Precarity on the Platform: Processes of Commodifying Labor and Forms of Unpaid Work in Platformized Domestic Cleaning in Finland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18291/njwls.171845Keywords:
Employment, Wages, Unemployment & Rehabilitation, Gender, Ethnicity, Age and Diversity, Labor Market Institutions & Social PartnersAbstract
This article analyzes how platformized domestic cleaning companies optimize labor processes and commodify labor. Drawing on qualitative research with migrant cleaners, we study how they struggle with the processes of labor commodification. They struggle for a living wage, which, for non-EU migrant workers, is entangled with a struggle over legal status. The optimization of the labor process imposes unpaid labor on the workers in the form of unpaid reputation management work and unpaid logistics work, that is, spatiotemporal optimization of movements between gigs, home, the company office, and the cleaning app. We find that migrant platform workers are excluded from the decommodifying protections of the Nordic welfare state, have less bargaining power than citizens, and are disciplined by a migration regime converting fluctuations of the rating system into a threat to legal residence. Platformized domestic cleaning exemplifies the broader recommodification of labor in the Nordics.
Author Biographies
Lena Näre, University of Helsinki
Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences
Olivia Hakala, Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey
PhD Student, Department of Sociology
Olivia Maury, University of Helsinki
Lecturer, Swedish School of Social Science
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