Disabled workers’ labor will be devalued

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 non- economic, 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 deal- ing 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 activ- ity – 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 knowl- edge 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.