We often imagine work and home as separate worlds. Work happens in the factory, office, farm or shop. Home is where workers rest, eat, care for others and recover for the next day. But for many workers, that separation has never really existed.
A new special issue of Work in the Global Economy focuses on exactly this problem: “Living at Work”. The editors’ introduction argues that the relationship between work and housing deserves much more attention than it usually receives. Across many different sectors and countries, employers, states and labour intermediaries have long organised workers’ accommodation in ways that shape not only where people live, but how they work, how much control they have over their time, and how easily they can leave.
This is not just about “working from home”, as many of us have done at least partially since Covid-19. It includes much more visible and coercive arrangements: factory dormitories, labour camps, live-in domestic work, tied housing and off-site accommodation arranged through contractors or brokers. In all these cases, housing is not simply a background condition of employment, but part of the organisation of labour itself. It can help recruit workers, keep them close to the job, extend oversight of their time and behaviour, and make leaving more difficult. If losing your job may also mean losing your bed, room, legal right to stay, or the social infrastructure that makes your daily life possible, then free labour looks a lot less free.
Accommodation can therefore be a powerful mechanism of labour control, and it isn’t just about the ability to leave. When housing is tied to employment, the boundary between paid work and the rest of life becomes much less clear. Time outside work is no longer fully outside work, and workers may be “on call” for far longer than their formal contracted hours. Employers or their intermediaries may gain influence over when workers rest, who they live or associate with, how mobile they are, and how easily they can refuse demands.
This is especially important for migrant workers. In many contexts, both domestically and across borders, workers move long distances for employment and depend on employers, contractors or landlords linked to their workplace for somewhere to stay. That dependence makes them more vulnerable. When losing a job also means losing your accommodation, the costs of refusing poor conditions are much higher. In some cases, even the right to remain in a place or country is bound up with employment and housing. It also becomes harder to organise collectively when an employer-cum-landlord is monitoring who you meet and when.
The special issue shows that these arrangements take many different forms. Some involve workers living in dormitories close to factories: the “dormitory labour regime”. Others involve domestic workers living in their employer’s home, farmworkers housed in camps, or workers in off-site private rental accommodation that is nonetheless controlled by labour brokers who report to employers. These cases might seem very different, but they share a common feature, that living space is drawn directly into the labour process.
Of course, accommodation is not only about control. It can also be a site of negotiation and sometimes resistance. Workers exchange information where they live and build social ties there. They compare wages, conditions and opportunities. In some cases, accommodation may become a space from which workers begin to organise and contest the terms of their employment. Housing is not only where labour power is reproduced, then; it can also be a place where workers make claims and push back.
Looking at work through accommodation in this way, the editorial argues, helps us see something important about contemporary capitalism. It is not simply that work is “spilling over” into private life in the vague sense many of us may recognise. Nor is it just a continuation of older forms of paternalism, in which employers provided longer-term housing in “company towns” to ensure a settled workforce and, sometimes, whole family or intergenerational labour systems. Instead, many labour accommodation regimes are geared towards securing temporary labour supply, extending workers’ flexibility, deepening dependence on employers, and shifting longer-term costs away from firms.
This is why worker accommodation should not be treated as a side issue. It is often central to how labour is recruited, controlled, reproduced and contested. If we want to understand the changing world of work, we need to pay much closer attention not only to what happens in the workplace itself, but also to where workers sleep, eat, care and base their lives.
Smith, C., Goodburn, C., Sacchetto, D. and Ngai, P. (2026) Living at work: accommodation, labour and social reproduction, Work in the Global Economy. https://doi.org/10.1332/27324176Y2026D000000069
Dr Charlotte Goodburn is a Reader in Chinese Political Economy at King’s College London, specialising in labour, migration and development. Her research explores how global production systems intersect with migration regimes and the lived realities of workers.