The theme issue explores how the rise of digitally mediated care services in platform economies transforms everyday lives and (re)shapes intersectional inequalities in European cities.

In cities across Europe, digital care platforms have become increasingly central in mediating services related to social reproduction, including grocery shopping, the preparation of meals, cleaning, and child and senior care. By reconfiguring domestic tasks, most of which have formerly been unpaid, they transform the gendered and racialized division of labour in everyday life (Ecker and Strüver, 2023). Large cities are particularly attractive for platform business models, as they provide access to a wide customer base and a large pool of marginalized workers, whose alternatives in the local labour markets are often limited (Altenried, 2021). On the one hand, care platform companies have been criticized for taking advantage of such disparities by offering working conditions that are widely experienced as precarious and insecure (Strüver/Bauriedl, 2022; Richardson, 2023). On the other hand, scholars also note that platforms may lower labour market entry barriers for marginalized workers and selectively formalize care labour (van Doorn, 2021).

We understand the rise of platformized care services as a response to the ongoing crisis of care (Fraser, 2016; Dowling, 2021). A combination of societal challenges, such as the intensification and delimitation of paid employment, cutbacks in public services, and changing household structures and living arrangements, have led better-off households to turn to the market to fill care gaps (Hester and Srnicek, 2023). The arrival of platform companies is thus symptomatic for the current capitalist societal order that capitalizes on social vulnerabilities whilst continuously outsourcing risks and responsibilities to individuals (Srnicek, 2017; Rodríguez-Modroño et al., 2023).

The rise of the platform economy has been a key concern for feminist scholars, who analyse entanglements of macropolitical structures of platformization with the micropolitics of everyday life (Huws, 2019). These connections are reflected in the lived realities of platform workers, who are often marginalized due to a number of different intersectional vulnerabilities relating to limited language skills, temporary visas, and the non-recognition of foreign academic credentials and professional achievements, as well as experiences of sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination (van Doorn and Vijay, 2021; Orth, 2023). These conditions, which are deeply intertwined with wider political processes (e.g. EU border regimes), enable care platforms to recruit workers by offering comparatively low entrance requirements.

The ways in which intersectional insecurities unfold in everyday life depend, among other factors, on the type of care platform labour performed. For example, working in private homes is tied to uniquely gendered insecurities such as the risk of sexual harassment (Pulignano et al., 2023). Food delivery riders spend large parts of their working days in public, where they are at risk of accidents and forms of (racial) discrimination. What many platform workers share is that they encounter various (invisible) forms of algorithmic control, which can limit their agency in situations of conflict (Wood and Lehdonvirta, 2023). In addition, while they free up the time of those who can afford to outsource their reproductive work, platform workers themselves systematically lose time and capacity to address their own care needs (Zampoukos et al., 2024). In turn, they adopt manifold strategies of individual and collective survival and resistance (Orth, 2022; Ettarfi, 2024).

The theme issue is concerned with advancing the empirical and theoretical debates on the role of intersectional inequalities in the transformation of care services in the platform economy. Its contributions address how intersectional inequalities shape individual and collective working realities and the wider societal impact of platformization on the gendered division of labour in everyday life.

References:

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Dowling, E.: The care crisis. What caused it and how can we end it?, London: Verso, 2021.

Ecker, Y. and Strüver, A.: Kommodifizierung, Fragmentierung, Restrukturierung städtischer Räume und Arbeit in technologischen Experimenten mit Hausarbeit, sub/urban, 11, 17–45, 2023.

Ettarfi, K.: Conceptualizing labor agency through resilience: Practices of reassembling work on domestic services platforms, Geoforum, 156, 104130, 1–7, 2024.

Fraser, N.: Capitalism’s Crisis of Care, Dissent, 63, 30–37, 2016.

Hester, H. and Srnicek, N.: After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, London: Verso, 2023.

Huws, U.: The hassle of housework: Digitalisation and the commodification of domestic labour, Feminist Review, 123, 8–23, 2019.

Orth, B.: Riders United Will Never Be Divided? A Cautionary Tale of Disrupting the Platformization of Urban Space, in: Platformisation of Urban Life Towards a Techno Capitalist Transformation of European Cities, edited by: Strüver, A. and Bauriedl, S., Bielefeld, Transcript, 185–204, 2022.

Orth, B.: Stratified pathways into platform work: Migration trajectories and skills in Berlin’s gig economy, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56, 1–15, 2023.

Pulignano, V., Mara, C., Franke, M., and Muszynski, K.: Informal employment on domestic care platforms: a study on the individualisation of risk and unpaid labour in mature market contexts, Transfer, 0, 1–16, 2023.

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Rodríguez-Modroño, P., Agenjo-Calderón, A., and López-Igual, P.: A Feminist Political Economic Analysis of Platform Capitalism in the Care Sector, Review of Radical Political Economics, 55, 1–10, 2023.

Srnicek, N.: Platform Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

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Van Doorn, N. and Vijay, D.: Gig work as migrant work: The platformization of migration infrastructure, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56, 1129–1149, 2021.

Wood, A. and Lehdonvirta, V.: Platforms Disrupting Reputation: Precarity and Recognition Struggles in the Remote Gig Economy, Sociology, 57, 999–1016, 2023.

Zampoukos, K., Butler, O., and Mitchell, D.: Who's got time for social reproduction? Migrant service workers as embodied infrastructures of the algorhythmic city, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 50, 3805–3821, 2024.