Debates about workers on digital platforms too often focus on male-dominated sectors such as deliveries and ride-hailing. In a blog for the International Day Of Care, Veronica Deutsch explains how care workers, overwhelmingly women, are now central to the precarious UK gig economy – and sets out what campaigners, researchers, employers and policy makers can do to support them.
Who works in the gig economy in Britain today? If you read the media coverage, you might be left with the impression that these workers are typically male cab or food delivery drivers. What that coverage often doesn’t mention is the huge number of women care workers providing childcare and adult care services who are now finding employment online. That digitally mediated domestic care work, like most other feminised labour, remains relatively unexplored and invisible.
Amid the crises facing the childcare and social care sectors, domestic and in-home caring services are increasingly delivered through on-demand digital platforms in the UK and beyond. Such care platforms are on the rise – and indeed there is some evidence the care and domestic workforce may actually be the largest one across the gig economy.
It’s therefore urgent that we develop a deeper understanding of care work within the gig economy. We need to look not only at what the rise of digital platforms means for care workers’ rights and protections, but also the quality of care available to families. Here are three areas where we can start.
1. We need more data about who is working on care platforms.
We can gauge from the limited data we do have on gig work more generally, international examples, and broader research into informal care and domestic workforces that the care platform workforce is likely to be highly feminised and disproportionately made up of migrant women, including many from racialised groups. However, currently, this is largely assumed: we lack concrete data on who is operating in the care platform workforce, and few projects have managed to capture this because of the difficulty in finding a reliable sample. The data we do have may not tell the full story.
‘Care platform workers are more isolated than other platform workers who operate in public spaces (e.g. delivering food). Crucially, they lack a “factory floor” – a central place to meet and organise’
We need greater insight into who is in the care platform workforce, which requires research and approaches that meet workers where they are – considering their accessibility needs and offering them opportunities for co-design, collaboration, and co-production of knowledge.
One example of such work is Miranda Hall and Dalia Gebrial’s UK-based workshop in 2022, ‘The platformization of care: researching for resistance’. Their workshop engaged researchers, trade unionists, workers and policy practitioners in a collaborative conversation, using power mapping as a way of drawing on collective expertise and allowing workers to be equally involved in knowledge production. That led to insights that might otherwise not have been captured.
2. We need to understand the specific problems facing care platform workers when it comes to their rights and protections
Typically working in private homes, care platform workers are more isolated than platform workers who operate in public spaces (e.g. delivering food). Crucially, they lack a “factory floor” – a central place to meet and organise – in contrast with other kinds of platform workers who may meet one another at restaurants or depots.
We also know that feminised workforces will often struggle to engage in traditional union tactics and prioritise more affective forms of support, such as mutual aid. These ways of organising are less visible, which can pose a challenge when it comes to making their voices heard.
Workers on and off digital platforms are also vulnerable to legislative loopholes that leave them unprotected. For example, workers are not generally protected under the Data Protection Act 2018 due to CCTV on domestic premises being excluded from laws governing data, which means that workers may be subject to “nannycams” without their knowledge, unethical in itself, as well as putting them at risk of exploitation.
The “nannycam” problem shows how, while there are challenges shared by all platform workers, it is also important not to lump them together or miss the specific complexities of the domestic care workforce. These unique conditions powerfully shape how domestic care workers engage with platforms and their campaign priorities.
3. Care platforms are a mixed bag
Care platforms come in a wide variety in sizes, structures, and funding models, from “marketplace” platforms, where workers are pooled into a database that users can then search for someone to hire, to ‘on-demand’ models, which facilitate direct matching between users and workers.
These platforms also have varied employment arrangements, from formal contracts and regular wages to casual, precarious ‘gig’ models that presume self-employment. That means workers have varying protections.
‘Though ultimate responsibility for reforming the sector lies with government, individual employers can also drive change in their own homes at micro-level by treating care and domestic workers fairly.’
While the personal nature of care work, with labour done in private homes, can increase the vulnerability of workers, there is some evidence that platforms which link carers to employers are not universally bad for the workforce. In fact, the personal relationship with employers can mean issues such as poor treatment or low pay can be “negotiated on the ground” more easily when there is a 1-1 user/worker relationship. Some platforms even have arrangements that offer decent or higher wages than workers may find elsewhere.
The 1-1 nature of caregiving/receiving relationships may also facilitate allyship between care users and workers in campaigning, though intersectional organising of this kind is not without its challenges. As the care platform sector is diverse, we will need to respond to the wide variety of employment models when developing solutions for the market and its workforce.
Where do we go next? Policymakers and employers alike can start by listening to the workforce.
There is clearly an urgent need for meaningful, inclusive policy reform that ensures digitally-mediated care is recognised and valued and that all care workers involved enjoy decent and dignified work. Change across employment rights, health and safety, and data protection will be key to ensuring that conditions and protections for care platform workers (and all gig economy workers) improve.
However, though ultimate responsibility for reforming the sector lies with government, individual employers can also drive change in their own homes at micro-level by treating care and domestic workers fairly. They can listen to their experiences and take on board suggestions for engaging with platforms in more considerate ways.
Worker groups are already developing ways to support such micro-progress on the ground: Nanny Solidarity Network, a London-based grassroots mutual aid organisation, recently launched a pamphlet ‘Let’s Talk About Domestic Work’, which outlines some of the critical challenges facing its membership and sets out how families employing care workers through platforms can help mitigate them.
More broadly, as public awareness of both the care crises and digital platforms grows, now is the time for coalitions and movements mobilising for decent work to centre on care and platform labour, and bring care platform workers to the heart of campaign efforts.
This approach requires significant time, commitment, and investment from stakeholders due to the complexity of developing inclusive demands. It is not a quick fix but it is a fix that is desperately needed. We know care platform workers are increasingly standing up for their rights and protections.
The onus is now on those with the leverage to lobby for change nationally to ensure they make space for workers’ emergent voices in campaign demands. Change must start by listening to those on the ground. By doing that, we can create a new care economy for a digital age that delivers decent work for every domestic care worker, and supports the valuing of care work more broadly.
Author
This is the first in a series of blogs to mark this year’s International Day of Care and Support.
Follow us on X/Twitter to get the latest blogs in the series and subscribe to our monthly roundup of Oxfam blogs and research here.
Find out more about Oxfam’s research and campaigning on care in this blog: “Across Britain, paid and unpaid care work remains undervalued and ignored: here are six ways governments can change that” and also check out our Valuing Women’s Work page on the Oxfam GB website.