This book is for the moment of doing that, repeated many times across a working life, until the work becomes visible as work rather than a small task at the end of the day.
The Last Assembly is structured in eight chapters. An opening scene at the kitchen table with a flat-pack box. A history of the Bauhaus, where half the first cohort were women and almost all were sent to the same workshop. A history of postwar Swedish design, where folkhemmet and a teenage businessman from Småland produced the company that became IKEA. A history of flat-pack as an economic mechanism, and of the labour it quietly transfers. A look at who in the household actually performs that labour, drawing on the 2022 Canadian Time Use Survey. A reading of Dalla Costa, James, and Federici on the structural invisibility of domestic work. A reading of the gender wage gap as the visible consequence of that invisibility. A closing return to the room where the essay began.
