Adding precariousness to precarious work? Paid domestic work through digital platforms in Argentina

FRANCISCA PEREYRA; LORENA POBLETE; ANIA TIZZIANI

Turku

Congreso; Work Conference 2021-2022; 2021

Turku University

Paid domestic workconstitutes a significant portion of female work in Argentina: 15,5% of allworking women and 20,5% of all female wage earners are domestic workers. It isa type of work that tends to be both precarious and informal, two interrelatedfeatures. Most domestic workers are not enrolled in the social security systemand have no labor contract, and their working conditions are precarious,particularly with regard to working hours and wages within hourly workers.Although informality has decreased in the last two decades, it remains thenorm. In 2003 only five percent of paid domestic workers were formallyemployed; in 2019, this number had risen to just 24%.In 2014, the first andonly digital platform for services of households was established in the countryand it has currently expanded to Mexico, Colombia, and Chile. The platformoffers two different services: matching and administration. On the one hand, itprovides an intermediation service in the matching between the offer and thedemand for domestic services. According to one of its founders, the cost of theintermediation is entirely paid by the employer. The digital platform currentlyhas 40,000 active workers, all of them women, for whom it facilitates thesearch for employment in positions close to their homes, for occasional,weekly, or monthly hiring in cleaning and care services for households. On theother hand, it also provides the service of managing the labor relationship.When the employer decided to use this service, the company is trusted toformalize the domestic work relationship, and manage the payment of monthlywages and employers contribution to the social security system. According toits founding partners, the platform seeks "to change the reality ofdomestic employment in Latin America." Based on 20 in-depth interviewswith domestic workers working at the platform and a firsthand analysis ofquantitative information from a survey on labor conditions conducted among 300 domesticworkers in 2020, the paper questions the generalized argument on the literatureconcerning the "uberization" of the labor market. Although it isundoubtedly that digital platforms contribute to adding precariousness intomost of labor activities, they can also contribute to produce improvements inalready precarious activities such as paid domestic work. The data, bothqualitative and quantitative, shows tensions between these two directions.While the platform facilitates formalization, it did not promote it as anemployer obligation. While the platform helps to optimize working time allowingdomestic workers to adapt it to other responsibilities (care or studies) and tocumulate various hourly positions, it multiplies the number of employers and thenumber of working conditions negotiations. While the platform generalizes veryfragmented working time arrangements, it reduces the level of dependency oneach employer. While the platform fixes the wage according to the legal hourlywage established by collective agreements, it makes difficult to negotiatehighest wages more aligned with the labor markets price. Looking at all theseapparent contradictions by using context-specific analysis tools (Di Stefano,2016; Ticona et al., 2018), the paper seeks to understand the changes thatdigital platforms introduce on Argentina paid domestic work sector.The paper isorganized on four sections. The first discusses the argument concerning"uberization" of the labor market on the international literature.The second section presents paid domestic work sector in Argentina. The thirddescribes the characteristics of this particular household services platform.Finally, the fourth section focuses on the analysis of tensions betweenmechanisms adding and removing precariousness to platform domestic work.