Abstract
Platform economy growth is notable in female-dominated sectors traditionally characterised by informality, including care and domestic work. A long history of theoretical work has sought to understand the gendered structures underpinning persistent—and in some cases growing—informality, and empirical investigation has extensively documented women’s position in some of the most vulnerable segments of the informal economy, where they experience a higher poverty risk, lack of protections and challenges organizing for better conditions. Less attention to date has been paid to how these gendered structures of informality shape the emerging platform economy, and how domestic workers navigate these altering structures. This chapter seeks to address these gaps by situating the platform economy within debates on informality and formalization. Drawing on data we collected on platform domestic workers in South Africa, we assess the extent to which ‘platformization’ reflects a structural change in the heavily informal market for domestic work, which coexists alongside an advanced regulatory framework for the domestic work sector.
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Notes
- 1.
Spooner et al. (2021)
- 2.
- 3.
Hussmans (2002: 7), following the 2002 ICLS definition and upheld in the 2015 ILO Recommendation no. 204. OECD/ILO (2019) provides a set of operational criteria to assess employment relationships, among which the key criterion is employer contributions to a social security scheme such as a pension (p. 175, Table A.A.2).
- 4.
See Chen, 2012: 4–5.
- 5.
Chen (2012: 5).
- 6.
- 7.
Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_formalism)
- 8.
Recommendation 204 advocates the progressive extension ‘in law and practice, to all workers in the informal economy, social security, maternity protection, decent working conditions and a minimum wage that takes into account the needs of workers and considers relevant factors, including but not limited to the cost of living and the general level of wages in their country’ (ILO, 2015).
- 9.
- 10.
Chen (2006).
- 11.
- 12.
Chen (2011) provides a typology of the types of employment statuses and arrangements that characterize domestic work.
- 13.
Blackett (2020).
- 14.
Ibid. (Blackett, 2020).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
Both informality and non-standard employment refer to ‘various types and degrees of labour market segmentation’ and are often described in terms of ‘discontinuities in labour markets’ (Carré, 2020), however the terms are not synonymous. According to the ILO (2016b), non-standard employment arrangements deviate from the conventional understanding of ‘work that is full time, indefinite, as well as part of a subordinate relationship between an employee and an employer.’ In high-income countries, shifts toward non-standard forms of wage employment ‘sever workers from access to employment-related social protection’ thereby increasing the incidence of informal work (Carré, 2020: 53). In low- and middle-income countries, the implications for levels of informality are less clear-cut as the counterfactual is often an informal work arrangement, however, according to Carré (2020: 52), ‘non-standard working arrangements most often entail reduced or no employment-related social protection and sometimes reduced coverage under some labour standards, depending on the country.’
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Huws, 2019.
- 21.
See du Toit (2013).
- 22.
STATS SA (2020).
- 23.
The seminal study of this theme is Cock (1980).
- 24.
- 25.
Jansen, 2019: 191.
- 26.
Their study draws heavily on the informal economy model proposed by global research and policy network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) (see Chen 2012). The WIEGO model reveals a high degree of segmentation by employment status and enterprise type, with employment status, in turn, segmented by gender and other social characteristics (e.g. caste, class, race), all of which influence poverty outcomes. Earnings are highest among informal employers and regular informal wage workers at the top (mainly male), followed by own-account workers and, finally, casual wage workers (of all genders). Industrial outworkers or homeworkers and contributing family workers (mostly female) have the lowest earnings and correspondingly, the highest risk of poverty. The model has received empirical support from Chen et al. (2005) for Costa Rica, Egypt, El Salvador, Ghana, India, and South Africa; and from Gindling and Newhouse (2014) using standardized data across 98 countries.
- 27.
The research is part of a broader two-year research project exploring gender and the platform economy in Kenya and South Africa (Hunt et al., 2019). The project sought to understand the experiences of gig workers (male and female) working on a household services platform in Kenya alongside those of domestic gig workers (virtually all female) in South Africa. Given the focus of this chapter on domestic work, it draws on the South Africa component of this work.
- 28.
Identifying gig workers is a key challenge facing researchers of gig platforms. By securing the collaboration of a domestic work platform that was genuinely open to independent research on its workforce, we were able to gain access to its workforce for our survey and qualitative interviews, and the platform’s data on the supply of and demand for gig work, as well as in-depth interviews with platform representatives (see Hunt et al., 2019 for more details). In the qualitative work, we included gig workers working for this same platform and others. We found that this approach offered the best trade-off between access and independence, but it was not without challenges. A key issue that emerged is that survey data suggested far more positive experiences and perceptions of gig work than those that arose in our interviews with workers. We hope to revisit this issue in future work.
- 29.
The UIF covers five categories of benefits: namely unemployment, maternity, illness, and adoption and survivor benefits in the event of the contributor’s death. The contribution rate is 2% of the employee’s salary (1% by the employer and 1% by the employee) paid monthly through the payroll tax collected by the South African Revenue Services or paid directly to the UIF by those in informal or irregular employment (https://www.social-protection.org/gimi/gess/ShowWiki.action?wiki.wikiId=855)
- 30.
Business Insider SA (2021).
- 31.
- 32.
Liao, 2019.
- 33.
- 34.
According to Vanyoro (2021: 8): ‘The number of undocumented migrants in the country is not known and remains highly contested. There are no reliable estimates of how many of these migrants are women, as gender-disaggregated migration data are largely unavailable’
- 35.
Vanyoro (2021) cites a 2013 ILO study showing that Johannesburg, 35.6% of employed black women who originated from outside Gauteng province worked in private households compared with 9% of employed black women born in the province, though she stresses that most labour migration in the country is internal.
- 36.
- 37.
Gobind et al. (2013).
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
- 41.
Key informant interview, platform representative.
- 42.
Key informant interview, SADSAWU representative.
- 43.
SweepSouth (2021)
- 44.
Hunt & Machingura, 2016, op. cit.
- 45.
ILO (2017), op. cit.
- 46.
Key informant interview, platform representative.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
We computed utilization rates, discounting voluntary ‘days off’ between November 2017 and December 2018.
- 49.
Between June 2018 and mid-September 2019, weekly earnings for workers with five or more days availability per week, excluding voluntary ‘days off,’ averaged ZAR 900 (PPP $145). Estimates of household income needed for a household of four to exceed the poverty line are ZAR 5276 (Finn, 2015) and ZAR 4125 per month (Budlender et al., 2015).
- 50.
Hunt & Samman, 2020.
- 51.
For more discussion on the limitations of the private insurance model, see Hunt & Samman, 2020.
- 52.
See Blackett, 2020.
- 53.
This may reflect employer unwillingness to register their domestic workers and thereby contribute to the fund, but there is also ample anecdotal documentation of administrative failings in the registration system—e.g. problems with the online registration process, a lack of online support in registering workers, overwhelmed call centres, employer accounts of not receiving a worker’s registration number after making a submission, and a lack of government communication with or training for employers on compliance (see Liao, 2019; Crouth, 2020).
- 54.
Staffing Industry Analysts (2021).
- 55.
Munkholm & Schjoler, 2018.
- 56.
See Hunt et al., 2019: 73, Box 10.
- 57.
- 58.
Hunt et al., 2019: 70.
- 59.
Tucker, J. L. and Anantharaman, M. (2020: 296).
- 60.
SweepSouth, 2020.
- 61.
See Crouth, 2020.
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Acknowledgements
We extend thanks to Fairuz Mullagee, Social Law Project, for comments on an early draft of this chapter, as well as Sofia Trevino and Adriana Paz, International Domestic Workers Federation, for their overarching reflections on informality and the domestic work sector which helped refine our thinking for this chapter. We are also grateful to the co-authors of the original research on which this chapter is based: Sherry Tapfuma, Grace Mwaura, and Rhoda Omenya, as well as Kay Kim, Sara Stevano, and Aida Roumer.
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Hunt, A., Samman, E. (2023). (Re)Conceptualizing Gendered Structures of Informality for Domestic Workers in the Platform Economy. In: Surie, A., Huws, U. (eds) Platformization and Informality . Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11462-5_9
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