disadvantage for workers.

The sections that follow analyse sociocultural, sociolegal and sociospatial mechanisms of invisibility in turn, outlining examples of each to clarify how they operate but, out of necessity, not comprehensively cataloguing the many categories of labour they might subsume. Figure 1 summarizes these mechanisms and presents this article’s proposed framework of invisible work. The discussion that follows highlights the analytical gains this framework yields, while also pointing to fertile areas for future research.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Mechanisms of invisibility.

Sociocultural mechanisms of invisible work

Sociocultural mechanisms render labour invisible when such labour is obscured – and therefore economically devalued – through cultural ideologies of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, ability and more. As shown in Figure 1, such mechanisms operate on at least two levels: (1) on workers’ bodies through the requirement of hidden bodily labour; and (2) on workers’ skills by naturalizing and devaluing them. In the first case, hegemonic belief systems require many workers to perform a range of bodily labour, including the overlapping categories of aesthetic labour, emotional labour and identity work. Through aesthetic labour, for example, workers cultivate a particular appearance, style and/or accent in order to conform to employers’ corporate ‘image’ (Warhurst and Nickson, 2007; Williams and Connell, 2010) – images that are dictated by hegemonic ideologies of class, race, gender, sexuality and/or ability. Likewise, through emotional labour workers manage their emotions in order to comply with job requirements – such as serving with a smile even when customers are rude (Hochschild, 1983; Wharton, 2009) – which are similarly gendered, classed and racialized (Wingfield, 2010). Similarly, through identity work (Snow and Anderson, 1987), workers negotiate the tensions between their personal and occupational identities, including strategically performing race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and ability in order to comply with organizational norms or expectations (Khanna and Johnson, 2010; Kreiner et al., 2006; Poster, 2007).

Such types of labour may be implicitly or explicitly required by employers yet, either way, they are invisible because the goal of such labour is to make their products appear natural, rather than manufactured through individual effort. For instance, Poster (2007: 271) examines the identity work – what she calls ‘national identity management’ – of Indian call centre agents who are required to pretend to be American when serving US callers. As Poster observes, they often ‘live the part’ (p. 285), diligently learning American culture and slang on and off the clock in order to seem authentically American and thereby avoid customer questions about their nationality. The purpose of this labour, then, is to hide not only their national identity but also the extensive labour required to do so.

In another example, Gruys (2012) examines the emotional labour that retail workers in a plus-sized clothing store perform in response to customers’ ‘fat talk’ (i.e. fat-shaming requests for body-image reassurance). In answer to the ubiquitous question, ‘Does this outfit make me look fat?’, workers must seemingly genuinely reassure customers that they are not fat, despite the fact that they are shopping in a store designated for those who are culturally defined as ‘fat’. Moreover, for those salespeople who are not plus-sized, Gruys finds their body-image reassurances are frequently met with mistrust, hostility and silencing, which adds another layer of invisible emotional labour to their work.

The second category of sociocultural mechanisms of invisible work devalues workers’ occupational skills rather than their bodily labour. Labour in this category is devalued through hegemonic cultural ideologies – of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability and more – manifested in state and organizational policies and practices, as well as in cultural discourses of skill and work, which devalue some workers’ skills. A prime example of this is the naturalization of skill phenomenon, in which (some) workers’ skills and ability are constructed not as a product of their hard work, talent and expertise but as their natural way of being. This long-deployed strategy to reduce employers’ labour costs has been applied to a variety of feminized skills in particular, and has therefore contributed to the economic devaluation of some categories of traditionally defined ‘women’s work’ (Collins, 2003; Kessler-Harris, 1982). For example, garment workers were historically said to have ‘nimble’ fingers rather than sewing expertise (Chapkis and Enloe, 1983; Collins, 2003; Green, 1997; Rosen, 2002) and care workers are characterized as innately caring and compassionate rather than skilled and capable (Folbre, 2001; Palmer and Eveline, 2012; Tronto, 1993). These types of work are culturally and organizationally constructed as unskilled – and thereby economically devalued – because such workers are purportedly doing what comes ‘naturally’.

Household domestic labour is similarly naturalized and made invisible through sociocultural mechanisms. A complex and shifting blend of cultural ideologies of gender, race and class has been deployed to devalue this labour performed by various groups of women in the USA, including the African American women who historically worked as slave and waged domestics for economically privileged white families (Rollins, 1985; Sharpless, 2010), the immigrant and other women of lower socioeconomic status who perform much of this paid labour today (Glenn, 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001) and the upper middle-class women who opt out of wage work to be ‘just a housewife’ – a phrase that reflects the low value of domestic labour even in the context of these women’s relative privilege (Folbre, 1991; Matthews, 1989; Palmer, 1990).

Thus, through sociocultural mechanisms of invisibility, workers’ labour is obscured through the deployment of hegemonic cultural ideologies, which naturalize some workers’ skills and/or require hidden bodily labour. The product of such labour is expected and normalized – whether it is sewing proficiency or acting American – while the skills and labour involved are minimized or disregarded.

Sociolegal mechanisms of invisible work

Work rendered invisible through sociolegal mechanisms is devalued because it is excluded from legal definitions of ‘employment’ and is therefore not monitored and regulated by the state as such. Three broad types of labour can be characterized as made invisible through sociolegal mechanisms: work that is legally deemed to be noneconomic, illegal or otherwise unregulated (see Figure 1). ² Of course, the types of labour that are made invisible through these mechanisms depend on the particular sociolegal environment. For instance, while prostitution is illegal in most of the USA and would therefore be classified as sociolegally invisible work in this typology, it is legal in many other countries and would thus not be classified as such – unless, of course, it was unregulated labour.

The first subcategory of sociolegally invisible work is composed of the wide variety of labour that is deemed to be ‘noneconomic’ – that is, workers who are legally characterized as not working for wages but for some other reason. In the USA, this category includes community volunteers who are legally characterized as working for their ‘own advantage’ (US Department of Labor (DOL), 2014), graduate students and student athletes who are legally defined as ‘primarily students’ rather than ‘workers’ (National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 2004; but see NLRB, 2014), disabled workers, unpaid interns and workfare workers who are legally deemed to be receiving job training and work experience rather than performing labour at their worksites (Goldberg, 2007; Krinsky, 2007; NDRN, 2011; US DOL, 2010) and prisoners who are legally characterized as gaining ‘rehabilitation and job training’ rather than working for their prisons and the companies that subcontract their labour (Harker v. State Use Industries, 1993: 133; also see Zatz, 2008).

Because these employment relationships are legally construed as ‘noneconomic’, such workers are not defined as covered ‘employees’ by most employment laws – including the US federal minimum wage – and can therefore be unpaid or minimally paid, which directly results in the economic devaluation of their labour. Furthermore, these types of labour are largely not included in official employment data. In its definition of the labour force, for example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics does not include those who are attending school (student athletes, graduate students and sometimes interns), those who are confined to institutions (prisoners), those who are officially unemployed (workfare workers) and those who are not working for pay (unpaid household workers, unpaid interns, workfare workers and volunteers) (Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 2011). Thus, these categories of labour are not recognized as ‘work’ in government data and its many resultant analyses of US employment.

The two other categories of sociolegally invisible work are illicit and informal labour. Illicit work involves any type of illegal economic activity, such as illegal sex work, drug dealing and other ‘black market’ transactions, while informal labour includes any unregulated ‘off the books’ work, such as waste picking, street vending, day labour and often home-based work (Duck, 2016; Grant, 2014; Leonard, 1998; Purser, in press). Unlike ‘noneconomic’ work, illicit and informal work are recognized as economic in nature; yet, because they are not regulated by the state as economic activity – but instead as criminal or unauthorized activity – the consequences are similar: they are largely unprotected by employment laws and uncounted in official employment data. ³ As a consequence, there is little systematic knowledge of these types of labour, including their working conditions and economic impact (but see ILO, 2012; Nightingale and Wandner, 2011). Indeed, aside from a limited understanding gleaned from individual case studies, their contours as work remain largely unknown.

For many of these types of labour, sociolegal mechanisms of invisibility intersect with – and are often compounded by – other mechanisms of invisibility. For instance, some types of sociolegally invisible work are also devalued by sociocultural mechanisms. Such is the case for volunteer work, care work and sex work, in which hegemonic gender ideologies obscure the fact that labour is being performed and lend legitimacy to their exclusion from legal definitions of ‘employment’. Likewise, some categories of sociolegally invisible work are sociospatially invisible as well, as they are also devalued because they are segregated from socially constructed worksites, whether in private homes (e.g. paid and unpaid domestic labour, informal home-based work and sex work) or formal institutions (e.g. disabled labour in sheltered workshops and incarcerated labour in prisons). In fact, in many such cases, the labour’s sociospatial invisibility has served as justification for their legal exclusion.

Yet not all legally excluded labour is devalued as such. In the USA, for example, corporate executives, supervisors and independent contractors are not covered by federal minimum wage laws because they are legally construed as not needing this protection. Thus, aside from employer exploitation of such exceptions (e.g. the misclassification of employees as independent contractors), these categories of labour are not devalued by virtue of their exclusion from employment law. To the contrary: their legal exclusion reflects their higher economic valuation. By contrast, the types of labour analysed here – from prison work to sex work – are economically devalued because of their exclusion from legal definitions of employment.

Sociospatial mechanisms of invisible work

Sociospatial mechanisms are in effect when work is economically devalued because it is physically segregated from the socially constructed ‘workplace’. Yet, like legally excluded work, not all labour performed off-site is devalued as a result. Only some types of spatially segregated labour are made invisible through such mechanisms, which are analysed here in two spatial categories: (1) labour that is devalued because it is performed in the domestic sphere; and (2) labour that is devalued because it is performed in other non-traditional worksites (see Figure 1).

In the first case, scholars have demonstrated that domestic labour – which includes paid and unpaid housework and, often, care work – is devalued, in part, because it is performed in the home, as the home itself is constructed as a site in which ‘real’ work does not take place (Boydston, 1994; Daniels, 1987; Glenn, 2000; Macdonald, 1998; Mirchandani, 1998). Thus, household labour is not only devalued through hegemonic gender ideologies, which are here categorized as sociocultural mechanisms. It is also devalued through spatial logics – though, to be sure, such logics are deeply entangled with gender belief systems.

Although the invisible work literature has historically focused on women’s domestic labour, there are other kinds of home-based work that may also be analysed as sociospatially invisible, including that of the employees and contract workers who labour from home in the Global North (e.g. Budig, 2006; Craig et al., 2012; Mirchandani, 1998; Osnowitz, 2005) and that of the predominantly women workers who perform home-based piecework in the Global South (e.g. Hassan and Azman, 2014; Hiralal, 2010; Jhabvala and Tate, 1996; Mies, 1982; Prügl, 1999). In the latter case, Jhabvala and Tate (1996: 3) observe that many such workers do not consider themselves ‘workers’ because they work from home, instead identifying themselves as ‘“not employed”, or as “housewives’’, even when they are spending 14–16 hours a day earning income to support their families’ (also see Mies, 1982).

Yet sociospatially invisible work does not have to take place in the home. It may also take place in the public sphere but is nonetheless devalued through spatial dynamics because it occurs in non-traditional worksites. In the USA, this category includes labour in segregated work institutions such as ‘sheltered workshops’ and prisons. Sheltered workshops, for example, are (ostensibly) designed to provide job training and work experience to people who have disabilities that hinder their work capacity. However, such institutions are criticized for paying disabled workers below the US federal minimum wage, while also segregating them from able-bodied workers in contravention of the Americans with Disabilities Act’s emphasis on inclusion and integration (Gill, 2005; NDRN, 2011; Pendo, 2016). American prisons can also be construed as segregated work institutions, as they employ approximately one million prisoners to perform a variety of jobs – such as cooking in prison kitchens, manufacturing office equipment for government agencies, building body armour for the military and working as call centre agents for private companies – earning up to US$0.32 per hour in state prisons and US$1.15 per hour in federal facilities (Thompson, 2012; Zatz, 2008). The institutional context of prisoners’ labour serves as legal justification for their exclusion from the US minimum wage and other employment protections (Zatz, 2008); thus, for incarcerated workers, socio-spatial and sociolegal mechanisms of invisibility are deeply entwined.

Whereas disabled and incarcerated labour are sociospatially invisible because they take place in segregated work institutions, other types of labour are rendered invisible because they have no particular worksite at all. A prime example of this is digital labour, which consists of a range of Internet activity, including the paid and unpaid labour used by online crowdsourcing ventures (e.g. Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk and Wikipedia), as well as unpaid online activities that are commercially appropriated (e.g. gaming, product reviewing, blogging and the entering of personal data) (Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2014; Cherry, 2011; Hesmondhalgh, 2010; Scholz, 2013). As these examples suggest, digital labour is spatially dispersed; it may be performed anywhere, including in private homes, public cafés and between tasks at traditional 9-to-5 jobs, prompting Poster et al. (2016) to label it ‘disembodied’ labour. Because of this spatial dispersion, digital workers are isolated from each other as well as from the businesses for which they work – isolation that is further intensified by their anonymity, as many such workers do not use their personal identities online. Thus, digital labour is not only divorced from a particular worksite, it is also divorced from workers’ bodies and identities.

For many digital workers, their sociospatial invisibility is compounded by their sociolegal invisibility. This is the case for the so-called ‘Turkers’ who work for Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. They bid online to complete small, discrete jobs posted by ‘requesters’ and, if chosen, perform the labour, earning an average of US$2 per hour – less than the federal minimum wage but nonetheless legal because they are not defined as ‘employees’ by minimum wage law (Aytes, 2013; Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2014; Cherry, 2011). Yet requesters can refuse to pay them without reason while keeping the products of their labour and, importantly, while negatively affecting their approval rating which, in this world of anonymous digital labour, is more detrimental for workers than losing any single job’s minimal wages. Digital workers have little ability to address such problems – either individually or collectively – because of their spatial dispersion (i.e. invisibility from sociospatial mechanisms) and exclusion from legal definitions of ‘employee’ (i.e. invisibility from sociolegal mechanisms).

The compounding effects of sociospatial and sociolegal invisibility also characterize what might be called ‘unwitting’ or ‘casual’ digital labour (i.e. unpaid Internet activities such as blogging and the provision of personal data from which corporations generate sales and profit) (Andrejevic, 2013; Dean, 2013; Hesmondhalgh, 2010; Scholz, 2013). As Scholz (2013: 2) observes, the US$100 billion estimated value of Facebook is predicated on its massive collection of user data, yet because Facebook users’ provision of such data ‘doesn’t feel, look, or smell like labor’, as it falls beyond legal definitions of employment and outside of culturally defined worksites.

In all of these cases, labour is devalued because it takes place outside of the ‘workplace’, whether it is ‘behind closed doors’ in non-traditional worksites (e.g. private homes, prisons or sheltered workshops) or dispersed across many (e.g. digital labour). Moreover, the effects of such spatial dynamics are often compounded by other mechanisms of invisibility, resulting in the intensification of labour devaluation.

Discussion and conclusion

As shown in Figure 1, the analytical framework presented here recognizes a wide range of labour as ‘invisible’: from emotional labour to volunteer work, from care work to workfare, from graduate student work to drug dealing, and from identity work to housework. Yet even with this broad scope, it gives much-needed clarity to the contours of invisible work. Rather than a vague and variable synonym for out-of-sight, unrecognized, marginalized and/or degraded labour, this framework defines invisible work as labour that is economically devalued through cultural, legal and/or spatial dynamics.

This analysis thus highlights new patterns of disadvantage across seemingly disparate categories of work. For example, with this framework it is possible to identify the analytical connections between categories of labour as seemingly divergent as digital and domestic work (which are both rendered invisible through spatial dynamics) or aesthetic labour and care work (which are both devalued through hegemonic gender ideologies). Yet, at the same time, this framework highlights the points of distinction between such categories. For instance, even as home-based work and prison labour are both devalued by sociospatial mechanisms, this framework makes clear how such dynamics differ: labour in the home is devalued by its seclusion in the domestic sphere, which is produced and compounded by gender belief systems, while prison labour is devalued by its seclusion in a segregated work institution, which forms the legal basis of – and is intensified by – its sociolegal invisibility.

As these examples suggest, this framework highlights those types of labour that are ‘multiply invisible’ in the tradition of intersectionality theorists who analyse the intersecting axes of inequality and disadvantage (Crenshaw, 1989; McCall, 2005). As Figure 1 reveals, for example, care work may be rendered invisible through multiple mechanisms at once, for it is devalued through sociocultural mechanisms (at the bodily level through the requirement of emotional labour and at the occupational level through the naturalization of caregiving skills), sociolegal mechanisms (inasmuch as it is legally constructed as noneconomic and/or informal work) and sociospatial mechanisms (inasmuch as it is performed in private homes). Thus, this framework points to new lines of inquiry about how and where such mechanisms intersect to intensify disadvantage in the workplace.

This framework thus opens up many avenues for future research. In particular, it raises new questions about how the causes and consequences of invisibility compare for those types of work that are made invisible by the same set of mechanisms. For instance, what are the similarities and differences between internships, student athlete labour, workfare and disabled labour which, in the USA, are legally constructed as noneconomic work in the name of education and experience? Likewise, what are the points of intersection and deviation between those types of bodily labour – aesthetic, emotional and identity work – which are rendered invisible through sociocultural dynamics? Conversely, this framework points to analytic linkages between categories of work that are rendered invisible through different mechanisms – such as identity work, volunteer work and informal labour – allowing scholars to ask questions such as: What are the points of connection, if any, between these types of labour even as their mechanisms of invisibility differ?; and How do the consequences of invisibility differ across mechanisms? Furthermore, this framework raises questions about how invisible work and its mechanisms vary across cultural contexts and over time. How, for instance, do different sociolegal contexts affect the economic valuation of sex work or prison labour? How do mechanisms of invisibility change over time, and how does such change affect relative proportions of invisible work? In addition, this framework points to the analytical limits of invisibility and its mechanisms. As noted above, for example, not all legally excluded labour is sociolegally invisible and not all off-site labour is sociospatially invisible. How and where are such boundaries drawn? What factors mitigate these mechanisms of devaluation for some categories of workers but not others? Finally, this analysis raises questions about the possibilities of invisibility as well as its limits. Building on the few case studies which suggest that workers may be able to leverage invisibility to gain a modicum of advantage in the workplace – for example, capitalizing on being ignored or out of sight to avoid surveillance and increased workloads (Anteby and Chan, 2013; Star and Strauss, 1999) – this framework will help researchers identify those mechanisms of invisibility that might yield opportunities as well as disadvantages at work. Thus, in some cases, invisibility may be conceptualized as a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott, 1987), opening up opportunities for power and resistance even as it imposes many more constraints.

Ultimately, this newly operationalized concept of invisible work reveals invisibility to be a structure of disadvantage that encompasses a broad range of work, including many types of labour that are not considered ‘jobs’ at all. In so doing, it not only allows for a more comprehensive analysis of work, it also denaturalizes the construct of work by making visible the mechanisms through which only some categories of labour are deemed economically valuable. At the same time, it brings disparate types of labour in communication with each other. Thus, in this framework, digital, domestic and disabled labour are not simply idiosyncratic examples of disadvantaged work, they are all devalued through spatial, cultural and legal dynamics. Although the particular causes and consequences of their invisibility vary, the conceptual framework presented here highlights the shared mechanisms of their disadvantage and provides the foundation for further research to untangle the complex systems that produce and sustain it.