Between June to November 2019, we conducted 65 in-depth semi-structured interviews primarily in New Delhi and Bengaluru. We borrowed from ethnographic methods and feminist principles to co-design and implement the research tools with grassroots workers and organisers. In order to interrogate this further, we studied several aspects of the work relationship, including wages, conditions of work, social security, skill levels, and worker surveillance off platforms. Our hypothesis was that platforms are reconfiguring labour conditions, which could empower and/or exploit workers in ways qualitatively different from non-standard work off the platform.
Through a feminist approach to digital labour, our project aimed to examine the dynamics of platformisation in, and of domestic or reproductive care work. Domestic work is a particularly vulnerable and unprotected sector, which makes work in the sector qualitatively different from most other sectors in the gig or sharing economy. In fact, the similarity in precarity and the informal nature of this relationship across gig work and domestic work has led to domestic workers being labelled the original gig workers. Similar debates around lack of protections and precarity have also taken place in other occupations in gig work such as transportation and food delivery. This is expected to shift the organisation of workers and employment relations profoundly.īroadly, the discourse on digital platforms providing home-based services can be summarised as follows: proponents argue that digitisation will act as a step towards bringing formalisation to the sector, while critics argue that platforms could replicate the exploitation of workers by further disguising the employer-employee relationship.
In India, order books of digital platforms providing domestic and care work services were reported to have been growing by upto 60 percent month-on-month in 2016. Digital intermediation of domestic and care work has been a space of high-growth, but also high-attrition. This holds the potential to impact millions of workers in the sector, which is characterised by a long history of informality and exclusion from rights-according legal frameworks. More recently, there has been tremendous growth of digital platforms. Paid domestic and care work is witnessing the entry of digital intermediaries over the past decade.
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