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

PEREYRA, FRANCISCA; POBLETE, LORENA; TIZZIANI, ANIA

Turku

Congreso; WORK CONFERENCE 2021; 2021

Turku University

Paid domestic work constitutes a significant portion of female work in Argentina: 15,5% of all working women and 20,5% of all female wage earners are domestic workers. It is a type of work that tends to be both precarious and informal, two interrelated features. Most domestic workers are not enrolled in the social security system and 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 the norm. In 2003 only five percent of paid domestic workers were formally employed; in 2019, this number had risen to just 24%.In 2014, the first?and only?digital platform for services of households was established in the country and it has currently expanded to Mexico, Colombia, and Chile. The platform offers two different services: matching and administration. On the one hand, it provides an intermediation service in the matching between the offer and the demand for domestic services. According to one of its founders, the cost of the intermediation is entirely paid by the employer. The digital platform currently has 40,000 active workers, all of them women, for whom it facilitates the search for employment in positions close to their homes, for occasional, weekly, or monthly hiring in cleaning and care services for households. On the other hand, it also provides the service of managing the labor relationship. When the employer decided to use this service, the company is trusted to formalize the domestic work relationship, and manage the payment of monthly wages and employers? contribution to the social security system. According to its founding partners, the platform seeks "to change the reality of domestic employment in Latin America." Based on 20 in-depth interviews with domestic workers working at the platform and a firsthand analysis of quantitative information from a survey on labor conditions conducted among 300 domestic workers in 2020, the paper questions the generalized argument on the literature concerning the "uberization" of the labor market. Although it is undoubtedly that digital platforms contribute to adding precariousness into most of labor activities, they can also contribute to produce improvements in already precarious activities such as paid domestic work. The data, both qualitative and quantitative, shows tensions between these two directions. While the platform facilitates formalization, it did not promote it as an employer obligation. While the platform helps to optimize working time allowing domestic workers to adapt it to other responsibilities (care or studies) and to cumulate various hourly positions, it multiplies the number of employers and the number of working conditions negotiations. While the platform generalizes very fragmented working time arrangements, it reduces the level of dependency on each employer. While the platform fixes the wage according to the legal hourly wage established by collective agreements, it makes difficult to negotiate highest wages?more aligned with the labor market?s price. Looking at all these apparent contradictions by using context-specific analysis tools (Di Stefano, 2016; Ticona et al., 2018), the paper seeks to understand the changes that digital platforms introduce on Argentina paid domestic work sector.The paper is organized 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 third describes the characteristics of this particular household services platform. Finally, the fourth section focuses on the analysis of tensions between mechanisms adding and removing precariousness to platform domestic work.ReferencesDi Stefano, Valerio (2016) The rise of the 'just-in-time workforce': on-demand work, crowdwork, and labor protection in the 'gig-economy'?, Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 37: 471 -503.Ticona, Julia and Mateescu, Alexandra (2018) Trusted strangers: Carework platforms' cultural entrepreneurship in the on-demand economy, New Media & Society, 20 (11): 4384 - 4404.