Credit labour: Navigating household debt in Southern Europe

Abstract

In dialogue with scholarship on social reproduction and debt, this article discusses the financialization of domestic economies through the concept of credit labour. Based on comparative research in Southern Europe (Greece and Spain), we analyse the ways in which labour is mobilized along different trajectories of indebted kinship networks. Alongside their similarities – including their familist welfare regimes and the importance of homeownership for household reproduction and upward social mobility – the Greek and Spanish cases display important disparities regarding the different pace of their bankification processes, their diverging entanglements of credit and migratory projects, and their contrasting social and political responses to the debt crises. Ethnographically exploring credit labour, traversing debt pathways – from accessing credit, to managing debt and defaulting on loans – manifests a particular ‘gender division of debt’, with women primarily bearing the toll. Such time- and energy-consuming effort involves the entanglement of analytically different modalities of work, that may take the form of providing care; building, maintaining or repairing social bonds; dealing with bureaucracies; or engaging in militant actions. The comparison of our case studies unveils the variegated and historically contingent ways in which value extraction from increasingly financialized households takes place. On a more analytical level, understanding credit as labour depicts it as instrumental in relation to finance accumulation, co-producing the forms of relatedness necessary for such accumulation, as well as shaping its limits.