Revisiting the Second Shift – Rethinking Value in the Outsourcing of Social Reproduction

This article examines the link between outsourcing social reproduction and the valuation of time by approaching the employers of domestic workers as workers who themselves labour to produce surplus value. It contributes to current research on outsourcing social reproduction, which emphasizes the (re)privatization of public services, by situating outsourcing within the sphere of production. The analysis is based on in-depth qualitative research on employers of migrant care and domestic workers in Finland (N = 31). Developing an integrated link between migrant workers’ labour-power and employers’ labour-power, we demonstrate that the employers work a second shift of paid employment in the evening, enabled by the outsourcing of reproductive labour. We argue that outsourcing social reproduction often takes the form of purchasing inexpensive time, enabled by hiring migrant domestic workers, which those who outsource convert into productive labour-time, thereby subsidizing their own labour to increment economic value for capital. We analyse the ways in which outsourcing reproduction is organized to enhance the amount of productive social labour-time in a context where capital places increasing demands on labour.