Housing and the right to work

Jessie Hohmann

Chapter 7 in Housing and Human Rights, 2026, pp 174-199 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores the right to work and its connection with housing, particularly with enjoying adequate housing as a human right. After sketching the main justifications for the importance of work, it sets out the content of the international human rights instruments enshrining a right to work. It then explores three themes. First, the relationship between productive labour and rent seeking and the role of housing investment in that question; second, the conceptual divide between the house as a space of leisure and the workplace as somewhere beyond it; third, assessing the implications of a promised ‘post-work’ world prompted by mechanization and technology. These themes demonstrate that while our human rights documents assume that work underpins adequate housing as a social right, this chapter show a more complex and contested relationship, one that has always been contentious, and which remains pressing in questions of human rights enjoyment.

Keywords: Productive Labour; Financialization; Rent seeking; Leisure; Social Reproduction; Post-work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035309733
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