‘Cash-In-Hand Work: Unravelling Informal Employment from the Moral Economy of Favours’

Abstract

Through the study of cash-in-hand work, an illicit type of monetary transaction often seen to epitomise unbridled profit-motivated market exchange, the aim of this paper is to challenge the dominant narrative that monetary transactions are universally market-like and profit-motivated. Until now, most studies contesting this narrative have focused upon relatively small marginal sites (e.g., car boot sales, local currency schemes) that can be simply explained away as peripheral or even superfluous to an understanding of monetised exchange in the mainstream economy. Unravelling the characteristics and logics of monetary exchange in this larger economic sphere can be viewed as an exemplar of unconstrained profit-motivated market exchange, however, the intention is to provide a more robust challenge to the view that monetary transactions are always profit- motivated than has so far been the case. To do this, the conventional focus of studies of cash-in-hand work on its variable magnitude is transcended and instead, evidence is reported of a study conducted in North Nottinghamshire that investigates the characteristics and logics underpinning such work. This reveals that although there exists cash-in-hand work of both an ‘organised’ and ‘autonomous’ variety that is conducted under profit-motivated market-like exchange relations (what I here call ‘informal employment’), there is also cash-in-hand work imbued with not-for-profit rationales and non-market economic relations that represents a ‘moral economy of paid favours’ and is more akin to unpaid mutual aid. This paper thus concludes that if not-for-profit monetised transactions can be found even in this sphere, then those contesting the view that monetised exchange is always profit- motivated so as to illuminate alternative futures beyond profit- motivated capitalism should be encouraged to extend their enquiries to more mainstream economic spaces in order to mount a more serious challenge to the hegemony of capitalist relations.