These kinds of changes are often thought through the conceptual lens of ‘neoliberalism’. It’s worth describing what we might mean when we talk about neoliberalism, as the term – and imprecise uses of it – are all too quickly maligned. By neoliberalism, I mean a conscious, political project, undertaken to break the power of organised labour and develop new methods to extract profit from more and more of human social life, including from the legacy institutions of the welfare state. David Harvey describes it as the ‘gutting’ or ‘hollowing out’ of social programmes or social institutions.6 In its promise of breaking through the boredom of mid-twentieth century Fordism, it turns freedom in on itself. In promising freedom, it produces more coercion. As the philosopher, Byung-Chul Han puts it:

Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty – emotion, play and communication – comes to be exploited. It is inefficient to exploit people against their will. Allo-exploitation [exploitation carried out by other people] yields scant returns. Only when freedom is exploited are returns maximised.

Unlike in the US where private companies step in to fill the gap left by a welfare state never having really been built, in the UK, private companies deliver previously public services. The services remain free at the point of use (with the exception of dentistry), but many are run by private companies. The performance of the companies running these services is monitored by the body that would have originally provided the service themselves – national and local government, local NHS structures and so on. The process of outsourcing, of paying private companies to carry out the work of public services, accelerated in the 1980s with the introduction of ‘compulsory competitive tendering’. This legislation placed a requirement on public sector organisations to tender all contracts for service delivery, meaning that anyone could bid for them. The contract was awarded to the company that would provide the service the most cheaply. This duty was relaxed slightly in 1997 but by then outsourcing was established as the new normal. Now, £284 billion per year is spent buying goods and services from external suppliers. This is about a third of all of public expenditure21 and 13% of GDP.22

A potentially more helpful set of debates can be found around the question of what those who employ cleaners – particularly those who consider themselves feminists – ought to pay them. Academic philosopher, Arianne Shahvisi, argues that if ‘people outsource cleaning chiefly to save themselves time, they should presumably pay the cleaner for the cost of that time’.23 As many people earn more than the average cleaner’s wage, about £12 per hour, this would mean a significant increase in the hourly wage for cleaners.24 As well as valuing their employee’s time as equal to their own, Shahvisi argues for working hours across all sectors that leave all people with enough time for reproductive labour, with men being expected to do their fair share. These two goals are potentially helpful ones, but they do not extend beyond the horizon of the individual household. It seems important that we demand a reduction in the amount of reproductive work by increasing communal provisions. We might imagine canteens, as Rebecca May Johnson does in an essay on the nationalised ‘British Restaurants’ set up during the Second World War but allowed to decline in the peacetime years that followed.25 These would be open to all, with decent working and eating conditions. We could imagine universal childcare, and support for collective ways of living that reduce the duplication of reproductive effort that the existing household model creates. When labour is made available cheaply because of the stickiness of low pay for women and the exploitation of migrant workers, there is a disincentive for the development of technological innovation: if it’s cheaper to exploit someone than to come up with technology that reduces the time spent on that task or even obliterate it entirely. In fact, in interwar Britain, the development of domestic appliances and even the shift to the use of electricity and gas in heating and cooking were delayed by the easy ability to hire servants.26 Nowadays, household technologies are either expensive gimmickry or minor updates to existing machines, like digital rather than manual dials for washing machines. In fact, many new ‘innovations’ in domestic technology depend on the existence of a cheap pool of easily exploitable labour – like the American start-up making smart fridges that not only alert their owners when they’ve run out of milk, but raise an order for milk on Instacart, powered by poorly paid platform gig work.27