Beyond
Disruption: How Tech Shapes Labor
Across Domestic Work
and Ridehailing by
Julia Ticona,
Alexandra Mateescu and
Alex Rosenblat
examines
the promises and practices of labor
platforms across the ridehail, care, and cleaning industries
in the US. Between Spring and Winter 2017, we conducted
over 100 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with
ridehail app drivers, in-home child and elder care workers,
and housecleaners who use platforms to find work
in primarily in New York, NY, Atlanta, GA, and Washington,
DC. During this period, we also observed the online
communities that these workers have formed to discuss
occupational or platform-based issues. Although there
is a growing body of research on platform-based work,
few ethnographic studies exist, and public understanding
of this area is shaped largely by journalistic and corporate-produced
narratives about who workers are, what
motivates them, and how they understand their work. This
study contributes new insights on the operation of labor
platforms in different low-wage industries and raises new
questions about the role of technology in restructuring
work.
The authors summarise their findings
it’s not all about “uberization:”
The dominance of Uber in public understandings of on-demand
labor platforms has obscured the different ways technology is being
used to reshape other types of services – such as care and cleaning
work – in the “gig” economy. In particular, the Uber model doesn’t
illuminate differences in regulation, workforce demographics, and
legacies of inequality and exploitation that shape other industries.
labor platforms don’t all do the same things:
Labor platforms intervene at different points in relationships
between workers and clients. We identify two main types of platforms:
“on-demand” and “marketplace” platforms. While on-demand
platforms (like Uber) indirectly manage workforces through
“algorithmic management” to rapidly dispatch them to consumers,
marketplace platforms (like many care services) primarily impact
the hiring process through sorting, ranking, and rendering visible
large pools of workers. Some platforms (like many cleaning services)
mix elements from both types.
platforms shift risks and rewards for workers in different ways:
Marketplace platforms incentivize workers to invest heavily in
self-branding, and disadvantage workers without competitive new
media skills; meanwhile, on-demand platforms create challenges
for workers by offloading inefficiencies and hidden costs directly
onto workers.
platforms create hard trade-offs between safety and reputation:
Workplace safety is an important issue for workers across care,
cleaning, and driving platforms. While some labor platforms provide
helpful forms of accountability, company policies also exacerbate
risks for workers by placing pressures on them to forego
their own safety interests in the name of maintaining reputation
or collecting pay. Race and gender shape workers’ vulnerability to
unsafe working conditions, but platform policies don’t account for
the ways that marginalized workers’ face different challenges to
their safety.
online communities create weak ties in a fragmented workforce,
for some:
Workers on labor platforms use social media and other
networked communication to find one another, share pointers,
laughs, complaints, and to solve problems. However, while these
groups excel at ad hoc problem solving, they struggle to address
larger structural challenges, and may exclude significant populations
of workers.
