Although transnational and global studies of migration, consumption, or economic integration have reconfigured how the history of work and workers is written, few venture beyond the boundaries of standard employment. In contrast, the aim of this forum is to study practices and habits of not-working while at work on the one hand and forms of “wageless life” beyond unemployment on the other. The three articles that fall firmly into the latter camp cover activities on the margins or plainly outside the formal economy, including activist work, sex work and prison work. With their characteristically large share of unacknowledged work – and with their strong implications for civil and human rights, including the right to self-determined work, which underline how closely these rights are linked to the value of labour in European democracies –, these are outliers or exceptions in standard depictions of work. Yet as another article shows, this is by no means self-explanatory, as lines of demarcation have been repeatedly expanded at the Court of Justice of the European Communities. The inquiry into where labour actually begins and ends in European welfare states bridges over to the articles that analyse how the boundaries of working and non-working practices were negotiated at workplaces in different trades and industries.  

The Palais d'Amour in Hamburg was a prostitute residence in St. Pauli. Willi Bartels, the so-called “King of St. Pauli”, was the operator. 7 August 1968.