Hidden platform subsidies: the role of social networks in concealing (too) low income on care work platforms

This article explores how digital platforms have changed working conditions and labor relations in domestic and care work in recent years. The study focuses on Hogarú, a digital platform in Colombia. Through a qualitative study involving interviews and focus groups, we analyze Hogarú’s business model, along with the changes in working conditions for domestic workers compared to traditional employment methods. The study highlights two main findings. First, digital platforms can enhance domestic workers’ bargaining power by raising awareness of their rights, professionalizing their work, promoting physical meeting spaces with other workers, providing ongoing training, and ensuring fundamental rights. Second, while digital platforms can shift the traditional labor relationship from one where the domestic worker directly offers care services to one managed by the company, power imbalances and low recognition of this work persist. This article offers insights into digital labor platforms from the perspective of the workers involved.

In the last few years, the proliferation of digital labour platforms has led to the transformation of business models and labour relations in an increasing number of economic activities, including highly feminized and informal traditional sectors, such as care and domestic work. Drawing on an analysis of 37 digital care platforms in Spain, this research compares the distinctive features and structural power dynamics they engender, and it constructs a taxonomy of business models of these care platforms. By analysing the main features of their operational models, we are capable of distinguishing three main types of platforms: marketplace, on‐demand, and digital placement agencies. First, the paper argues that the distinctive features of each digital platform business model have differentiated impacts on working conditions in terms of access to tasks, remuneration, flexibility and means of control. This differentiation allows us to understand what is transformative and what is continuous in platforms' precarization or formalisation of care work and working conditions of carers, mainly women and migrants. Each business model has its differentiated outcomes in terms of labour control and reorganization of women's and migrants' reproductive work. Second, more broadly, while digital care platforms may have contributed to facilitating workers' access to jobs, reducing transaction costs and standardising processes, this has often been through the creation of more flexible and insecure forms of work and to increased market pressures. Therefore, this study contributes to existing research addressing the degree of formalization of labour relations in digital platform work through a nuanced analysis of their business models.

Digital platforms are a new reality of today’s global economy and the major driving force of its development. Digital labour platforms are a fast-growing element of the global labour market; they ensure interaction between customers and service providers, concentrate digital labour capital, and are actually beyond the scope of monitoring and regulation exercised by national institutions. Digital labour platforms shift the drawbacks of national labour markets online and scale them. The purpose of the article is to study the features of the formation and development of digital labour platforms, identify social and economic risks of such employment and develop the ways to adapt state regulation. The essential aspects of employment services on digital platforms have been explored and positive and negative aspects of digital employment platforms have been identified. Emphasis is placed on the study of peculiarities of employment through digital platforms. It has been found out that digital platforms help to minimize workforce within companies, but at the same time, they increase the use of freelance work. Digital platforms have proved to promote non-standard employment, shift and scale the drawbacks of national labour markets into online space. A comparative analysis of the main characteristics of employment through digital platforms in terms of on-hire employment and self-employment has been made. It has been justified that the provision of services through digital platforms has mixed signs of employment and self-employment. It has been determined that the main risks of employment through digital platforms for Ukraine are scaling up shadow employment in online space, weakening the country’s labour potential and the lack of social protection. The ways to minimize risk and adapt national employment policy to the challenges of digitalization of the economy have been offered. It has been substantiated that the main measures for the national employment policy adaptation are: normative regulation of the terminology and criteria for such employment, development and implementation of tools for its monitoring and regulation, launch of a common health insurance system of those who are employed through digital platforms.

As demand for privately organized care and domestic work has grown, digital platforms have emerged as key intermediaries connecting prospective workers with clients. Drawing on unique survey data collected in Germany in 2019, this study offers a systematic analysis of the sociodemographic characteristics of platform-mediated care and domestic workers, with particular focus on their family and household compositions and their motivations for using a digital care-work platform. The study’s findings reveal similarities between these workers, traditional care and domestic workers, and other platform workers in the gig economy. This study also focuses on how this work serves as a strategy for reconciling paid work with unpaid family responsibilities. Importantly, a noticeable proportion of the workers have unpaid care responsibilities for children or other family members and friends while pursuing platform work. When asked about their reasons for using a digital platform, the workers mostly name the income potential, job flexibility, and independence that this platform-mediated work provides. However, the motivations of different groups of workers vary: those with children more often value the balance of paid work and family life that this work offers, while financial incentives and professional development are less of a priority.

Digital domestic work platforms have grown in the past few years, enabling employers to source paid domestic work via an app. Few studies have looked at the impact that digital domestic work platforms have on the working conditions and well-being of domestic workers. This study draws on the International Labour Organization’s Decent Work framework to explore the extent to which the domestic work platform SweepSouth offers opportunities for decent work. Findings are based on in-depth qualitative interviews with domestic workers employed by SweepSouth. The research revealed that working hours and autonomy were experienced as positive by domestic workers. However, wages remain insufficient to sustain a quality life. Furthermore, the lack of control over work time, an absence of union representation and collective bargaining power, and no social benefits have a negative impact on domestic workers’ working conditions. Algorithmic ratings from clients also put extra pressure on domestic workers to render quality cleaning services. Finally, this study shows that domestic work remains unstable and insecure and that digital domestic work platforms do little to improve the lives of domestic workers.

In recent years, many countries have witnessed a progressive commodification of domestic and care services. Service provision has become increasingly diversified, and the domestic and care sector has also been part of a general trend of progressive ‘platformisation’, as both local and multinational digital labour platforms (DLPs) have entered the market. Despite its growing prominence, the platformisation of domestic and care work has remained relatively under-researched. This symposium aims to provide a global perspective on the evolving landscape of platform-mediated domestic and care work, drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. The papers in the symposium deepen the scholarly discussion by advancing the analysis in at least four key directions. First, they examine the diversification of digital labour platforms’ business models in the domestic and care sectors, assessing management practices and their impact on working conditions. Second, they explore the regulatory and welfare frameworks of different national contexts, considering how institutional structures and the neoliberal promise of flexible solutions to care crises influence the discourse on platform workers’ working conditions. The third and fourth dimensions take a more micro-level approach, focusing on workers’ lived experiences, perceptions and strategies for navigating digital labour platforms.

Women’s unpaid care and domestic work is gaining relevance in policy-making as well as in academia. Feminist scholars and activists have lobbied successfully for the integration of unpaid care and domestic work into the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 5.4) of the United Nations in the hope for greater recognition of women’s contribution to the economy. Policy documents about social reproduction highlight women’s disproportionate share of reproductive activities as an obstacle to women’s economic empowerment and as a relic of ‘traditional’ gender roles. Social reproduction is thereby not understood as a merit in itself, but as an obstacle to women’s participation in paid labour. Policy implications will enable certain empowerment effects for some women, but at the same time promote the increasing privatization and commodification of reproductive work across the globe. Rising inequalities between the Global North and South and between women along the categories of class and race will be one major result. To theoretically explain such contradictory effects of the recognition of social reproduction, I use the concept of ‘enclosures’ based on Marx’ ‘primitive accumulation’. Feminist scholars use the concept to explain how unpaid care and housework is commodified or de-commodified to integrate women into the paid labour force or to reduce the costs of social reproduction according to the needs of the economy. The sudden interest in unpaid care and domestic work e.g. in the Sustainable Development Goals can therefore be seen as process of double enclosure, which integrates women into the paid labour force, but also sets the grounds for the further commodification of domestic and care work. This paper aims to critically discuss the sudden interest in unpaid domestic and care work and its contradictory effects from a Marxist feminist perspective and reflects on feminist strategies and movements in global governance. After introducing Marxist perspectives on social reproduction, the question if and how feminist ideas and concepts have been appropriated, the effects and implications of global policies on social reproduction and global inequalities, as well as possible counter-strategies will be discussed.

As the need for care has grown, paid care and domestic work in the private home is increasingly being organised on the market. Today, digital platforms serve as intermediaries for care and domestic services but systematic research on the resulting work arrangements between workers and clients remains limited. By understanding platform-mediated care and domestic work arrangements as a (social) exchange of ‘love and money’ between workers and clients, the study explores the working conditions and the worker-client relationships that emerge. Drawing on unique survey data collected on a large digital platform in Germany in 2019, the study shows that care and domestic workers who offer their services on digital platforms often experience informal work arrangements characterised by low working hours and irregular shifts. The worker-client relationships are described as amicable more than professional. They are often built on continuity, long-termism and reliability, which are essential for a lasting relationship. This challenges the on-demand, economic logic characterising other forms of platform work.

This chapter explains how the language of entrepreneurship masks subordination and alters the exploitation of reproductive labor. Tracing the implications of neoliberalism’s human capital theory for contemporary views of children, child-rearing, reproductive labor, and the advent of innovation education, the chapter interrogates both the intensification of mothering and paid domestic work. Using gig economy care work platforms like Care.com as an example, the chapter shows how domestic workers are increasingly called on to brand themselves and are treated as individual entrepreneurs. In doing so, the chapter attends to how reproductive laborers are being incorporated into the neoliberal notion of homo entrepreneur. This dynamic reveals how digital care work platforms obfuscate and perhaps even worsen the stratification of reproductive labor while claiming to solve problems in care work through a novel digital platform.

An increasing number of workers turn to digital platforms – such as Fiverr, Freelancer, and Upwork – as an alternative to traditional work arrangements. Digital platforms govern how gig workers join, move through, and leave platforms – often with the help of self-learning algorithms. While digital platforms and algorithms take on HRM practices, we know little about how HRM activities unfold on digital work platforms in the gig economy. The study therefore aims to understand how HRM activities apply to and take shape on digital platforms by studying worker perceptions. We combine supervised text analysis with an in-depth qualitative content analysis, relying on 12’924 scraped comments from an online forum of workers on Upwork. We outline five conversations on HRM practices that pertain to access and mobility, training and development, scoring and feedback, appraisal and control and platform literacy and support. Based on these findings, we build five propositions about how digital work platforms employ HRM activities. Our paper contributes to recent work on HRM on digital platforms by (1) developing a new mixed-methods approach that illustrates how the content of HRM practices may differ from traditional organizations, (2) highlighting the changing role of actors in creating HRM practices by introducing the concept of ‘crowd-created’ HRM practices, and (3) conceptualizing how digital platforms employ a ‘hybrid HRM approach’.

Domestic and care work is a largely feminized sector marked by high levels of informality, low wages, and precarious working conditions worldwide. Over the past decade, particularly in the United States and Europe, new intermediaries have emerged, organizing search and hiring services through digital platforms. More recently, significantly driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, these platforms have proliferated in Latin America, raising questions about the effects of this new form of intermediation in the region. While the dominant global view on digital labor platforms is that they lead to the precarization of working conditions, emerging international literature questions whether they might contribute to the formalization of the sector. This hypothesis is based on recognizing certain characteristics of digital intermediaries that can institutionalize the employment relationship in an activity that largely operates outside of regulation, where direct hiring and personalized negotiation of working conditions prevail. At the same time, the literature warns that certain business models of these platforms contribute to non-formalization and promote hiring practices that deepen precariousness. Within this debate, this article aims to contribute to understanding the intermediation methods of these new actors in Latin America, considering that the employment classification of workers is crucial for their access to rights. To this end, the article presents a regional mapping of digital platforms operating in the sector and proposes a typology based on the business models and types of hiring promoted by the studied platforms.

This report analyses the issue of unpaid care and domestic work in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) using Oxfam’s Rapid Care Assessment tool. The report explores how different communities across OPT define unpaid care and domestic work through a gender lens; how they distribute this work across the household, the average hours spent by women and men on care work and how intersectional factors influence this time allocation. The report examines the trends that influence those roles and responsibilities, particularly in a context of protracted crisis, and how issues like economic deterioration, electricity crisis and climate change in the Gaza Strip increase the care work carried out by women and girls. The report highlights areas for action: recognizing and reducing the responsibility of care work for women and girls, raising awareness and educating about the redistribution of unpaid care and domestic work at the household level between men and women, and at the state level, accessing affordable basic services.

The United Nations collects data at gigabyte scale from the member countries for sustainable development goals, and recognizes the impact big data collection has on opportunities and risks for sustainable development. The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) open data hub provided a dataset that details the "proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic chores and care work" world wide. This primary dataset is only a portion of the data available related to the research area. This data contains many related variables, such as the population's age, sex, and location metrics. In an effort to better understand the impact of unpaid domestic work, the dataset was analyzed in conjunction with another dataset from the UN Statistics Division that details the rate of divorce/separation in the world population. Our analysis included methods such as principal component analysis, the k-means clustering algorithm, the random forest clustering algorithm, and implementing a neural network. The principal components were clustered using the k-means algorithm to cluster the variables in a manner that explains the variance present in the dataset. The analysis found that age, sex, and location demographics are key variables that explain the diverse variation between countries and the percentage of time spent on unpaid domestic work.Machine learning algorithms enabled the confirmation of this relationship. Using the key variables identified, a random forest of decision trees and a neural network were generated to classify the percentage of time spent on unpaid domestic work. Similarly, the random forest algorithm and a neural network were also implemented to classify geographical regions. These models were compared to determine the strength of the relationship between age, sex, location metrics, the percentage of time spent, and geographical regions.The analysis detailed in this work strives to identify the social factors that classify the percentage of time spent on unpaid domestic work in accordance with the UN SDG 5.4, which is to "recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure, and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate."

Domestic care workers have long been largely invisible in labour statistics and in public and policy debates. The emergence of digital labour intermediaries has exposed domestic care workers to a new, but problematic, individual visibility: to find jobs and customers, they must create digital public profiles with personal information. Accordingly, scholars emphasise that this individualised visibility poses risks to privacy and security of domestic care workers. We argue in this paper that labour market intermediaries create not only an individualised visibility of domestic care workers, but also a new collective visibility that leads to more public debate about their working conditions and societal recognition. Methodologically, our argument is based on qualitative interviews with founders and managing directors of companies who mediate domestic care work in Switzerland. Drawing on the concept and literature on market moralisation, we consider these companies to be moral entrepreneurs. Based on our interest in how they frame the social value of commodified care work, we applied a discourse-analytic perspective. We found that the moral entrepreneurs use four central narratives to highlight their societal contribution. They claim to formalise care work, increase the public recognition of care work, emancipate women and integrate migrants. Based on these findings, we discuss these moralising narratives as ambivalent: although they reify a problematic feminisation, migrantisation and neoliberalisation of domestic care work, they enhance the collective visibility of care workers. Subsequently, the increased visibility might contribute to put working conditions in domestic care on the public agenda and lead to positive change.

International labour migration has expanded across the globe creating new migration patterns within countries in the southern hemisphere. Domestic service is one such informal labour sector where international labour migration is taking place. This large-scale transnational labour migration from Southeast Asian nations, in particular, is due to an increased demand for domestic and care workers in the service industries of countries in the northern and southern hemisphere. Domestic service has become one of the key drivers of female labour migration. Hochschild refers to this type of migration as ‘care drain’, in which women from Third World countries leave their own children in the care of female relatives back home and migrate to care for the children and households of professional women in the West to support their own families. The intimacy that often characterizes the relationship between the employer and the domestic worker makes her seem like a family member – not a worker. This sense of intimacy can be misleading, however, as the relationship between the domestic worker and the employer is characterized by a difference of status, resources and power. According to an estimate given by the International Labour Organization (hereinafter referred to as ILO), domestic work constitutes one of the largest, yet least visible service industries in the world. The increase in female migration and the nature of domestic work constitutes a major challenge to the protection of the human and labour rights of domestic workers. As domestic work is performed within the privacy of the home, it is frequently excluded from the scope of labour legislation. Human Rights Watch has stated that almost 30 per cent of the world’s domestic workers are employed in countries where they are excluded from national labour laws, including weekly rest days, limits to hours of work, minimum wage coverage and overtime pay. Even when partially covered, domestic workers are often excluded from key protections such as minimum age requirements, maternity leave, social security and occupational health measures. Historically, performing domestic service for another’s household has been an important way of earning a livelihood for women. Affluent families in both developing and developed countries engage both local and migrant women domestic workers. In recent years, Pakistan has become an employment destination for migrant Filipino domestic workers (hereinafter referred to as MFDWs), who are being employed by affluent Pakistani households, despite the presence of a large number of Pakistani female domestic workers available to take such positions. The employment of MFDWs is increasingly a marker of status and affluence, reflecting the racialized and class hierarchies that continue to infuse the sphere of domestic work, both in Pakistan and elsewhere. Based on a small, exploratory, sample qualitative study of the lived experiences of MFDWs, this chapter addresses the question of whether international human rights and labour standards can provide protection and empowerment to MFDWs. Drawing upon the feminist concept of ‘women’s agency’, this chapter examines the extent to which law reforms, drawing upon evolving human rights standards, can support migrant domestic workers’ capacity for agency, and more effective implementation of decent work standards.