Conference Agenda

The growth of digital platforms and the new type of jobs associated with them has attracted a great deal of academic interest in recent years. Although empirical evidence shows that these jobs still have a limited impact on the overall employed population, their rapid growth suggests a significant potential for expansion. An important part of the academic literature has focused on the more disruptive and problematic changes that digital platforms introduce in different dimensions of the world of work, namely those involving workers’ mobilisations and judicial processes. In this context, the case of Uber has become paradigmatic, constituting a flagship of the digital world of work. Since then, the neologism “uberisation” began to circulate as a key word to describe the changes in labour relations brought about by the platforms, generally pointing in the direction of different forms of job insecurity and precariousness.

Even though digital intermediaries involved in the domestic and care sector have particularities related to the type of activity they carry out, they also share some characteristics with the rest of the platforms. On the one hand, most of these platforms present themselves as a technological intermediary that limits their task to connecting the needs of those who require a service with those who are willing to provide it. Therefore, these platforms tend to avoid positioning themselves as part of the labour relationship. On the other hand, however, these platforms usually structure their intervention around control mechanisms, using reputation systems that tend to be structured in one direction only, from employers to workers. These mechanisms are highly opaque to workers and promote a “culture of control” that pushes them to accept employers’ demands, even when they exceed the limits agreed at the time of recruitment.

Digital intermediaries in the domestic and care work sector present particular challenges for decent work. First, legal frameworks do not necessarily contain special provisions for domestic and care platform workers. Secondly, many (or most) workers work informally and therefore do not have access to labour and social rights.

Thus, the panel will explore how digital intermediaries contribute to and/or undermine the formalisation of paid domestic work and how they alter the dynamics of negotiating working conditions between employer and domestic worker. Using several national cases, from two very different regions (EU and Latin America), the panel will discuss the challenges brought about by digital intermediaries in the sector.

The article explains how digitally mediated domestic and care service provisions endure the invisibility and informality of care work by the individualization of risk, which we operationalize by one of its dimensions, i.e. unpaid labour. We understand unpaid labour as a cost that workers bear individually, at the intersection of the social (inter-personal) and economic (monetary) interactions for services through platforms. The study draws from the experiences of domestic and care workers providing their services through platforms. It shows how platforms enter the labour markets and welfare structures of two mature economies (i.e. Belgium and France) by their (digital) rules following ‘regulatory compliance’ and ‘disruption’ as distinctive strategies guiding the processes of platform dominance. In spite of country-based differences in processes, however, we found platform-mediated employment outcomes to remain generally unrecognised, undocumented, informal and charged with unpaid labour as the risk (cost) workers bear when providing care services through platforms.

The emergence of digital platforms is intertwined with the transformation of the welfare systems, including marketization and privatization. These processes have consequences in terms of working conditions and needs for social protection and representation of interests of care workers. The pandemic emergency raised trade union’s attention to the marginalized conditions of the workforce in this sector, composed mostly by female, migrant and precarious workers.

Through a longitudinal case study of the digital platform Helpling in Italy, we compare the working conditions of home care platform workers before and after Covid-19, adopting an intersectional approach. The research is carried out through interviews with managers, analysis of the data provided by the platform and interviews with workers, considering the role of social actors in protecting them. The results are compared between 2018 and 2023.

Digital intermediaries in the domestic and care work sector have gained prominence in recent years. However, the literature on the effects of their intervention in the sector is still very scarce. Based on a quantitative and qualitative study that includes 20 in-depth interviews with domestic workers working through the Zolvers platform in Argentina, 5 focus groups (of workers and employers) and a survey of 300 cases, this article aims to analyse the ambivalent role of these digital intermediaries. The findings of this research account for cases in which digital intermediaries contribute to the formalization of domestic work and circumstances in which they contribute to its casualization and informality.

This proposal aims at giving an insight of home service platforms in France. Based on a field work focused on four digital platforms in the context of a thesis in sociology, it gives an illustration of what this model involves, in terms of reinforcement of grey areas: some related to domestic work while others are related to digital work.

Home service digital platforms highlight the possibility they offer for domestic work to get more formalized. However, it doesn’t prevent clients and workers to communicate “in direct” once the first contact is done. In addition, for some domestic workers, digital platforms enable better security than in the informal sector.

Depending on the economic model of these platforms, and the work status, the impact on the working conditions is different. This proposal intends therefore to open some lines of thought of a model that is halfway between the formal and informal sector.

The COVID-19 pandemic generated several harmful effects on the Chilean labor market. On the one hand, employment in platforms increased, particularly in the service area, resulting in employment relations with more informal characteristics. In turn, the crisis during and after COVID-19 strongly affected households’ budgets and domestic service employment, which is the furthest behind in the post-pandemic recovery compared to other occupational categories. As a consequence, the use of platforms for contracting domestic service has increased as a household strategy. This study shows that, like other jobs on platforms, the working conditions of women workers in the sector have become more precarious, and they now have more difficulties to organize and demand their rights, which results in a set back with respect to the advances observed in the 2010s.