AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
The Value of Reproductive Labor
David Griffith, Kerry Preibisch, and Ricardo Contreras
Two rivers. Hadn’t two rivers sprung
from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four,
and they’d diverged. Here only two
and coming together. Even if one were tempted
to literary interpretations
such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female
—such notions would have been resolved, dissolved, straight off
in that watery, dazzling dialectic.
–Elizabeth Bishop, Santarem (2008, 176–77)
I n the 1920s, the Russian agricultural economist A.
V. Chayanov (1966) developed the “drudgery curve,”
demonstrating that the subjective value that Russian peas-
ants attached to their labor varied with the changing com-
position of the household. As the ratio of consumers to
workers in their households rose, peasants produced more.
Having children seemed to make them work harder, sug-
gesting that their attitude toward their labor seemed to
improve along with the change in the ratio, reflecting the
satisfaction that many parents derive from feeding their
children.
Influenced by Chayanov, Marshall Sahlins (1972) in-
troduced the idea of negative reciprocity—a concept, like
drudgery, connoting subjectively ill feelings toward eco-
nomic relations. Similarly, many scholars, following Marx
and other critics of capitalism, have portrayed wage labor
in a negative light, considering capital’s methods of mobi-
lizing labor as inherently exploitative and fraught with the
problems of surplus extraction, power imbalances between
labor and capital, and other conditions. Anthropologists like
Kingsolver (2007), Benson (2012), Durrenberger (2012),
and Steusse (2016) have written about how wage workers
have been demeaned through manipulations of gender, na-
tionality, legal status, and ethnicity. Historians Hahamovitch
(2014), Ngai (2004), and Rockman (2009) have made simi-
lar observations.
In this article, we examine labor from a different di-
rection to consider how people value their labor and their
economic activities positively, even when they acknowledge
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 120, No. 2, pp. 224–236, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12973
that they are being exploited and otherwise experiencing
poor conditions while working. Specifically, we examine
the relationship between reproductive labor and the wage
labor of guest workers from Guatemala and Mexico who
work in low-wage, difficult jobs in Canada and the United
States. We argue that, contrary to many characterizations of
reproductive labor, reproductive and productive labor add
value to one another and, in the process, serve as sources
of happiness, dignity, and social legitimacy to women and
men working in jobs that many consider onerous, dirty,
smelly, undignified, and poorly remunerated. Briefly, we
consider happiness a constellation of positive feelings and
mental states associated with contentment and joy; dignity
deriving from an individual’s inalienable right to respect,
self-worth, and self-esteem that is conferred on them by
others and recognized by themselves; and social legitimacy
as the collective endorsement, by one’s family and commu-
nity members, of a specific activity or behavior as proper
or appropriate (Johnston et al. 2012). We explored each of
these concepts thoroughly with the people we interviewed,
both guest workers and others living in the same commu-
nities, not only asking them directly about their sources of
happiness, dignity, and social legitimacy but also paying at-
tention to the contexts of the interviews where the three
concepts were introduced voluntarily.
As a form of affective labor (Hardt 1999; Muehlebach
2011), producing feelings of love, warmth, caring, happi-
ness, and other positive emotions, reproductive labor gen-
erates value by itself while also drawing on and contributing
to productive labor in ways that provide workers with the
means to tolerate, circumvent, and alter exploitative rela-
tions that emanate from advanced capitalism. Following a
discussion of anthropological and social scientific theories
of value and reproductive labor, we present a typology of
forms of labor found in six communities in Guatemala and
Mexico before focusing on the relationships between repro-
ductive labor and foreign contract labor in the context of
guest worker programs between Guatemala and Canada and
between Mexico and the United States.
C 2018 by the American Anthropological
 Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras • The Value of Reproductive Labor
VALUE, REPRODUCTIVE LABOR,
AND THE DAZZLING DIALECTIC
Any discussion of either value or reproductive labor is sure
to raise theoretical questions that have been of interest to an-
thropologists and other social scientists at least since the writ-
ings of scholars like Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David
Ricardo, and Karl Marx (Heilbroner 1980). David Graeber
(2001), in one of the most comprehensive discussions of
value, reminds us how value’s several meanings dovetail with
symbolic anthropology, linguistics, and political economy,
simultaneously reckoned in terms of culturally conditioned
desires and needs, semiotics, and with reference to produc-
tion, exchange, and consumption. Despite the suggestion
that value comes from a dialectical relationship among all
these sources, unfortunately, Graeber ultimately narrows its
source to the cultural meaning attending exchange. Drawing
on Nancy Munn’s (1986, 11–12) work in Gawa, and
especially her argument that “certain broad types of Gawan
acts are fundamental symbolic operators of positive value
transformation and its negation,” Graeber reinforces Munn’s
claim that value originates in gifting or exchange rather than
production or consumption. “Producing food is not simply
a value in itself. The most prestigious act in Baining society
is giving food” (Graeber 2001, 70; emphasis in original).
Similarly, in his exposition of Marx’s ideas about value,
Terence Turner (2008) considers its relationship to produc-
tive activities, exchange, and, above all, the individual and
“meta-needs” that derive from the social totality—that is,
the cultural meanings assigned to objects of value. He ar-
gues, “‘Value’ is this internal relation of the quantitatively
contrasting forms of appearance among entities sharing a
qualitatively identical essence, where the essence (content)
is socially necessary labor time and the form consists of con-
trasts among different proportions of that content embodied
by different products of the same social system or social to-
tality” (2008, 46). In other words, the raw material of value
derives from labor, yet its expression as a cultural good or
service depends on shared meanings about its relationship to
needs and desires.
Like Graeber, Turner narrows the source of value to
the cultural meaning attending exchange and, in the pro-
cess, advises a similar narrowing of analysis of economic
formations. Focusing on the social totality of capitalism, he
argues that value is accorded primarily to commodities—
objects explicitly of exchange—and that analyzing a capital-
ist system depends on examining in detail those productive
activities oriented toward producing commodities for mar-
kets. Where does this leave reproductive labor? Although
Turner recognizes that value can derive from reproductive
activities, in characterizing capitalism as a social totality, he
recommends ignoring noncommoditized reproductive labor
for its failure to enter spheres of exchange: “Domestic work
of the kind traditionally done by women in the context of
families and households, for example, is not performed for a
wage and thus does not assume the character of a commodity
with an exchange value” (2008, 46).
225
Of course, commoditized reproductive and affective
labor—domestics, nurses, teachers, prostitutes, etc.—
would fall within those productive activities that Turner
would consider game for analysis, yet many feminist anthro-
pologists and others have pointed out just how arbitrary are
distinctions between commoditized and noncommoditized
reproductive and affective labor (Browner 2000; Constable
2009; Muehlebach 2011). Although we discuss this in more
detail in the section on reproductive labor below, here we
point out that these distinctions have contributed to others
concerning gendered labor. For example, Carla Freeman’s
(2001) deeply insightful analysis of Barbadian transnational
higglers (women traders) critiques the dichotomy between
global and local, pointing out that the former is often char-
acterized as masculine and the latter as feminine. From this
dichotomy, she argues, comes others: for example, between
production and consumption, between formal and informal
economic activity, and, I would add, between external and
internal (Roseberry 1989). With her analysis of transna-
tional higglers, however, Freeman demonstrates how these
women are influential agents of change who move between
global and local contexts in ways that engage both produc-
tion and consumption. Instead of restricting her observations
and analysis to either the local or the global or to production
or consumption, she elucidates the relationships between
them. The women she profiles are at once wage workers
in transnational informatics companies, processing airline
tickets, and at the same time entrepreneurs who travel
abroad to purchase goods for resale back home, influenc-
ing their clients’ tastes in clothing, shoes, toys, and other
goods:
As a third-world female producer/consumer, the informatics
worker/higgler represents an intriguing dimension of globaliza-
tion in which participants within the informal sector and in global
factories are themselves enacting new modes of globalization; they
are not merely its effects. It is precisely their agency in doing so,
as well as their mutually reinforcing engagements across formal
and informal economies and across transitional spaces in which
they produce and consume, that both the macro-models as well as
many of the feminist ethnographic local accounts fail to illuminate.
(Freeman 2001, 1030)
Freeman also makes it clear that their work as entrepreneurs
helps moderate the difficulties of work in a global factory
while adding to their self-esteem, dignity, happiness, and
identity. Many social scientists have shown that people often
work hard at tasks that pay little or involve excessive personal
costs because they are part of one’s identity or heritage or
they yield social and environmental benefits (Griffith 2009;
Moberg 2014). In Mexico, for example, maize production
persists despite an adverse political economic context. This
is due, in part, to the value that small farmers—particularly
women—attach to it as a safety net against a volatile labor
market, as a less fungible form of income than cash, as a
safe and high-quality source of food, and as a cultural as-
set (Fitting 2011; Preibisch, Rivera Herrejón, and Wiggins
2002). Further, like Barbadian higglers, these behaviors
226 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 2 • June 2018
allow participation in multiple formal and informal
economies involving reproductive, affective, wage, and
other forms of labor. From these accounts, it is clear that
reproductive labor is not always considered a curse on those
who spend much of their lives engaged in caring for chil-
dren and households without pay. Instead, as we see in more
detail below, reproductive labor often produces happiness,
dignity, and social legitimacy.
The forms of labor that people experience can vary
widely from place to place, with local systems of produc-
tion, exchange, and consumption involving a variety of social
relations, interactions with natural resources and markets,
seasonal considerations, and so forth. Yet, with the global
expansion of capitalism, one form of labor that most people
have become familiar with is wage labor: capitalism’s central
social relation of production, under which capitalists extract
surplus value from the proletariat and alienate workers from
the products of their labor (Marx 1939; Wolf 1982, 354).
It’s likely, then, that many people might compare various
social relations of production they engage in locally (in their
households and communities) to wage labor, evaluating their
disappointments and rewards in light of one another. This
was the assumption guiding our research in Guatemala and
Mexico among families that send guest workers to seasonal
jobs in Canada and the United States. Managed migration—
or the legal employment of foreign nationals—involves the
complete separation of productive and reproductive labor
and the close coordination of the workers’ time to the em-
ployer’s demands. It is, therefore, one of the more extreme
forms of wage labor.1
METHODS
This work is based on approximately eight months of
fieldwork conducted in six communities in Guatemala and
Mexico, from 2009 to the present. Working from our
contacts in guest workers’ workplaces in Canada and the
United States, these communities were initially selected
based on two criteria: that they sent guest workers abroad
and that they included a mix of economic activities. Workers
from families we have become familiar with worked in
agriculture in Canada and in agriculture and seafood
processing, laundries, and the hospitality industry in the
United States (Binford 2013; Griffith 2006; Hahamovitch
2014; Sharma 2006). In their home communities, residents
engaged in multiple livelihoods, which varied across the
communities where we have been working. We were
deliberate in selecting communities that combined different
mixes of domestic production,2 managed migration,
undocumented migration, and other forms of labor. Space
considerations preclude detailed ethnography; instead, we
provide capsule descriptions in Table 1.
In each community, we interviewed between thirty-five
and forty individuals, around half with experience with for-
eign contract labor and the rest without such experience.
We conducted open-ended interviews with guest workers
and people in the communities from households with no
emigrants, supplementing in-depth interviews with obser-
vations, background research, focus groups, local research
assistance, and the distribution and collection of cameras.
As noted earlier, due to our theoretical focus on the value
of labor, we asked questions about happiness, dignity, and
social legitimacy directly, and we paid close attention in
the analysis to where these concepts emerged in relation
to other themes like work, job satisfaction, family life, and
so forth. While the table identifies some of the dominant
economic activities, in all the communities a wide variety
of economic activities absorbed residents’ labor. Indeed,
multiple livelihoods, particularly at a household level, were
more the rule than the exception, consistent with previous
research in these regions (Fischer and Benson 2006; Golding
2005; Preibisch et al. 2002). Most households generated
income from more than one economic activity, although
the opportunities for self-employment, including peasant
agriculture, were unevenly distributed across the commu-
nities. Migration opportunities also varied across commu-
nities and between Mexico and Guatemala, although mi-
gration was a major source of employment and income in
each community, usually responsible for social differentia-
tion, which was in turn expressed by differences in material
wealth and access to natural resources financed by remit-
tances and migration earnings. At the same time, due to
need, moral and economic attachments to traditional liveli-
hoods, and other reasons, people remained loyal to local
production systems, resulting in many different forms of
labor. Below, we describe the different forms of labor that
we encountered in the communities, developing a typology
that allows for comparisons across different livelihoods in
the communities in terms of happiness, dignity, and social
legitimacy.
FORMS OF LABOR: A TYPOLOGY
In all six communities, we observed different economic ac-
tivities with an eye toward creating an inventory of the
different types or forms of labor people practiced, assessing
how people valued them relative to one another, and focus-
ing, in particular, on how they valued them relative to wage
labor in the context of managed migration. We are not, we
emphasize, attempting to assign quantitative values to each
form of labor, but are considering them qualitatively and
dialectically. Although space limitations prevent us from
discussing all these forms of labor in terms of their rela-
tionships with wage labor, ultimately we hope to determine
how each of them borrows and adds value to wage labor and,
as with Freeman’s (2001) work, elucidate relations among
local and global economic phenomena.
We present a typology of forms of labor below, em-
phasizing that it does not encompass all economic activ-
ities. In Sinaloa, for example, narcotrafficking was com-
mon, but we chose not to delve into its dynamics. As
others who work across Latin American will confirm,
many very small-scale operations were hidden away in peo-
ples’ homes. Nevertheless, the communities represented
 Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras • The Value of Reproductive Labor 227

TABLE 1. Characteristics of Study Communities*

Approximate Guestworker
Name Location size destinations Other features
Mantiox de Dios Chimaltenango, Guatemala. 2,000 Canadian greenhouses. Kaqchikel. Peasant and
commercial agriculture.
Pozo Profundo Santa Rosa, Guatemala. 1,750 Canadian greenhouses, Landless Mestizo
fields, and poultry. proletariat. Coffee.
Services.
Las Brisas Sinaloa, Mexico. 3,000 Virginia seafood. Moyos and Mestizos.
Artisanal fishing, seafood
processing.
Emilano Zarzuela Sinaloa, Mexico. 7,500 North Carolina and Virginia Landless Mestizo
seafood. proletariat. Industrial
agriculture. Services.
San Isidro Sinaloa, Mexico. 2,750 North Carolina and Virginia Mostly landless Mestizo
seafood. proletariat. Industrial and
peasant agriculture.
Services. Brickmaking.
Lago Cocomiche Michoacán, Mexico. 3,000 US agriculture and Canadian Landless Mestizo
greenhouses. proletariat. Artisanal lake
fishing. Services.
Tourism.

*Community names are pseudonyms.

markedly different economic profiles, from nearly fully pro-
letarianized to those more aligned with peasant production
systems.3 Wage labor was common, however, across all
the communities, regardless of access to other economic
opportunities.
Although here we focus primarily on reproductive la-
bor and its relationship to foreign contract labor, it is our
eventual intent to investigate how each form of labor ex-
presses value in terms of happiness, dignity, and social le-
gitimacy. The typology, too, could be considered as a con-
tinuum from labor that deeply engages the family and the
community to labor that is largely separate (in space if not
in sentiment) from the reproductive economy. Viewed an-
other way, we consider this a rough continuum from a moral
economy of economic activities embedded deeply in cultural
understandings of proper behavior to the political economy
of labor separated from local norms, social relationships,
and institutions, and guided instead by core principles of
capitalism.
We developed this typology and described the different
forms of labor and their characteristics based on observed
economic activities and interviews with their practitioners.
Although they derived from our field sites, these forms of
labor and their characteristics are represented in communi-
ties in low-income countries around the world. Following
the typology, we focus on reproductive labor’s relationship
to foreign contract labor, examining the interpenetration
of the two forms at opposite ends of our continuum. The
typology is presented in Table 2.
While each form of labor has the potential to produce
happiness, dignity, and social legitimacy, nearly all seem
equally capable of compromising these three dimensions of
human experience in some way. This compels us to tease
out the circumstances within these contexts that work for
or against happiness, dignity, and social legitimacy. Already,
in the table, we have identified several conditions that un-
dermine or enhance that form of labor’s ability along these
lines—pointing out, for example, that the same form of
labor can produce happiness in one setting and despair
in another. Working through such contradictions has be-
come a principal challenge facing workers of the twenty-first
century.
REPRODUCTIVE LABOR
Most reproductive labor occurs within households, usually
engaging the labor of women, yet drawing on all household
labor (Browner 2000; Clark 1993; Constable 2009). In
the wider community, it depends on people in health care,
education, religion, and similar fields. It consumes large
amounts of people’s time, daily activities, and routines,
although much reproductive labor is taken for granted by
family members and even the people engaged in its tasks
228 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 2 • June 2018

TABLE 2. Forms of Labor

Typical geographical and

Labor form social locations
Reproductive Home, with family.
Of the heart Church, civic spaces, home,
with friends and family.
Subsistence Home, fields, with family.
Local day Fields, workshops, etc.,
with neighbors or local
employers.
Local wage Fields, workshops,
factories, etc., with local
employers.
Commercial Fields, with family, hired,
agricultural and exchange labor.
Commercial Households, workshops,
non- factory settings, etc.
agricultural
Foreign undoc- Work sites abroad, often in
umented total or partial absence of
the nuclear family.
Foreign Work sites abroad, in
contract employer-provided
housing, without family.
Characteristics
Labor involved in the maintenance and reproduction of human
beings. A source of extreme happiness and dignity, but often
unrecognized, undervalued, and unrewarded socially. Highly
socially legitimate.
Voluntary work for church, community, etc. Usually satisfying,
confers dignity and social legitimacy.
Family labor employed for subsistence purposes. Physically
demanding but satisfying and socially legitimate, its dignity
deriving from producing quality food, fuel, and income.
Labor hired on a daily basis, often poorly remunerated and not
terribly satisfying or dignified, if socially legitimate.
Labor hired on a longer-term basis than local day labor,
remunerated at different levels but generally providing just
enough to survive, conferring little happiness or dignity, if
socially legitimate.
Labor employed in the production of agricultural commodities.
Potentially a source of happiness and dignity, market exposure
can frustrate it and, at times, rob it of its dignity, satisfaction,
and social legitimacy.
Labor involved in entrepreneurial, independently owned and
operated activities (e.g., recycling plastic, baking bread). Often
involving self-exploitation and the exploitation of one’s family
members, it is capable of producing happiness when sufficient
for survival. Usually highly dignified. Socially legitimate if it
does not involve behavior considered morally reprehensible,
such as narcotrafficking.
Labor performed in high-income foreign countries without legal
documentation, often paying low wages abroad but high relative
to wages at home. Contradictions surround its ability to
produce happiness and dignity, although most at home consider
it socially legitimate, despite its illegal status abroad. The
happiness and dignity it produces derive less from the work
itself (although this is not always the case) than what the
earnings from the work bring at home.
Labor performed within managed migration programs or with
legal work visas, usually for one employer. Excessive labor
control undermines feelings of dignity, and happiness is
compromised by long separation from home and family, but
both at home and abroad it is considered socially legitimate.
The sacrifice involved can produce a strong sense of dignity, and
converting earnings into necessities, luxuries, and gifts at home
can produce satisfaction and happiness.
 Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras • The Value of Reproductive Labor
(e.g., selecting a shirt for a child for school, sweeping
the porch, opening a tin of corned beef). Non-nurturant
reproductive labor addresses daily needs (e.g., cleaning,
household provisioning, food processing, fuel management,
cooking, mental and physical health care, providing unpaid
labor to domestic productive enterprises) and nurturant
reproductive labor (often called affective labor) involves
reproducing the next generation (e.g., reproductive
decisions, child care and protection, enculturation, and
socialization) (Browner 2000; Constable 2009; Duffy 2007;
Elson 1999; Hardt 1999; Paciulan and Preibisch 2013). All
forms of reproductive and affective labor have been com-
moditized, and when they are they tend to be less gendered
than when they are not commoditized, but are still largely
performed by women (Constable 2009; Duffy 2007).
Reproductive labor’s yield is human beings.
In much of the social scientific literature, particularly
from feminist perspectives, reproductive labor has been cast
as a curse upon women and the basis of unequal relations be-
tween women and men. Especially as increasing numbers of
women enter the formal labor force as wage workers (often
performing reproductive labor as domestics, washerwomen,
or in food services), many scholars argue that their workloads
rise as they continue to be responsible for child care, house-
work, shopping, and cooking at home—in other words, that
the gendered division of labor in the reproductive economy
does not change sufficiently to offset rising female and falling
male participation in the productive economy (Arizpe 1989;
Elson 1999; Moser 1995; Parreñas 2000). Drawing on data
from around the world, Elson (1999) argues that the in-
crease in women in the productive economy has not been
matched by an increase in men in the reproductive economy,
and more recent studies show that increased female labor-
market participation does not necessarily result in increased
power for women (Becerril 2011; Hughes 2014). The “dou-
ble day” faced by women working outside the home also
reflects poor state responses to the participation of women
in the paid labor force.
While this is certainly the case among many women who
have entered the labor force, it is equally certain that dozens
of other arrangements occur in which combining reproduc-
tive labor with work in the formal economy alters, in positive
ways, a woman’s contribution to the maintenance of family
and home, her relationships with her spouse and children,
and her sense of who she is and what her role is (Contreras
and Griffith 2012; Freeman 2001, 2012; Griffith and Con-
treras 2014; Hughes 2014). Although men taking on some
reproductive responsibilities may not be common, it does
occur, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2000) focuses on cases
of women hiring others, usually other women, to absorb
much of the burden. Indeed, the gendered organization of
the household into male and female spheres in the Philippines
is so rigid that even when women migrate internationally for
work, transnational families reconstitute their households so
as to enforce gender boundaries (Parreñas 2000).
229
Parreñas adds that this often becomes a three-tiered
“global care chain” organized along lines of class, ethnicity,
gender, and nationality, which involves Filipino women “es-
caping their gender roles in the Philippines, easing the gen-
der constraints of women who employ them in industrialized
countries, and finally relegating their gender roles to women
left behind in the Philippines” (2000, 570). In our own work
in Mexico and Guatemala, the most common thing we have
seen is women who work outside the home delegating house-
hold tasks to their daughters, mothers, and other female
relatives, although, in some cases, men boasted of being able
to cook, clean, and care for their children as well as their
wives.
These multiple ways of accomplishing reproductive la-
bor suggest that the view of reproductive labor as a curse
upon women around the world does not account for the
many cases where reproductive labor improves the well-
being of the women who perform it. As we flesh out the
voices of guest workers and others below, reproductive la-
bor is often a source of happiness and dignity that generates
significant social legitimacy in the communities where we
worked. This is reinforced in cases where reproductive and
productive labor enhance one another, as they do in the
transnational experiences of many of the workers in our
study. For example, many women have learned how to uti-
lize the space of the home to earn additional income alongside
their reproductive labor, engaging in activities such as baking
bread, cutting hair, or making tamales for sale. Others have
opened convenience stores or other businesses that become,
in part, extensions of their homes—places their children
can complete their homework after school or where they
can breastfeed an infant while engaging in productive labor.
In San Isidro, one of these businesses, run by a woman who
has been a guest worker for many years, also served as a
place where children in the community gathered after and
before school. While she or one of her children sold snacks
and drinks to the children, she took the opportunity to offer
them moral instruction against narcotrafficking and other
violent behaviors.
Each of these arrangements involves a set of social rela-
tionships that link reproductive and productive economies,
reinforce or alter gender roles, empower women relative
to other women and to men, and influence the way people
value labor from both emic and etic perspectives. Migration
scholars have long understood that reproductive labor in
communities that send migrants abroad subsidizes those
economies where migrants work, absorbing the costs of
raising children and maintaining homes so that receiving
economies need not make such investments (Griffith 1985;
Pessar 1982; Ong 2006). Diane Elson (1999) observes
that much of the economic literature on reproductive
labor views it in terms of disruptions in workplace
schedules—when women have to take time off to tend
to a sick child, for example—rather than acknowledging
the contributions of the reproductive economy to the
productive economy. These contributions include, most
230 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 2 • June 2018
notably, the people who bend sheet metal into ventilation
systems, tally figures in cubicles, pick tomatoes under
the Florida sun, and so on—in short, the workers of the
world.
Clearly, productive and reproductive activities are
highly articulated. At the most basic level, unpaid reproduc-
tive activities are critical to the functioning of the productive
economy by reproducing labor (Arizpe 1989; Elson 1999).
Others would argue that the myth of women entering the
workforce merely to supplement their husbands’ earnings
benefits the productive economy by helping to justify pay-
ing women less than men for the same work, or keeping
minimum wages at levels insufficient to support families,
even when many women are the principal breadwinners in
their families. Devaluing domestic work also legitimizes the
failure of capitalist classes to finance the costs of reproducing
the labor force and creates divisions in the workforce that
are advantageous to capitalism (Benerı́a 1979; Fernandez-
Kelly 1989). As noted in our earlier discussion of value,
here we consider this dialectically, suggesting not only that
the productive economy engages the reproductive economy
for part of its value but also that the reproductive economy
endows the productive economy with part of its value. In
the lives of many of the guest workers we have been working
with over the past several years, this was precisely the case.
Two salient characteristics distinguish reproductive la-
bor from other forms of labor. First, in the formal economy,
reproductive labor has been gendered, often racialized, and
devalued (Thomas 2008). Second, in informal settings like
the family, reproductive labor is highly valued, as when
manifested in the mutual love between parents and chil-
dren, and is emotionally charged, often a source of deep
satisfaction yet just as often a source of searing pain, as after
the death of a child (Constable 2009; Freeman 2012; Hardt
1999; Muehlebach 2011). These contradictory character-
istics make assigning value to reproductive labor difficult,
particularly if we insist that economic phenomena require
measurement in order to be objects of scientific analysis or
included in predictive models.
Of all the forms of labor listed in Table 2, the products
of reproductive labor are the least predictable because the
labor inputs come from a variety of directions and back-
grounds, including from clergy, school teachers, relatives
you might wish had less (rather than more) influence on
your children, and random others in the community and in
the media. In much of the social scientific literature, repro-
ductive labor overlaps with and corresponds to household
labor, where gender serves as the fundamental principal
dividing labor. At the same time, it is a joint enterprise,
deeply intertwined with the development of the family—its
life cycle and growth—and today, in many cases, more gen-
dered normatively than in practice. In households we visited,
reproductive labor involved at least three generations—
usually (grand)mothers and (grand)children—along with
lateral kinship ties, such as a child sharing among sisters,
and significant ties among cousins, uncles and nephews, and
nieces and aunts. Among most of those we interviewed—
men and women alike—reproductive labor was the most
likely form of labor to produce happiness, yet also the most
likely to produce suffering and despair. In response to a
question about happiness, Guadalupe, a woman from Pozo
Profundo, Santa Rosa, Guatemala, said, “For me, happiness
is that my children do well, that my family is healthy, and
that my husband has a good job so that we can provide for
our children.” Yet, she added that it was often the case that,
“we don’t have enough money to give them what they need,”
and this caused her and her husband distress. At times, sim-
ilar sentiments were expressed with ambivalence, as when
Rosa of Mantiox de Dios, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, said
that she experienced two feelings when her husband left for
Canada: happiness and sadness. “I’m a little sad and a little
happy,” she said. “Happy because he’s working for the family
but sad because he is gone.”
These references to family life were quite common.
Typically, informants expressed economic achievement and
economic advancement directly in relation to the well-being
of their families, whether talking about economic activity at
home or abroad. For example, when we asked Efrain, a
Kaqchikel man with eight children, whether he preferred
working in Guatemala to working in Canada, he expressed
his separation from family in terms of their welfare:
The difference between work here and there is that there you
have to work extremely hard to stay in good graces with the boss,
because the work is very hard. In Guatemala, you can rest any
time you want. . . . If you want to work half a day, you work half a
day, but there isn’t any money. But in Canada the experience that
you have, thank God, is that you earn double or triple but also
you do double or triple the work. . . . Because I have my family I
have to spend some time there and some time here. Because I’m
alone there, apart from my family, the family can thrive.
Such sentiments were so common among guest workers and
others in our study that, rather than being the main point
of one’s comments, references to family welfare were often
sprinkled into reflections on one’s economic circumstances.
A day laborer we interviewed in Mantiox de Dios, while
expressing dismay over his subsistence-level earnings, dis-
cussed his desire to become a guest worker with several
references to family:
We work in the fields with the hoe until we have blisters, earning
just enough for a tortilla, a little beans for the children, just to eat.
. . . Here in Guatemala, the poverty doesn’t allow us to reach
for our dreams. There are many who have gone to Canada, but
the first time you go you have to be at least twenty-five to forty
years old, and married, and I’m still just a boyfriend [not legally
married]. But I need and want to go now. I have a family, I have
a wife, I have two little children, and all I have to give is enough for
them to eat. I want to give something to my children, to the future.
(emphasis added)
As Rosa indicated, another powerful indication of the
high value placed on reproductive labor is the emotional
response of workers and workers’ family members to being
separated from one another, whether because of migration,
estrangement, illness, death, or other reasons. This includes
 Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras • The Value of Reproductive Labor
separation not only from their children and other family
members but also from the physical spaces of renewal and
reproduction: homes, yards, churches, and communities.
Bonacio, a young guest worker from Mantiox de Dios, con-
fessed to feeling his spirituality seeping slowly away during
the months of the year he worked in Canada, saying, “Hon-
estly, imagine being outside of your spiritual life for nine
months. One cools down. It’s like a bonfire. If no one is
there to throw in the firewood and push the ends into the
fire, the fire goes out.”
Women and men experienced separation from fam-
ily in many different ways, with some generally missing
their children, spouses, and other family members with-
out identifying any special times or conditions that made it
particularly difficult. Yet others focused on specific conse-
quences of separation—resentment from birthdays missed,
children experimenting with sex and drugs, poor treatment
of children by surrogate parents, and other consequences of
absence. Several of the guest workers we interviewed had
close family members who ere sick, debilitated, or otherwise
physically or mentally challenged, and leaving them could
be especially difficult.
During our interviews with guest workers or their family
members, it wasn’t uncommon that a simple question about
what it was like being separated from family elicited tears.
“I suffered a great deal [when I first] separated from my
children to come to work here,” said a Mexican woman
who had been a guest worker for thirteen years, initially
leaving her daughter and son when they were thirteen and
ten, respectively. “Now my children are older. But yes, in
truth I believe that it’s very bad for us to be apart. I am like
a mother and father who abandoned the children when we
had a great need for one another.”
During a group interview with five Mexican women
working in a Virginia seafood plant, the question about leav-
ing family caused all five women, at once, to weep. Veronica,
a mother of two children under the age of ten, said, “It’s a
very bad experience because they forget us. It damages the
love of your children, the love of your husband, the love of
your whole family. When we return it isn’t the same. Noth-
ing is the same. They resent us for being away.” Because they
were all weeping by this time, one said, “Now you have to
wait for us to stop crying.”4
While the other four women agreed with this state-
ment, another woman with elder children, Aurelia, offered
a slightly different perspective, saying, “In my case, my chil-
dren have forgiven me. They’re older now and I can explain
to them that this is my career. . . . I tell them that the
sacrifice is to improve their lives. And we have improved
our lives, although in the past [when she was gone] my son
had problems with drugs and alcohol.” At this, several of
the other women chimed in that their children had also had
drug and alcohol problems and echoed the theme of (neces-
sary) sacrifice. Lilliana, a guest worker and mother of two
from Las Brisas in Sinaloa, Mexico, associated her sacrifice
with suffering, happiness, and accomplishment, expressing
231
it poetically: “We leave [for the United States] with bro-
ken souls, crying all the way to Hermosillo [where they are
issued their visas], but when we return, we arrive happy to
have obtained so much.”
Others spoke of missing significant events in children’s
lives. For example, Tanya, a woman who began working
abroad coincidentally with her son entering kindergarten,
said: “It was bad because on my son’s first day of kinder-
garten, I wasn’t there. When he graduated, I wasn’t there.
For his first day of first grade, I wasn’t there. When he grad-
uated that time, I wasn’t there either. And now I’ve been
gone two years without seeing my son graduate.”
These comments suggest that life-cycle considerations
influence how people value their reproductive labor and
that, like Chayanov’s peasants, it changes over the life cycle
of the household. Yet household life cycles do not progress
according to predictable phases, but skip and glide based on
internal developments, changes in state support for families
and local economies, and multiple circumstances—illness,
divorce, the availability of work, and, of course, death.
Coming up with a ratio or other metric to trace the happiness
or despair that people experience from reproductive labor,
while possible, would divest it of its true character.5
Another illustration of the value of reproductive labor
comes from an elder guest worker, Carmen, in her late
sixties, who experienced both the deep trauma of losing a
son and grandson and the comforting reassurance of still
having children and grandchildren to support her through
her grief. During the height of the 2011 crab-picking season,
on September 11, Carmen learned of the death of her son in
the vegetable fields of California, which also happened to be
the one-year anniversary of the death of her grandson in a
motorcycle accident. Her employers allowed her to fly from
North Carolina to California to retrieve the body and carry
it to Sinaloa for the funeral. After the funeral, she returned
to North Carolina to finish the crab-picking season, working
until early November.
Although she finished the season, while Carmen was
flying home a second time, she suffered extreme high blood
pressure on the airplane, forcing an emergency landing;
two of her daughters, also crab pickers, were with her.
While the two deaths and her sudden illness were sources
of despair, Carmen undoubtedly derived deep comfort and
support immediately from the two daughters who were
with her and, later, from a daughter-in-law, the dead son’s
wife, and several grandchildren. All of these individuals
lived either with her or with her daughters close to her.
The house of one of her daughters adjoined hers, creating a
vast, open compound of two yards and several shared fruit
trees, gardens, and animals. Daily, these spaces were sites of
multiple reproductive labor activities that, within a year, had
healed much of the pain that Carmen experienced through
the loss of her son and grandson.
When we visited her in January 2012, just four months
after her son’s death, she and her family were still in mourn-
ing. Yet, in January of the following year, when we visited
232 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 2 • June 2018
them again, they had quit wearing black and were vibrant
and animated. At one point, the first author asked Carmen
whether or not women who returned from a season of crab
picking were weary and ready to rest, and she laughed and
said, “No. Stronger!” and everyone laughed with her. In
this case, her reproductive setting, bolstered by her work
abroad, enabled Carmen to recover from the devastating
loss of a grandson and son.
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN REPRODUCTIVE
AND FOREIGN CONTRACT LABOR
We noted earlier that with the spread of capitalism, nearly
all people in the world have become familiar with wage la-
bor, suggesting the possibility of people valuing other forms
of labor relative to wage labor. In the communities where
we worked, the most extreme form of wage labor was for-
eign contract labor, which nearly completely separates pro-
ductive from nurturant reproductive labor, ties workers’
schedules closely to employers’ demands, involves exces-
sive labor control, and allows unscrupulous employers to
engage in wage theft, sexual harassment, and other forms
of abuse. In both Canada and the United States, employer-
specific visas, which restrict each guest worker to a single
employer, constitute the most significant power imbalance
in the employment relationship. In addition, employers pro-
vide guest workers with housing (usually on or close to the
farms, seafood factories, laundries, hotels, or other places
where they work) and control transportation to and from
job sites as well as to shopping centers and other venues.
Combined with the threat of not calling workers back the
following season (blacklisting), these measures deeply en-
hance the control that employers have over guest workers,
which at times results in up to twenty-hour workdays.
When working abroad, both female and male guest
workers are often entirely responsible for the non-nurturant
reproductive labor required to maintain themselves as pro-
ductive workers. This includes cooking their own meals,
washing their own clothes, and cleaning personal and com-
munal living spaces. Employers expect guest workers to
engage in regular non-nurturant reproductive work, con-
sidering those who do to be “good workers.” In Canada,
women migrants often carry out reproductive tasks for their
male intimate partners or cook meals for other migrants as
a side business to their agricultural jobs. Although guest-
worker programs are designed to separate productive from
nurturant reproductive labor, today, most if not all guest
workers have cellular phones with which they can commu-
nicate with family members back home and thereby partic-
ipate, remotely, in nurturant reproductive labor decisions
and activities.
Yet most characteristics of guest-worker jobs present
stark contrasts to reproductive labor, the latter of which is
deeply embedded in local community values, norms, ide-
als, and social relationships. We conclude our discussion
by considering the relationships between reproductive and
foreign contract labor, focusing on how they influence one
another’s value in terms of happiness, dignity, and social
legitimacy. Rather than comparing the two, we show how
these different forms of labor interpenetrate one another.
Our analysis suggests that their relationships result in an am-
bivalent and contradictory cluster of outcomes, including
happiness and despair, suffering and satisfaction, frustration
and celebration.
Consider Marielba, who worked as a guest worker in
North Carolina and Virginia seafood plants for eighteen
years. She started before her children were born but took
time off while they were young and her husband was in-
carcerated in the United States, only to begin working in
seafood plants again when her children were older, in their
teens, two years before her husband was released. Marielba
typically characterized her work abroad as extremely hard
and taxing, often fraught with humiliation and exploitation
and made more difficult because of separation from fam-
ily. Such characterizations constituted evidence that foreign
contract labor often created the conditions for despair, suf-
fering, and frustration in workers’ lives. Yet, despite these
difficulties, Marielba, like all guest workers, acknowledged
that the jobs she held abroad paid far more than she could
earn performing the same work in Mexico.6 Because of this,
most guest workers preferred these jobs and this form of
labor to similar work at home, and even to other forms of
labor that may be innately satisfying.
Yet the value of foreign contract labor was not simply
a matter of pay. During an interview with Marielba, she
initially characterized her work as “very hard” (muy duro),
“very heavy” (muy pesado), and “very tiring—extremely tir-
ing!” (muy cansado—¡cansadı́simo!). Later, however, after re-
peated interviews with her in the United States and in her
home in Mexico, she told us that she liked it.
“You like it?” we asked. “Why?”
“Because now it’s easy. At first it was very difficult and
I had a hard time, because I didn’t know how to do it, but
gradually I worked enough to improve and now it’s easy for
me. And I earn a lot!” she added, laughing. Her satisfaction
with work derived from acquiring the skill she needed to
make the job easier to accomplish, on the one hand, and to
earn more, on the other, given that, with piecework, the
faster and more efficiently you work, the more money you
earn.
Yet, these two sources of satisfaction, we learned later
in the interview, were parts of a grander satisfaction—steps,
as it were, in a cumulative process that, taken as a whole,
constituted Marielba’s happiness. For what followed was a
detailed account of what she has been able to do with those
earnings—accomplishments, such as adding rooms to her
house and acquiring appliances, that we have been witness
to over multiple visits to her home. But it wasn’t only
adding rooms and buying stoves that gave her satisfaction:
it was what that space meant to her and her family and her
dreams.
“First, I built a bathroom, so my children didn’t have to
go outside to use the toilet or wash in the middle of the night.
 Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras • The Value of Reproductive Labor
We had a new bathroom, and then [security] bars, a fence,
we painted all the rooms, we painted the floors.” She also
spoke of fitting her kitchen with sinks and buying appliances.
Woven in and out of this portion of the interview were
references to meeting household and educational expenses,
paying the light bill, buying food and books, and paying for
clothing. By 2014, she had a new car and was having two
rooms added just behind her house, separated by a space of
a few feet, for her daughter and her daughter’s son, giving
them their own space, yet keeping them inside the same
fenced-in family compound.
In this way, the extreme wage-labor relationship pene-
trated and became intertwined with reproductive labor. A
cynical interpretation might posit that Marielba was playing
directly into the hands of capital, working hard and produc-
ing surplus values for her employers while talking herself into
believing God’s grace was shining on her while, in reality, she
was subsidizing the reproduction of labor available to capi-
tal. Two observations undermine this interpretation. First,
neither of her children was working in seafood processing
or similar economic activities, nor did they plan to. Second,
she was not unaware of all the difficulties that come from
working in crab processing, including the exploitation, hu-
miliation, and suffering, characterizing it as “very hard, very
heavy,” and in other negative terms. As Katherine Newman
(1999, 2006) has shown in her work on low-wage workers,
workers like Marielba know far better than those of us who
have never worked such jobs the extent to which this is so.
Yet, as Marielba said, she likes it, just as many of the workers
Newman describes like their work.
Aurelia offered a slightly different illustration of the
relationships between reproductive and foreign contract la-
bor. When we initially met her, in 2009, she was working
in a North Carolina seafood-processing plant with twenty-
six other women, including Rafaela, her twenty-year-old
daughter. Aurelia was forty-one and had worked in the crab
industry for thirteen years, missing many of the childhood
years of her daughter and two sons, Manuel and Pedro. Yet,
like Marielba, she used her earnings to upgrade and expand
her housing, pay for educating her children, purchase inven-
tory for a small store run out of her home, and buy small
houses for her children and a few acres of land to rent to local
farmers. In 2010, she arrived at the crab plant in the spring
without Rafaela, who was two months pregnant. Rafaela
stayed home both to protect her reproductive health and
to finish her college classes before she became preoccupied
with a newborn.
As Rafaela’s due date neared, Aurelia, still working
in North Carolina, began worrying that the crab season
wouldn’t end before the child was born. Jeopardizing her
future in the industry, she chose to return to Mexico before
the end of her contract to witness the birth of her first
grandchild. For that, she was blacklisted from the North
Carolina plant; two years later, she was able to connect with
another labor contractor (contratista) at a Virginia seafood
plant and return to picking crab.
233
Clearly, the reproductive labor of being a mother and
grandmother took precedence over her work in the crab
plant, yet her work in the plant has been critical to her stan-
dard of living and, by extension, to her daughter’s and sons’
as well. Once, during a conversation with her about working
in the crab plant, she said that with every twist of the knife in
the body of the crab, with every ounce of meat, she thinks,
“A new skirt for Rafaela. New pants for Manuel. New shoes
for Pedro.” Thus, thoughts of reproductive responsibilities
motivated her productive labor.
CONCLUSION: QUESTIONS OF VALUE
IN REPRODUCTIVE AND PRODUCTIVE LABOR
While highlighting individual experiences is important,
more important is how these processes of interpenetra-
tion have been expressed abstractly, generally, and his-
torically. Our focus on the relationships between repro-
ductive labor and wage labor—especially wage labor in
one of its extreme forms—derives from recognizing that
among the many forms of labor, reproductive labor is pan-
human and wage labor is becoming panhuman. That re-
productive labor emerges from biology and culture and
wage labor from history adds another compelling dimen-
sion to the relations between them. The reproductive-
labor relationships we have identified occur principally in
families and manifest primarily in feelings and exchanges
between parents and children, yet these relationships are
also deeply embedded in cultural traditions. In our study
alone, in Guatemala and Mexico, we encountered subtle
and overt differences in reproductive labor among Kaqchikel
peasant families, Moyos and Mestizos in Sinaloa, and non-
Indigenous rural proletariat in Michoacán and Santa Rosa.
In each of these cases, reproductive-labor relationships are
creative and unique, ranging from whole families pitch-
ing in to bring in crops or fish to the multiple livelihoods,
at home and abroad, in families with no access to natural
resources.
By contrast, the wage-labor relationships were remark-
ably similar across cultural and economic contexts, demon-
strating very little creativity or originality. Essentially, the
same techniques of labor recruitment, supervision, control,
and other aspects of the labor process show up over and
over, and this has been the case not only around the world
but through time. Consider Robert Castel’s (2003, 102)
description of royal manufacturing during fifteenth-century
England:
We should notice that this [state-controlled manufacturing] is a
hierarchical and closed structure. Discipline there is unforgiving;
work is often preceded by prayers. The employees include a small
elite of qualified artisans, many of them foreign-born, who have
been courted in order to monopolize their know-how, and what
amounts to an underqualified staff, generally rebellious against
this kind of structure, and whose recruitment conjures up images
of the kind of conscription practiced by the army. Some galley
slaves are taken from the shipyards, while one seeks to enlist some
poor and to form a workforce of women and children, reputed to
be more docile and less demanding.
234 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 2 • June 2018
With the exception of galley slaves, a similar passage
could have been written about the greenhouses, farms,
seafood-processing plants, and industrial laundries where
guest workers work. As locations of extreme wage labor,
they seem unlikely to be valuable from the perspective of
producing happiness, yet many acquire such value from what
they contribute to reproductive labor. This returns us to the
question of whether reproductive labor endows productive
labor with value, or vice versa. The answer to this, as in
much social science, is that this is not the correct question
to ask. Instead, we should consider how the interpenetra-
tion of reproductive and productive labor lend and borrow
value to and from one another. Examining the relationships
between productive and reproductive labor dialectically, in-
stead of as separate spheres of economic activity, is similar
to Freeman’s (2001) call for rethinking the common false
dichotomies of local/global, masculine/feminine, and for-
mal/informal economic activities. It is, moreover, firmly in
line with Roseberry’s (1989) theoretical recommendation
to critically examine the internalization of the external in
ethnographic settings.
Examined in this way, reproductive labor adds value
to productive labor through the various ways that workers
convert and subvert wage labor’s goals to the greater goals
of working families. Qualitatively, the social relationships of
reproductive labor are nearly infinitely creative and unique;
by contrast, wage-labor relations are nearly everywhere,
and across time, similar. It is said that without knowledge of
history we are doomed to repeat it, yet the historical knowl-
edge that capitalism has accumulated in its principal social
relation of production—wage labor—is nothing less than
the doom of repetition. It has spun out the same schemes
and machinations through the centuries. It is only through its
association with reproductive labor that it acquires distinc-
tion, producing happiness and dignity, cradled in culture’s
womb.
David Griffith Department of Anthropology, East Carolina
University, Greenville, NC 27858 USA; griffithd@ecu.edu
Kerry Preibisch (1973–2015) Formerly with the Department of
Sociology, Guelph University, Ontario, Canada
Ricardo Contreras Atlas.ti, Corvalis, OR 97331 USA; rcontr-
erasn@me.com
NOTES
Acknowledgments. We owe a great debt to the many guest
workers and community members who invited us into their homes
and spent time answering our questions, taking photographs for us,
and otherwise providing information for this research. The authors
are also deeply indebted to Deborah Thomas and three anonymous
reviewers for critical comments on earlier versions of this work;
their time, intelligence, and suggestions enabled revised versions and
additional sources that, we hope, added significant scholarly value
to this article. We also thank the National Science Foundation, who
funded the research underlying this work (grant #0722468) under
the project title “Managed Migration and the Value of Labor.” Of
course, any errors, omissions, or other problems with the article are
not due any of these individuals or organizations but to the authors’
alone.
1. In the United States, managed migration programs consist of
importing foreign nationals on a temporary basis for work in eco-
nomic sectors that have been certified by the US Department of
Labor as suffering from labor shortages. Most US programs are
not based on intergovernmental agreements but are known by the
visas that are issued to workers, with H-2A visas issued primarily
to agricultural workers, H-2B visas issued to seasonal nonagri-
cultural workers (people in seafood processing, the hospitality
industry, fishing, and other occupations), and H-1 visas issued to
technical workers. Canada’s programs are based on intergovern-
mental agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, Jamaica, and other
countries, but also contain the provision that workers are certified
to work for one employer and do not have free access to the entire
labor market. Other dimensions of the Canadian program, such
as housing and labor control, are similar to the United States’
guest worker visa programs.
2. Domestic production refers to production based in households
and extended families that is largely oriented toward subsistence
but can also be utilized for sale; it depends on household labor
almost exclusively.
3. We are not suggesting that the forms of labor we identified
represent all forms of labor in these communities, but are distinct
enough to provide a basis for comparison.
4. This statement was uttered more or less tongue-in-cheek, and
followed by the other women laughing, despite their weeping.
Their frankness with us reflects the deep relationships we have
been able to forge with those in our study through multiple visits
in multiple contexts.
5. Scholars (e.g., Sen 2011) have measured phenomena like well-
being, but does, say, creating an index from data on levels of
education, health, earnings, and other indicators truly reflect
what we experience as well-being? It seems rather to privilege
measurement itself and devalue qualitative appreciations of human
conditions.
6. Guest workers earn around ten times abroad what they could
earn for the same work at home.
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