Precarization or Protection? The Impact of Digital Platform Labour for Argentinean Domestic Workers in Times of Pandemic

POBLETE, LORENA; PEREYRA, FRANCISCA; TIZZIANI, ANIA; POGGI, CECILIA

Helsinski (virtual)

Congreso; The 2021 WIDER Development Conference; 2021

UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY

In Argentina, as in the rest of Latin America, domestic service constitutes an important source of female employment, representing 21% of salaried women. It is a historically precarious occupation: at the end of 2019 only 26% of these workers were registered. The lack of registration has especially influenced the sector during the Covid-19 pandemic, mainly through massive job losses. The document proposes an analysis of the way in which the advancement of the platform economy affects this sector marked by vulnerability, focusing particularly on the problematic of workers? formalization. The paper is based on the case of Zolvers, the only digital platform for domestic workers active in the country. The study is based on in-depth interviews and a survey conducted between December 2020 and January 2021 among 300 platform workers in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (which allowed the collection of information on 1,048 jobs). Additionally, data from the Argentina?s Household Permanent Survey was used in order to establish comparisons with the sector as a whole. Without denying that the uberization of work usually brings with it significant precarization, the document argues that this association should not be interpreted as a linear and uniform trend, but should be analyzed in context. Thus, on the one hand, the analysis focuses on the relatively high levels of registration exhibited by Zolvers workers (compared to those in the sector in general). In this context, it is also important to note that most of the job positions promoted by the platform are for very few weekly hours, the kind of insertion that has proved most resistant to formalization policies in the sector. The paper delves into the reasons that propitiate this phenomenon, also paying attention to the way in which the workers experience the situation. On the other hand, despite the greater formality registered in the framework of Zolvers, the pandemic implied a much greater loss of employment in the platform than in the sector in general. In this sense, the work suggests that although registration had a protective effect, it could not counteract the vulnerability effect implied by short-hours positions - whose termination is substantially cheaper than full-time work.