Who cares in the gig economy?
On-demand models are changing domestic work
“Doers” and domestic workers
Like many on-demand companies, Handy, an app that sends a housecleaner to your door at the tap of a phone screen, relies on a workforce of independent contractors. Takarah, a black woman in her thirties who lives in Harlem, began relying on the app full-time to find gigs after the cleaning company that was her main source of income suddenly, and without warning, stopped giving her hours. I interviewed Takarah (a pseudonym) as part of Data & Society’s ongoing research on the gig economy. While she liked that the Handy app gave her time flexibility to more easily care for her young daughter, she found many of Handy’s rules to be routinely stressful.
When a client is absent or non-responsive when a cleaner shows up, Handy mandates that its cleaners wait in the immediate vicinity (tracked by phone geolocation) of the client’s home for a full thirty minutes before Handy will compensate them for a cancellation. Takarah told me that Handy’s wait policy meant standing for half an hour on a sidewalk with a cartful of cleaning gear, sometimes in harsh winter weather. But she also found the experience particularly uncomfortable because, she added, as a black woman, she “stood out” as she waited outside the homes of her wealthy, usually white clients in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side:
“I felt like I was making other people uncomfortable because I was there, and they didn’t know why I was there.”
Sometimes, she added, the looks she got from passersby prompted her to explain her presence, assuring them that she was a housekeeper waiting to be let in. Occasionally, she preferred to cut her losses and leave before the half hour was up, even though it meant time wasted and lost pay for the client’s error.
Handy, which launched in 2012 and now operates in 30 cities throughout the U.S., is a company that, together with online caregiving marketplaces like Care.com and UrbanSitter, has entered an industry, domestic work, with a heavily skewed demographic: 95% of housecleaners, nannies, and caregivers are women, over half of whom are women of color and, in states like New York, nearly 40% of whom are non-naturalized immigrants.
Recently, a series of ads put out by Fiverr, an online gig marketplace, drew public ire for brazenly laying out what critics perceive as the race to the bottom pushing workers in the gig economy towards ever more dismal working conditions, in exchange for mostly symbolic rewards. One ad shows a close-up shot of a young white woman gazing wearily outward, lidded eyes connecting with the equally tired commuters that face the ad in the packed trains of cities like New York. Overlaid is the tagline: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.” But the lighting is glamorous, evoking fashion photography. Her hair has been tousled into a semblance of disheveled. Her tired gaze doubles as the jaded expression of a cover model.
As Caroline Jack points out, stories about what on-demand platform companies do, both as business ventures and as drivers of cultural transformation, play a role in binding together these disparate industries and forms of labor: cheap, convenient, and fast services made possible through the empowerment of entrepreneurial, independent contract workers who benefit from the scaling of these industries via digital platforms.
Women who do housekeeping or care work, though, are generally not the people placed at the forefront of these narratives. And they’re not placed at the forefront of the critiques either:
Much of the fascination value of the gig economy as a phenomenon is in the imagined figure of the downwardly mobile, middle-class (often white) person who seems to have unfortunately “dropped” into the labor pool of the service industry and started treading water.
Rather, it is usually the “doers” of the Fiverr ads, who are “doing what they love” who become the subject of analysis and think pieces. The riskiness and caffeine-driven frenzy that Fiverr’s ad takes for granted is glamorized in a way intended to signal a status more akin to that of a professional, creative class freelancer than that of a housecleaner or caregiver — that is, labor that has traditionally been devalued and treated as “unskilled” and low-status by society. This has little to do with actual skill or value, and very much to do with race, gender, and history.
Context and the need for ethnography
The specificities and histories of different industries matter, because they mean the experiences of gig workers in one sector can’t be substituted with those in another. And they matter because they shape our society’s relative measures for understanding what “fair” and “good” work looks like — and who “deserves” better. While glamour is the consolation prize offered to the newly precarious, companies bringing on-demand services into historically low-wage, low-status work may be banking on an advantage of low expectations.
Discourses about the gig economy often emerge from the generative gap between oversold promises and patchier realities. In some places, that gap is narrower, and on-demand businesses may be beginning to produce or reinforce existing inequalities across workers within a given industry. Ethnographic approaches are well-equipped to surface these changes.
Data & Society is currently working on a project that looks at how domestic workers experience their work under increasingly technologically mediated conditions, and how they weigh decisions about these platforms. Currently, there is little existing ethnographic research on on-demand domestic work, whether for caregiving or housekeeping. One recent report by the Overseas Development Institute uses the South African context as a case study for the “Uberization” of domestic work. Based in interviews with workers themselves, the study found that on-demand domestic work models have not necessarily been empowering for the women who use them. On the one hand, the research found, work through mobile apps enabled workers to generate documentation of time spent and money earned in an industry where wage theft is common. But on the other hand, the on-demand apps merely reinforced many existing power relations such as racial discrimination. Apps provided only limited autonomy and flexibility to workers and created bigger hurdles for domestic workers with less technological literacy and access.
In our field research conducting interviews with domestic workers within the U.S., we’ve begun to see similarly conflicted dynamics. Our work also builds on that of Data & Society researcher Alex Rosenblat’s past three years of field research on Uber drivers, finding that workers in the ride-hailing sector vary widely in their motivations for working in the gig economy.
As on-demand companies like Handy and online marketplaces like Care.com enter the space of domestic work, a range of questions emerge: what are the risks and challenges of signing up for platform-based work as an immigrant? As a non-native English speaker? How are experiences of work different for individuals with strong professional identities as caregivers or housekeepers, versus more casual workers who may also be finding other kinds of work via Postmates or Uber?
Domestic work in the United States is already skewed against certain workers: a 2012 survey of U.S. domestic workers conducted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance found that black and Latina domestic workers around the country are paid less than their white counterparts. But there are also important, less quantifiable dimensions beyond just aspects like pay or benefits that matter to people in their work — like dignity, well-being, and respect. Takarah’s frustrations with being pushed into uncomfortable and difficult situations by an app’s hard rules need to be accounted for in thinking about the consequences of technological transformations of labor. Where seemingly “external” conditions of racial and class inequalities come into play, on-demand platforms are not neutral parties in meaning-making.
Is a babysitter a gig worker?
While we puzzle over what counts as part of the gig economy, domestic workers have long been fighting to be seen as part of the economy at all. Domestic work entails a wide range of working arrangements, legal/classification statuses, and often informally-designated employment relationships. Often, though, they are simply “off the books,” in which case we know far less about their work arrangements or even how many of them there are.
What domestic work does share with the wider gig economy is flexibility, precarious access to work and hours, and little regulation of working arrangements. Ai-jen Poo, the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, has pointed out that domestic workers are “the original gig economy workers,” in particular because they “have experienced its dynamics, struggled with its challenges, and most importantly found some solutions to survive as a vulnerable workforce.” Housecleaners, moreover, have long been fighting labor battles in a layered terrain of third parties deferring responsibility for workers’ rights and well-being. From Harvard’s recent efforts to deflect ownership of a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel’s union-seeking housekeeping staff, to workspace startup WeWork’s conflict with its cleaning staff. In 2015, WeWork’s third-party cleaning company fired all its workers when they tried to unionize, and came upon the “solution” to directly hire a new staff of cleaners. WeWork then refused to re-hire its union-seeking and now jobless former cleaners, despite their pleas to get their jobs back. Domestic work may be starting to look even more like the rest of the gig economy, or vice versa.
And yet, this sector, in particular caregiving work, is often ignored in mainstream conversations about the gig economy. Part of this is because on-demand companies like Handy or online marketplaces like Care.com project a “softer” image of the gig economy. Lauren Mansell, the CEO of on-demand babysitting app Hello Sitter, explicitly distanced her startup from the “bad connotations” of companies like Uber — presumably not only its reputation for evading regulation, but also its machismo-laden rhetoric and aesthetics of risk-taking entrepreneurship. Housecleaners and babysitters are not being courted with the promises of fervid independence that Uber pitches to its “driver-partners” or Fiverr to its “doers.”
The invisibility of gendered gig work
Traditionally a part of the “gray” economy, domestic work has often been characterized as “invisible” labor. That invisibility is also being reproduced in how we study and understand how work is changing. For one, conversations about the gig economy have not paid much attention to race, gender, and class dynamics, which are incredibly salient in this sector. Moreover, domestic work itself resists visibility to platforms through quantification or tracking in ways typical to other on-demand business models. Additionally, researchers have limited access to what goes on behind the closed doors of the private home that doubles as a workplace for many people.
The first point is partly attributable to the fact that Uber as a company has become a symbol of the gig economy as a whole, and its 86% male workforce is becoming a stand-in for the rest of gig workers’ experiences. By contrast, a 2016 report on “Gig Work, Online Selling and Home Sharing” put out by Pew Research found that women make up 55% of gig workers. When discussions of gender and labor do enter the picture, it is online selling platform Etsy, with a perfectly flipped gender balance (86% female seller base), or white collar freelance work that is the go-to representative for women’s experiences — sometimes accompanied by declarations that “flexible work is the future of feminism.” But this is hardly helpful for understanding the experiences of women doing traditionally low-wage, “pink collar” work, particularly since the women doing the work are less likely to be white.
Finally, domestic work itself is just not amenable to the same kinds of surveillance as Uber or Postmates. The ways that Uber leverages its technologies to indirectly manage, sort, and control an otherwise “independent” driver population do not work so well with “soft skills” that to a large extent resist quantification and algorithmic control. While emotional labor (such as empathetic conversation), the staple of female-dominated service work, may help an Uber driver get a five-star rating, it isn’t intrinsic to the work in the same way as it is in intimate care. Handy can and does use geolocation to monitor when its workers arrive and leave a client’s home, but scrubbing a stovetop (or looking after a toddler) is too small a gesture for the planetary gaze of satellites.
Yet despite these limitations, the market for in-home care services is moving onto online labor marketplaces like Care.com, UrbanSitter, and SitterCity. Care.com, the largest of the three, provides both care and housekeeping services and boasts more than 24 million memberships across the globe. These larger companies are also branching out to offer more directly on-demand options: Care.com, for example, has recently launched its Care@Work app for employees of Care.com’s corporate clients, which allows employees to “find, book and manage family care needs as they arise on a 24/7 basis.” SitterCity likewise offers an on-demand app called Chime, and various babysitting apps like Sittr are becoming more common. On-demand elder care is likewise becoming a reality. Housecleaners, if they are not working under a traditional employer or running their own business, often use a combination of on-demand apps like Handy, platforms like TaskRabbit or Care.com, and online job boards like Craigslist. Beyond being case studies on gig work, these trends need to be thought about seriously because despite talk of automation, many of the jobs of the future are those that involve “humans looking after humans.”
The visibility of gendered gig work
The specificities of domestic work as an industry underscore the fact that generalizations about the gig economy and its relation to the “future” of work are limited in their usefulness. We need more research on how people are experiencing changes to employment on the ground. A good example of this need is the often-ambivalent relationship that people doing domestic work have with different kinds of technology-enabled visibility.
While companies like Uber have become known for evading labor regulation through worker misclassification, platforms for caregiving and housekeeping are doing the normative and legal work of providing payroll software, online templates for nanny contracts, performance evaluation through rating systems, and providing guidance to households on adhering to labor laws. There are various advantages to being “on the books” in these ways, but there are also disadvantages; and platforms don’t necessarily provide the kinds of visibility that caregiving workers want or need, in particular visibility to other workers in the form of a community of support.
Importantly, our project’s early field interviews are finding that much of the normative work that guides trust, reputation, and access to work still resides in more informal channels embedded in social networks, word-of-mouth, and less tangible judgments based on “intuition” or features like profile pictures, rather than ratings, reviews, or background checks, which is what these platforms are foregrounding as most important for “trust” between workers and clients.
There are numerous and active Facebook groups, email lists, and other forums that caregiving workers rely on, outside of online marketplaces. They are a good example of the ways caregiving workers have found to leverage technology to create solidarity and community despite their often hidden, isolated, and precarious work.
At least for the more digitally networked, Facebook groups serve as spaces where caregivers keep an ear out for work, build their reputations, warn about bad employers or participate in “nanny shaming,” and importantly, discuss what a fair employment relationship looks like.
Like Uber drivers posting dash cam footage on driver forums to shame bad passengers, caregivers often share screenshots to mock unreasonable or illegal requests from prospective employers. For example, parents on sites like Care.com will sometimes list one hourly wage and description in a job posting, but will then private message prospective caregivers with an offer of a (much smaller) lump weekly payment and entirely different work demands. In these situations, caregivers often turn to Facebook groups as a kind of court of opinion to determine whether what the parent is offering is fair. Sometimes it is not, and commenters on a post will collectively do the math only to find that that weekly lump sum pay averages out to $4/hour, or that, yes, it is illegal to bank hours, or no, it isn’t fair to demand that a sitter be perpetually available on short notice.
This kind of validation is especially important in work that is routinely treated as invisible, low-status, precarious, and with few legal protections, and where it has taken a long time to build organized institutions of support and advocacy like the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
It is also important because this work has often been viewed within a binary that places the home within the private sphere, which in turn is presumed to be outside of political and economic life. Transportation and housing, which have notably been affected by the rapid expansion of Uber and Airbnb respectively, are, by contrast, more easily regarded as issues that are squarely in the public sphere. Critiques of these companies and of the gig economy as a whole often make appeals to the public good, whether over the ills of gentrification or the widespread consequences of privatizing transportation.
Domestic work, meanwhile, gets relegated to a “private” matter to be settled between household and worker. In some capacity, platforms may be unsettling this tacit covenant by making a lot of this relationship more public, standardized, and documented. Through fieldwork and interviews with workers ranging from Handy and TaskRabbit cleaners to nannies and other caregivers who depend on online marketplaces, we want to ask: who benefits from these transformations, and who gets hurt or excluded? The fact that there are few available answers confirms that we need to better ground narratives about the gig economy in their historical and lived contexts.
Points: Alexandra Mateescu introduces and discusses the themes and questions that animate Data & Society’s Mapping Inequalities Across the On-Demand Economy — an ongoing project researching ride-hailing services (Uber, Lyft) and domestic work as comparative case studies for understanding differences in gig workers’ experiences. The project is led by Julia Ticona, Alex Rosenblat, and Alexandra Mateescu. — Ed.
