LABOUR PROCESS 93 husband, whether the woman had other waged work outside the home, and whether or not she used the labour of her family and friends. Her autonomy or choice was restricted to how she reconciled her waged homework with all the other demands on her time and energy. Her choice frequendy involves working unsocial hours, getting help from her family, and always turning her home into a workplace, with all its attendant inconvenience and hazards. The hidden costs and hidden labour have to be taken into account when assessing the labour process involved in homeworking. Conclusion Homeworking is not an inefficient, outdated mode of domestic production, it rather illustrates and highlights some of the advantages to capitalist production provided by a highly fragmented labour force, ideologically constructed as not a labour force by both the labour movement and employers' organisations. This construction is facilitated by the familial and domestic ideologies underlying the sexual division of labour, and the work of women in the household as non-work. From the evidence above; I conclude that homeworking is an integral part of capitalist' production in terms of organisation and control, and not part of petty commodity production; the relations between the buyers and sellers of homeworking labour are capitalist relations differing from non-homeworking relations in the degree of exploitation which is facilitated by the domestic ideology which subordinates women within the household and the labour market, and by the lack of penetration of any of the legal measures to establish and protect the rights of workers. The questions that remain unanswered are to what extent it is an important underpinning of capitalist industrial production because of its flexibility and because of the profit levels unattainable in the formal visible economy; how the conceptualisation of the labour process can be made less restrictive to encompass this intricate and efficient system of exploitation; how the methodology of social science research can be developed so that it no longer colludes in making invisible these and other forms of exploitation and subordination. Such questions relate directly to the questions of worker organisation. Both in terms of the homeworkers themselves and their claims to employee status to establish the rights and protection afforded to in-workers, and in terms of the threat this form of production continues to present to in-workers, whenever cost-cutting can be achieved by the use of unprotected labour. !st First presented at the Sociologists in Polytechnics Annual Conference, April 1981, and revised for publication. The research on homeworkers was carried out with funding from the Social Science Research Council from September 1979 to April 1981. Juila Graham worked from March 1980, both on