Re/Defining ?Essential Work?: The COVID-19 Pandemic and High-Re/Defining ?Essential Work?: The COVID-19 Pandemic and High-Skilled Venezuelan Migrants in Argentina's Platform EconomySkilled Venezuelan Migrants in Argentina's Platform Economy

IVANCHEVA, MARIYA; PLA, JESICA

Cambridge. Virtual

Workshop; Politics and Ethics of Platform Labour: Learning from Lived Experiences; 2021

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. University of Cambridge

With governments worldwide implementing national lockdowns to control the spread of coronavirus, low-paid low-status work has come to the forefront of the pandemic response as ´essential´ labour. While national publics were confronted with the uncomfortable reality that migrant workers often occupy undesirable and poorly rewarded ´frontline´ positions, regardless of their education level or skills, the work intensification and insecurity in ?key? sectors soared.To initiate a discussion on the effect of the current crisis on the valorisation and/or valuation of ´essential work´ and how it affects platform workers, this paper presents a case study of Venezuelan migrants in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since 2014, over 3.5 million Venezuelans have migrated across South America. Venezuelans arriving in Argentina are still predominantly university-educated professionals. Invited by a right-wing government that promised to acknowledge their credentials, they were initially represented by the Argentine media as ´deserving´, ´educated´, ´qualified´ migrants. Landing in recession-struck Argentina, however, the majority entered jobs in the platform and gig economy. With the pandemic, taxi, delivery, and care sector workers were attributed ´essential workers´ status and their risk-intensive highly precarious labour gained visibility.Yet how does ´essential work?s? ´worth´ measure up against its ´low-skilled´ status among middle class ´high-skilled´ migrant workers during the pandemic? How do they reconcile narratives of platform work autonomy/freedom vis-à-vis recession and pandemic realities of necessity/scarcity of work? What do Venezuelan ´high-skill´ migrants´ experiences of the shift from ´high-´ to ´low-skilled´ but ´essential´ labour in the platform economy tell us about the nexus between migration and social mobility? To discuss these questions, the paper presents the findings from qualitative interviews and a survey conducted among Venezuelan migrants in Buenos Aires between October 2020-March 2021. It traces if and how migrant representations and self-perceptions have changed or persevered with the revaluation/revalorisation of essential labour in the platform economy.