Work and economic life

What is work? We often think of work as paid employment, but much work is unpaid: cooking for the family, caring for a grandparent, helping in the family's field. Work can be defined as carrying out tasks that need mental and physical effort, with the aim of producing goods and services that meet human needs.

• Much work falls in the informal economy: transactions outside regular employment, sometimes cash for services, sometimes a direct exchange of goods or services. A neighbour who mends a bicycle for cash, or two families swapping help at harvest, are part of it. Such work is often missing from official statistics.

Work in traditional and modern societies:

• In traditional societies most people worked on the land or in crafts, learned through a long apprenticeship with a master. A craftsperson usually made the whole product, from start to finish.
• Modern work is highly specialised: there is a complex division of labour, and most people work on only one small part of a product. Most people in modern societies do not produce their own food.
• Location of work changed: before industry, most work was done at home or close by; industrialisation separated work from home, moving production to factories, offices and shops.
• Economic interdependence grew enormously: we all depend on thousands of other workers, often in other countries, for the food, clothes, houses and goods we use.

The transformation of work. Industrial processes were broken into simple operations that could be precisely timed, organised and monitored. Mass production needed mass markets. A key innovation was the moving assembly line, on which each worker repeats one task as products move past. Modern factories needed expensive equipment and continuous monitoring of workers. (The silent film Modern Times famously shows a worker who cannot stop repeating his assembly-line movement.)

• In recent decades there has been a shift to flexible production and the decentralisation of work: work is split across many small units, often in different places or countries, linked by global supply chains.
• This makes it easy for companies to move production elsewhere, which weakens workers' ability to bargain for better wages and conditions.

India. Unlike most Western industrial countries, a large share of Indian people still work in agriculture and other rural occupations, while the service sector (banking, IT, trade, transport, health) is growing fast.

Example (new): a smartphone's parts may be designed in one country, made in several others and assembled in a third, before being sold in a small-town shop in India: a single object links the work of thousands of people who will never meet.