WageIndicator - Women In Gig Work: Opportunities and challenges for domestic workers on digital platforms in the US, South Africa and India
Women in Gig Work, WageIndicator’s fifth webinar on the platform economy, focused on specifically on domestic workers who offer their services thourgh digital platforms.
After Claire Hobden’s keynote speech, it was the turn of the panel discussion, moderated by Olivia Blanchard, a researcher for the Mobile World Capital Foundation who collaborates with the WageIndicator Gig Team.
The panel discussion
Thanks to the panel discussion, we could deepen the scenario of three countries where on-demand cleaning and care platforms have predominantly expanded in the last few years: the United States, South Africa and India. Julia Ticona, Fairuz Mullagee and Aayush Rathi respectively described what the platform economy looks like locally, and shared opportunities and issues resulting from their research and workers’ interviews.
Differences and similarities
“Platforms are not disrupting the sector: they are exploiting what was already there in these labor market sectors: informality and the presence of intermediaries”, Julia Ticona, Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, emphasized.
“Care.com is the biggest, a kind of Amazon of domestic work. It has a lot of workers registered on the platform, but also many employers. And Facebook is an extremely important platform too,” she added.
With regard to the question why workers choose platforms for their work, Julia Ticona said that “from a worker’s perspective, platforms offer a semblance of professionalism, and a bit of control over who they work for. These are strong motivations for workers to sign up in the first place.”
Aayush Rathi, Senior Researcher at Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, agreed on the fact that “platforms as intermediaries have assumed the role to connect domestic workers to employers,” even if word of mouth is still predominant, when it comes to finding a job. However, platforms have expanded so much that it’s now impossible to not talk about domestic and care work on digital platforms anymore.
In addition to this, “while food delivery and taxi driving are male-dominated sectors, domestic work is over-represented by women who often migrate without partners or families.” This does not exclude that men are quite often engaged by platforms’ promises of professionalism and ‘packages’ of professional training. Their marketing is the major draw for many of them.
As reported by Fairuz Mullagee, Coordinator of the Social Law Project at the Faculty of Law at University of the Western Cape, platforms offering cleaning and care services in South Africa began to slowly emerge in 2014. They became a lot more visible from 2018 onwards, when spotlights turned to the widespread deactivation of Uber accounts.
South Africa has seen the birth and the growth of a few small, localized platforms, emerging in an atmosphere of general enthusiasm. Then, issues soon made their appearance: the idea of flexible work and easy access to the platforms did not prevent workers from losing their jobs, being forced to find up to five employers per week to make a living, and seeing their work devalued, whatever their expertise was. “As it is now, domestic work does not provide the chance to make a career or to earn more as time goes by. There are no possibilities for personal and professional growth.”
Pay is still a big issue
Panelists agreed that there are challenges that affect South African platform domestic workers, as well as Indian and US-based ones:
- The first challenge is pay. Workers do not often have enough gigs to earn a decent income. On the contrary, if they work long hours, they need to find multiple employers, and in many cases, that’s not even enough to make a living.
- Secondly, lack or reduction of social protections make them face their vulnerability on a daily basis.
- Thirdly, the hidden costs have a huge impact on their income. Platforms’ commissions remain generally high, and to make matters worse, workers are called to incur equipment costs (such as uniforms).
All this to say that platforms are designed to optimize one side’s experience: the customer’s. This power dynamic makes it impossible for workers to fight for their rights or benefit from grievance mechanisms.
The second session of Women in Gig Work in March 2023 will focus on the gendered experiences of online web-based platform work, including on both freelance and microtask platforms. This will be the topic of the Women in Gig Part 2 webinar, scheduled for March 2023.