O trabalho do cuidado domiciliar por plataformas digitais: as práticas de trabalho doméstico remunerado vinculadas à intermediação sociotécnica

Abstract

Companies that own digital platforms have been taking advantage of the Brazilian labor market as a way to socialize paid domestic work, in the form of home care services, through the work of day laborers. This business model is socially organizing a type of reproductive work in a salaried manner and, for this reason, care work is increasingly incorporated into the logic of the uberization or platformization of work. In this scenario of the digitalization of care intermediation, day laborers, who perform domestic work as a reproductive occupation related to care, make up an increasingly growing professional category in Brazil and are very representative of the changing profile of paid domestic work. Starting from the research question “are there implications of unpaid care work on paid domestic work when it comes to the work of women who provide services for digital care work platforms?”, this dissertation aims to study the intertwining between unpaid care work and paid domestic work practices linked to digital care work platform companies. This is a qualitative study, with intentional and non-probabilistic sampling, that presents three specific objectives. The first: to identify the objective and subjective dimensions that guide the choice and permanence of these workers in this type of platform-based work. The second: to investigate the different knowledge and skills that are mobilized by domestic workers to give materiality and concreteness to the work they perform. The third: to interpret aspects of the logic of the platformization of work through assumptions arising from the interrelation between the field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) and gender. With these objectives in mind, we sought to understand aspects of the physical, cognitive, relational, sexual, and emotional dimensions of caregiving based on testimonies collected in semi-structured interviews with domestic workers who work through digital platforms. Four categories of analysis were mobilized for the interpretation of these aspects: the concept of emotional labor, the notion of caregiving as profession, help and/or obligation. The results attest to the importance of considering both the concrete activities and the subjective dimension of caregiving in the context of the platformization of care work, based on the experiences and conditions lived by domestic workers. These results support the conclusion that the discussion on platformization in this sector should problematize, from a gender perspective, the contradictions present in the socio-technical dynamics, the incidences, and the interactions between technologies, social processes, and labor practices that constitute this phenomenon.