Platform Care

When people speak of gig economies they usually refer to transport and delivery sectors such as Uber and Deliveroo. Far less attention is given to platforms that advertise care workers. Yet these platforms have developed rapidly and now form a significant “marketplace” for a range of caring services ranging from nannies to dog walkers. They usually operate significant “gig” features such as a competition over rates of pay, no health or safety checks, and reliance on customer ratings and reviews. This session will discuss what happens to care workers when care becomes platformed, and also what happens to social responsibility on platforms with little accountability. Care work has already been subject to destruction of protections and privatisation through subcontracting agencies in which wages and conditions have “raced to the bottom”, a persistent devaluation globally of wages. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic starkly revealed how the value of care work is rarely recognised, so what happens when it operates in similar ways to other labour that has been gigged and deskilled?

Speakers:

Karin Schwiter, Assistant Professor in Labour Geography at the University of Zurich.

Simon Yuill, artist, writer and software engineer .

Emma Back, founder of founded Equal Care.

Discussant:Helen Hester, Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London.

Chair:Beverley Skeggs, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University and Director of the Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities.

Speaker Backgrounds:

<a href="https://simonyuill.info/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Simon Yuill</a> is an artist, researcher and programmer. His work includes the use of interview and research processes, film, publishing, and custom software systems. He holds a PhD from the University of Dundee and was the inaugural winner of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award and was a Research Resident at the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam, 2005). He built the software infrastructure for The Sociological Review Foundation and was the software designer of the ESRC “Values and Value” project. Simon Yuill will discuss the significance of market-based care solutions (e.g. platform care) in comparison to social responsibility.

<a href="https://www.equalcare.coop/team" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Emma Back</a> founded Equal Care in 2018 as a platform co-op dedicated to redistributing the power balance in social care – an area of life and work suffering from deep inequities and systemic injustice. Equal Care is a multi-stakeholder co-operative pioneering a way of providing care and support that is relationship-centred, recognises the unpaid labour in caregiving and targets local autonomy at scale. In 2019 a community share offer raised $600K. Emma’s background is in community development and mental health. She is a Finance Innovation Lab Fellow. Her experience working in the social care sector at the interface of its tendering and commissioning practices led to the creation of Equal Care as a vehicle to move money and decision-making to the people who do the giving and the receiving. She will discuss the experience of creating an alternative platform for social care.

<a href="https://www.geo.uzh.ch/en/department/Staff/karinschwiter" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Karin Schwiter</a> is Assistant Professor in Labour Geography at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on gendered &amp; intersectional inequalities in the world of work. In her current research, she explores how online labour platforms in the care sector reshape the meaning of work, workers&#x27; subjectivities and how work is organised socially, spatially and temporally. Karin Schwiter is a former member and president of the regional parliament of Schwyz and currently leads the Social-Democratic Party of the canton of Schwyz. Her contribution will focus on what happens “when care turns into gigs.”

Discussant Background:<a href="https://www.uwl.ac.uk/staff/helen-hester" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Helen Hester</a> is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technology, social reproduction, and the future of work, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and with Nick Srnicek After Work: The Politics of Free Time (Verso, forthcoming).This event is hosted by the Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities (CASEI)as part of the &#x27;Transforming Economies of Care Series&#x27; organised by Distinguished Professor Bev Skeggs and Daisy Baker (Lancaster University), Dr Emma Dowling (University of Vienna) and Dr Amy Horton (University College London). It will be convened virtually on Zoom in conjunction with the Sociological Review.Please direct any queries to Michael Lambert (CASEI): m.lambert3@lancaster.ac.uk.

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Platform Care

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