production, productivity, and work are among the words that have a lot of baggage for anarchists--who are engaged in a slow-motion death struggle with communists as well as capitalists. both of these c-groups over-value production, productivity, and work (as defined by them, of course) to outrageous degrees. some anarchist arguments against this overvalue are that a) people are limited to being valuable to the extent that they are productive, b) what is seen as productive is extremely constrained, c) communists accept the value of work as it is presented to us every day in this capitalist system, rather than valuing other things like play, spontaneity, etc...
so yes, production and work as commonly understood do mean a slightly more subtle form of oppression.
production is different from growing food to eat because production implies a general term, that involves looking more at what is produced (in a material sense), then in the daily relationships and interactions and small gestures that are implied by more specific language (like growing food, sewing, washing dishes, training a dog, bandaging a wound, writing an article, etc).
and the generality of the words production and work also hides the meaninglessness of a lot of people's work in the current system (paper-pushing, number-crunching, trend-analyzing, etc).
edited for verb tense agreement, sigh.