Precarious mothers: struggling to reconcile precarious work and care

This paper is about mothers in precarious employment, as the intersection of parental responsibilities and paid work represents a privileged site from which to explore the process of precarisation within a wider social context. Social reproduction is then interrogated in order to conceptually frame mothers’ everyday struggles for stability. The dyad use-value and exchange-value is mobilised to make sense of gendered activities in the domestic sphere as well as in paid work, so that the outcome of this research marks a conceptual shift from the metaphor work-family balance to the tension between useful activities and the monetary valorisations that these mothers need to obtain. The research suggests then that these parents produce social wealth at a number of different levels, but their activities need to meet their exchange-value because monetary valorisation represents the way to get their livelihood. This research aims to conceptualise the antagonism of ‘precarious mothers’ as their ‘normal life’ is distorted by daily struggles to achieve these means.
Keywords: precarious work, mothering, struggle, use-value, exchange-value, social reproduction, critical theory