UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (http
s
://dare.uva.nl)
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)
Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income
Service Work in the 'On-Demand' Economy
van Doorn, N.
DOI
10.1080/1369118X.2017.1294194
Publication date
2017
Document Version
Final published version
Published in
Information, Communication & Society
License
CC BY-NC-ND
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
van Doorn, N. (2017). Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-
Income Service Work in the 'On-Demand' Economy.
Information, Communication & Society
,
20
(6), 898-914. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1294194
General rights
It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s)
and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open
content license (like Creative Commons).
Disclaimer/Complaints regulations
If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please
let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material
inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter
to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You
will be contacted as soon as possible.
Download date:26 Aug 2022
Platform labor: on the gendered and racialized exploitation of
low-income service work in the ‘on-demand’ economy
Niels van Doorn
Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
ABSTRACT
How does one value something one cannot and often does not want
to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their
infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect
this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated
through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived
experience? And how can these infrastructures be mobilized in
projects that aim to build different kinds of platforms – the kinds
that support the revaluation low-income service work? This essay
addresses these questions by examining the gendered, racialized,
and classed distribution of opportunities and vulnerabilities
associated with digitally mediated service work, or what I call
platform labor. The argument will unfold in four parts. First, I
briefly situate the ‘on-demand’ economy within the context of
neoliberal socio-economic reforms that have, over the past four
decades, shaped our present circumstances. Second, I argue that
labor platforms should be understood as new players in the
temporary staffing industry, whose devices and practices
exacerbate the already precarious conditions of contingent
workers in today’s low-income service economy. They do so by
(1) bolstering the immunity of platform intermediaries and clients,
(2) by expanding managerial control over workers, and (3) by
orchestrating a pervasive sense of fungibility and superfluity with
respect to this workforce. Third, after a short overview of the
gendered and racialized history of service work, I analyze how this
history extends into the networked present of our platform
economy. Finally, I address the potential of ethnography, on the
one hand, and platform cooperativism, on the other, to critically
empower low-income service workers operating through platforms.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 30 October 2016
Accepted 7 February 2017
KEYWORDS
Platform labor; on-demand
economy; low-income service
work; race; gender; value
The cost of living
Standing unassumingly near a plain white wall, as if left unattended by one of the
museum’s cleaners, Josh Kline’s Cost of Living (Aleyda) consists of a purple-grayish jani-
tor’s cart loaded with various 3-D printed body parts and cleaning supplies that belong to a
housekeeper named Aleyda. The artist interviewed Aleyda as well as other janitorial and
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Niels van Doorn nielsvandoorn@uva.nl Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Turf-
draagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam, Netherlands
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2017
VOL. 20, NO. 6, 898–914
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1294194
delivery workers, after which he produced 3-D scans of their bodies and the objects they
use to do their job. As Ben Lerner (2016) has noted, Kline’s work – which was part of the
‘America Is Hard to See’ exhibition that inaugurated the Whitney Museum’s new down-
town NYC location –‘stages a confrontation between the culture of museum conservation
and the culture of the disposable prototype’, to the extent that the printed objects on the
cart are not intended to last. There is what Kline has called a ‘resolution gap’ between the
digital files and current 3-D printing technologies: the latter have yet to match the resol-
ution of the former and when printing technology improves a new set of objects with more
visual detail will be printed. Indeed, Kline has pointed out this planned obsolescence, stat-
ing that the digital files contain the still unrealized and unrealizable scans. In this way,
according to Lerner, ‘Kline is reversing the traditional temporality of the “original” art
work: what comes first are copies; the real work will arrive in the future’ (
2016).
This is an inventive take on Kline’s work, which, as Lerner also points out, offers a play on
the exhibitio n’s title by suggesting that this sculptural assemblage is indeed hard to see due to
the resolution gap that defers any ‘accurate’ view of the physical objects displayed on the cart.
But Cost of Living (Aleyda) embodies another kind of opacity, or obfuscation, one that attends
us to a different type of resolution gap which nevertheless also emerges from the discrepancy
between digital information and its physical conditions of possibility and constraint. In a
subtle yet somewhat macabre manner, it stages the material reality of the labor that has
been rendered invisible by discourses on our ostensibly dematerialized information economy.
Lerner himself briefly touches on this dimension of Kline’s sculpture when he writes:
To confront the severed head and fragmented body of a janitor in a museum space is a dis-
comfiting reminder of the undocumented (in more than one sense) material labor from
which such discourses can help distract us. Somebody is still making the hardware from
which you upload data to the cloud; somebody is still scrubbing the toilets at the museum
that hosts your symposium on Internet art. (
2016)
It is this kind of low-income service labor that is truly hard to see in America, which in
turn makes it difficult to truly see America. In the U.S., a large share of today’s low-income
and supposedly ‘low-skill’ workforce consists of people of color, many of them immigrant
men and women like Aleyda, whose body Kline has digitally reproduced, disassembled,
and then recomposed in a way that highlights both its fragmentation and its identification
with the cleaning products she uses daily. A gloved hand grips one bottle, while another
has the image of Aleyda’s hair printed on its entire surface. Cleaner and cleaning product
have merged and the resulting hybrid objects, meticulously placed on the cart, form an
understated testament to the commodification, fungibility, and perceived disposability
of the service worker’s body. Like the 3-D printed prototypes, this body is subjected to
the logic of planned obsolescence, redundant as soon as the next batch of better – i.e.,
cheaper, younger, or more docile – units of labor becomes available.
How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do
contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and
surveillance affect this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated
through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience? And how
can these infrastructures be mobilized in projects that aim to build different kinds of plat-
forms – the kinds that support the revaluation of low-income service work? This essay
addresses these questions by examining the gendered, racialized, and classed distribution
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY
899
of opportunities and vulnerabilities associated with digitally mediated service work, or
what I call platform labor. It investigates how the ascendant ‘on-demand’ or ‘gig’ econom-
ies are shoring up a particular order of worth whose political and moral economy leverages
inequality and severs the link between labor and livelihood for those at the bottom of its
entrepreneurial supply chain – now reimagined as a value-adding ‘ecosystem’ (Ben Letaifa,
2014; Van Alstyne, Parker, & Choudary, 2016). For these workers, the cost of living reg-
ularly exceeds the volatile earnings from what Susie Cagle (
2015) has termed ‘platform-
captured self-employment’, resulting in daily struggles to make ends meet (DePillis,
2014; Singer, 2014). The essay should be read as a position paper and a call to action:
its primary intention is to advocate an intersectional approach (Crenshaw,
1991;Gray,
2012)tothestudyof‘on-demand’ and ‘gig’ economies, highlighting the ways in which
these economies are historically constituted by class, racial, and gender inequalities, and to
argue for the necessity of ethnographic research that not only analyzes platform labor but
also aims to cultivate alternative imaginations of platform-med iatedwork.WhileIfocus
on the U.S., with its distinct socio-economic climate and racial history, many of the issues
and insights discussed below will also – increasingly – pertain to other Western countries.
The argument will unfold in four parts. First, I briefly situate the ‘on-demand’ economy
within the context of neoliberal socio-economic reforms that have, over the past four dec-
ades, shaped our present circumstances. Second, I argue that labor platforms should be
understood as new players in the temporary staffing industry, whose software-driven
management techniques exacerbate the already precarious conditions of contingent
workers in today’s low-income service economy. Third, after a short overview of the gen-
dered and racialized history of service work I analyze how this history of inequality and
subordination extends into the networked present of the on-demand economy, whose suc-
cess depends on the algorithmic intensification of established modes of exploitation and
control. Finally, I address the potential of ethnography, on the one hand, and platform
cooperativism, on the other, to critically empower low-income service workers operating
through platforms. These workers have thus far had little leverage when it comes to decid-
ing on the future of labor, despite the populist appeal of flat and frictionless digital labor
markets.
Situating the ‘on-demand’ economy
While many commentators have tended to focus on the novelty of what has come to be
known as the ‘on-demand’ or ‘gig’ economy, this phenomenon forms both a continuation
and an intensification of developments that have been underway for nearly four decades.
A common critical reading suggests that the recent Great Recession (2007–2011) provided
the conditions of possibility for the on-demand business model that has been most fre-
quently associated with Uber: under the combined pressures of mass un- and underem-
ployment, fiscal austerity policies, and rising inequality, an increasingly precarious and
shrinking middle-class workforce has welcomed new ways to market its assets – even if
the only asset available is embodied as labor power (Booth,
2015; Hill, 2015; Mirani,
2014). While I broadly concur with this reading, I do not think that the social insecurity
precipitating the rise of the on-demand and sharing economies can be solely attributed to
the latest economic recession. Contemporary trends usually have a more complex origin
story, which in this case, I would argue, starts in 1979. In that year, Paul Volcker, then
900
N. VAN DOORN
Chairman of the Federal Reserve, enacted a radical tight-money policy and raised interest
rates to hitherto unseen levels. As is well documented, this induced an inflow of capital –
in the form of foreign investments in U.S. government securities – as well as a deep reces-
sion that repressed wages and exacerbated already dismal unemployment rates, thereby
breaking the power of organized labor and inaugurating an era of ‘rollback neoliberalism’
marked by fiscal austerity, labor market restructuring, and the growing dominance of
finance capital (Harvey,
2007; Mahmud, 2012; Peck & Tickell, 2002). As Peck and Theo-
dore (
2012, p. 746) have noted, the logic driving this era
was crystallized in the Reagan administration’s economic program, which not only author-
ized wide ranging welfare retrenchments, while taking the fight to organized labor in the
form of antiunion stances and policies, but also articulated a normatively positive discourse
of labor market ‘flexibility,’ while (directly and indirectly) sanctioning the expansion of con-
tingent labor practices.
These practices took shape in tandem with – and were made possible by – the liberaliza-
tion of international trade relations and capital circulation, which spurred labor market
globalization and the massive ‘offshoring’ of manufacturing plants to countries with
low labor costs, putting further downward pressure on national wages and weakening
international labor solidarity.
Temporary staffing agencies have also played a key role in this structural expansion and
segmentation of contingent labor over the past three decades, both in manufacturing and
in the rapidly growing service sector where the gradual normalization of just-in-time
employment practices has had a particularly debilitating effect on the lives of low-income
workers. Describing the low-income labor market as ‘a site of intensive regulatory exper-
imentation and reinvention’ rather than straightforward deregulation, Peck and Theodore
argue that in
restructuring workforce systems and rewriting the social contract governing employment,
employers have sought both to download the risks inherent in a volatile economy and to off-
load the responsibilities that, historically, have been associated with the standard employ-
ment relationship, many turning to various labor market intermediaries to assist them in
mobilizing and managing flows of contingently employed workers for precarious jobs.
(
2012, p. 742)
On a macroeconomic level, temporary staffing has grown into an industry in its own right
since the 1980s and is now an important structural actor in the U.S. labor market, or one
that should rather be understood as ‘infrastructural’ to the extent that it has achieved ‘a
scale of operations that institutionalises this form of mediated contingent work as a per-
manent characteristic of the job market’ (Peck & Theodore,
2013, p. 27). Following Peck
and Theodore, businesses like Uber and Handy should be conceived of as platform labor
intermediaries that, despite their self-presentation as tech companies, operate as new
players in a dynamic temporary staffing industry whose traditional business-oriented
approach is being augmented by a more austere and zero-liability peer-to-peer model
that leverages software to optimize labor’s flexibility, scalability, tractability, and its frag-
mentation. These businesses do not only offer their software as a service to participants in
the multi-sided markets they orchestrate, but also use it to manage and conceal a contin-
gent workforce through historically gendered and racialized techniques that articulate a
‘workforce-as-a-service’ model (Starner,
2015).
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY
901