Carework Under Crisis
COVID-19 is exacerbating the ‘care crisis’ in society
The United States has long faced what’s been called the “care crisis.” Many families struggle to care for children while working long hours, and to also support elderly parents in the face of an underfunded elder care system. To bridge the gap, families often rely on unpaid care from family members or paid careworkers.
During the pandemic, careworkers are being laid off, and frontline, low-wage “essential service” workers often cannot afford to pay for care at home when schools, daycares, and eldercare support shut down. A particular cruelty of the pandemic is that caring for others is most desperately needed, but also the most risky kind of work. Like gig platform workers, domestic workers such as nannies, home health aides, and housecleaners continue to be treated as disposable and invisible, even as public relief efforts try to stem the ongoing economic and public health crisis.
Ad hoc care infrastructure
While a few state governments, such as Minnesota and Vermont, have temporarily classified grocery employees as “emergency workers” in order to entitle them to free, state-funded childcare services, in large part the lack of public investment in adequate care infrastructure has meant that the current national safety net is ad hoc, and reliant on a precarious, on-demand workforce whose health is at risk.
Domestic workers such as nannies, home health aides, and housecleaners continue to be treated as disposable and invisible.
Uber and Lyft have pledged to provide free rides and deliveries to senior citizens, as well as partnered with supermarkets like Stop & Shop to provide ride discount codes for the elderly to go food shopping. Many homecare agencies and senior centers already rely on ridehail companies to transport clients and care workers, and some city governments are recommending that elderly residents now use ridehail services rather than public transportation. To address the closure of schools and childcare centers, the governors of Texas, Rhode Island, and Louisiana have announced partnerships with Care.com to increase access to in-home childcare services to their respective residents affected by COVID-19: It is doing so by essentially offering a free 90-day trial of Care.com’s Premium membership service, which allows them to post job listings and message available careworkers. The city of Chicago has made a similar partnership with care platform UrbanSitter to offer free membership to first responders. In the private sector, some employers have addressed the crisis by offering expanded workplace benefits to their white collar employees by enrolling in Care.com’s corporate benefits program, Care@Work.
While these companies have offered up their digital labor pools to state governments as a form of crisis response, they’ve done little to support workers beyond temporarily waiving fees.
Online marketplaces like Care.com and UrbanSitter have become major clearinghouses for the informal paid care job market, operating like a kind of dating site for hiring workers or advertising care services, with a profit model based on charging a premium to allow users to get around paywalled access to employment opportunities. This means that they have an interest in boosting their subscriptions, but little incentive to be involved in the actual terms of employment or working conditions. So while these companies have offered up their digital labor pools to state governments as a form of crisis response, they’ve done little to support workers beyond temporarily waiving fees. Right now, in between emails and blog posts sharing tips for staying healthy, or providing information about the CARES Act and stay-at-home orders, Care.com continues its usual promotional emails that remind careworkers they can “earn a little extra” on the weekends by logging in to view newly-posted babysitting gigs.
What are the implications of grafting ad hoc solutions onto private companies that take little responsibility over their workforces besides serving as a “marketplace?” As Miranda Hall has pointed out, care platforms have benefitted from filling the gaps in poorly funded care infrastructures, just as ridehail platforms have exploited the gaps in cities’ public transport infrastructure in order to position their business models as necessary and indispensable. But at this point, there are at least 2.5 million domestic workers in the U.S. They are now in an impossible position that cannot be solved through a more efficient digital job market, or through the many volunteer-based mutual aid efforts on Facebook and Nextdoor that are picking up the burden for those who still need care. Such approaches continue to take care as a given, and treat the well-being of careworkers as a private, family matter.
New insecurity for domestic workers
Many scared domestic workers now have to tell their employer that they cannot risk their health by continuing to come in to work. At the same time, many others — from nannies to housecleaners to home health aides — have found themselves unemployed as households go on lock-down. The National Domestic Workers Alliance has conducted a recent rapid survey of its base to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on domestic workers and found that, as of April 9th, 72% of respondents reported having lost their incomes. A significant majority are experiencing serious food and housing insecurity.
As of April 9th, 72% of respondents reported having lost their incomes. A significant majority are experiencing serious food and housing insecurity.
The domestic workforce has been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, but even prior to its onset they had access to far fewer resources and safety nets. For one, two-thirds of domestic workers do not have health insurance. While in theory, some domestic workers must be classified as household employees and are therefore entitled to collect unemployment, in practice most work “off the books” by taking cash payment, which excludes them from accessing these benefits. Undocumented workers are the most vulnerable within the workforce; they are excluded from many workplace protections, have been excluded from forthcoming federal stimulus payments, and fear deportation crackdowns that have not relented under the current crisis. Like others in the workforce who are not able to sequester away and work remotely, domestic workers are primarily people of color and overwhelmingly women.
Domestic work as gig work
Further complicating the situation is the growing overlap between domestic workers as a vulnerable workforce and the gig platform economy, whose workforce has seen uneven responses from companies that broker and then take a cut of household services on demand. Unlike the ridehail behemoths that continue to have fleets of precarious drivers on the roads, some of the smaller gig platform companies in this space have simply gone under. Takl, for instance, a gig platform for home services, abruptly ceased operations. Press releases note that the company’s 80 employees in their Nashville headquarters have been laid off, but make no mention of its primary workforce: the legions of independent contractors who were working in 75 metropolitan markets in 41 states, or even how many of them there were. Handy, a housecleaning app, has continued largely business-as-usual, offering no public communications about the COVID-19 crisis. Handy typically leverages hefty and punitive penalty fees against its independent contractors, docking their pay over minor “offenses” like being late to a job, which leaves workers in debt to the platform. Cleaning workers complaining about continuing to be hit with these fees are receiving no safety guidance from Handy, having been met with autoreply responses from Handy’s official Twitter account.
Domestic workers may be too fragmented across different platforms, employers, and work arrangements to be able to mobilize.
Domestic workers are also the invisible workforce impacted by mass cancellations on Airbnb, as a significant secondary market of cleaning services relies largely on Airbnb apartment rentals. Most media coverage and backlash against Airbnb during the pandemic has centered on the financial impacts for their hosts. Airbnb announced it would offset some of their losses by pledging $250 million to support hosts, but it’s unclear if any of that money will trickle down to cleaners. Furthermore, many Airbnb cleaners are themselves independent contractors who are hired by other gig platform companies that cater to Airbnb hosts. While other workers in the gig economy, like Instacart shoppers, are going on strike to protest the company’s poor response to workers’ well being, domestic workers may be too fragmented across different platforms, employers, and work arrangements to be able to mobilize in the same ways.
The particular ways that the outbreak has impacted close-contact, people-facing jobs has prompted numerous speculations that accelerated automation is going to mitigate public health risks by replacing frontline workers with robots. But caregiving work cannot be social-distanced away with self-checkout machines. Neither can most other jobs, which will continue to rely on often-invisible, under-compensated labor. What is happening, however, is that privatized, tech-oriented efforts to mitigate the care crisis have followed the same trajectories that devalue workers, put them at risk, and place the economic burden of caregiving onto families. The long term impact of the pandemic on jobs is still unknown, but the crisis has put in stark relief the ways in which the labor of caring for children, sweeping floors, and cooking meals for elderly people is crucial for everyone’s survival, but is rarely considered an important aspect of our economy, and the greater public good.
Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher on the Labor Futures team at Data & Society, and co-author of the ethnographic report, Beyond Disruption: How Tech Shapes Labor Across Domestic Work and Ridehailing.
