Introduction: the austerity of domestic labour platforms

How to do more with less? This is, essentially, austerity's onerous question. Its default answer, in turn, has been to defer, download and outsource the burden of being overtasked and cash strapped. As Peck (2012, p 632) notes, ‘austerity is ultimately concerned with offloading costs, displacing responsibility; it is about making others pay the price of fiscal retrenchment’ (emphasis in original). These ‘others’ are, frequently, marginalized communities of colour and the low-income urban neighbourhoods they inhabit. Cities, to quote Peck again, are ‘where austerity bites’ as it ‘operates on, and targets anew, an already neoliberalized institutional landscape’, but does so in a highly uneven manner (Peck, 2012, pp 629, 631). What Marxist-feminist scholars have referred to as the ‘crisis of social reproduction’ or, more narrowly defined, the ‘crisis of care’ is thus experienced differently depending on what urban household one belongs to (Fraser, 2016; Hester, 2018). In the face of enduring cuts to publicly provisioned social reproductive services and a ‘post-Fordist sexual contract’ that expects women to excel both as mothers and as entrepreneurial professionals (Adkins, 2016), white middle-class households have increasingly turned to the market to outsource their reproductive tasks (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). As formal and informal markets for domestic work expand, they not only generate income opportunities for working-class minority and migrant households but also intensify their social reproductive challenges (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). Moreover, it has been extensively documented how such feminized and racialized reproductive labour is highly precarious, un(der)-regulated and subject to exploitation by employers and labour market intermediaries alike (for example, Glenn, 1992; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; McGrath and DeFilippis, 2009). It is within this historical and socioeconomic setting that this chapter considers the market entrance of a new type of ‘intermediary’: the on-demand domestic work platform.

Digital platforms amplify existing power dynamics and inequalities while introducing technologies and techniques that produce qualitatively new arrangements, conditions and experiences of work, generally referred to as gig work. Whereas I have elsewhere focused on the historically gendered and racialized techniques that render platformmediated domestic work invisible and devalued (Van Doorn, 2017), here I examine how formally self-employed domestic workers negotiate the engineering of their visibility, agency and income opportunities on two home-cleaning platforms – Handy and Helpling.