Wageless work: roundtable disussion

Wageless work—situations in which people continue to work in a variety of roles, even when funding is withdrawn, or salaries are unpaid—is more common than we might imagine, and arises in a wide variety of domains:

• work dedicated to securing funding [NGO’s, cultural institutions, academia]
• unpaid overtime for work routinely expected as part of one’s job [ primary & secondary teaching, other service and care work]
• essential work that has been underfunded or defunded -particularly in under-resourced settings in the majority world, e.g.  humanitarian response, basic service delivery, public health
• furlough and government shutdowns

For example, in South Sudan, civil servants—police, teachers, health professionals, university staff, all manner of ministry functionaries, and many soldiers—have not been paid for periods of a year or more at a time, yet many continue to turn up every day to undertake their work duties. How do people conceive of and relate to work when they can no longer count on getting paid? While the event is inspired by the dramatic manifestation of this tendency in South Sudan, the question of work without wages is even more urgent, in the unfolding context of the dramatic retraction of international funding streams towards a variety of public health, development and humanitarian projects and programs, as wealthy countries and regional blocs including the US, the UK and the EU curtail their funding.