Homework clarifies the past and present of home-based labor using case studies which offer a rich portrait of homework. The authors recognize that we must examine the influence of gender, race, and class to fully comprehend the history of homework -- taken from back cover.

From Justice Department officials seizing people's homes based on mere rumors to the IRS and its master plan to prohibit the nation's self-employed from working for themselves to the perpetrators of the Waco siege, government officials are tearing the Bill of Rights to pieces. Today's citizen is now more likely than ever to violate some unknown law or regulation and be placed at the mercy of an administrator or politician hungering for publicity. Unfortunately, the only way many government agencies can measure their "public service" is by the number of citizens they harass, hinder, restrain, or jail. James Bovard's Lost Rights provides a highly entertaining analysis of the bloated excess of government and the plight of contemporary Americans beaten into submission by a horrible parody of the Founding Fathers' dream.

This book combines a case study of industrial homework in the electronics industry with a world-systems approach to understanding the role of home-based work in economic development. It spans the period from the nineteenth-century origins of industrial homework to the important role played by home-based work in current strategies of economic restructuring in manufacturing and service industries. The author draws a clear distinction between industrial homework and earlier forms of domestic labor, such as the putting-out system. She also clarifies the important differences between various forms of contemporary home-based work: waged homework in industrial and service occupations, professional telecommuting, home-based self-employment. Moving from the lives of homeworkers themselves to macro-level analyses, Dangler's case study provides a vantage point from which to examine theories of world economic development, theories of labor market segmentation, and recent analyses of the importance of informal sector activities in the modern economy.

The 1970s and 1980s saw a resurgeance of industrial homework in rural areas. This text examines the effects of homeworking on workers (mainly women) and their families, and explores the role of the state in subsidising the development of homeworking jobs that depend on gender.