Own-use production
Also called: Own-use production work · Topic: Employment, Unemployment and Informalisation · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
Own-use production is work that makes goods or services mainly for your own household to use, not to sell. Examples are growing food for the family's meals, collecting firewood or fetching water. The ILO's 19th ICLS (International Conference of Labour Statisticians, 2013) treats it as a separate form of work from employment. Under that standard, employment means only work done for pay or profit. This matters for India because PLFS uses the Current Weekly Status rule, where one hour of work on any day of the week counts as being employed. That rule can include subsistence farm work that the ILO would not call employment. So India's headline worker numbers can look higher than they would under the ILO definition.
Example
A family in rural Maharashtra grows jowar on 2 ha and eats almost all of it. Under the ILO rule this is own-use production, not employment. If they sold most of the crop, they would count as employed. When countries moved to the ILO rule, the average employment-to-population ratio across 39 countries fell from 53.0% to 44.3%. The biggest falls were in low-income countries, where subsistence farming is common.
Don't confuse with
- Unpaid family worker: a helper in a family farm or shop that sells its output. They count as employed even though they get no wage, because the enterprise works for profit. Own-use production is for the household's own consumption.
- Unpaid care work: cooking, cleaning and caring for family members. It is also unpaid and left out of GDP, but it is a service, not the production of goods such as crops.