Former Scientific Staff:
PhD researcher in Labour Geography from 2021 to 2025
PhD project:
Bridge over Troubled Water: Working realities on carework platforms in Geneva
Project summary:
This PhD thesis explores how platform-mediated labor (re)shapes the lives of workers engaged in homecare – care and domestic work provided in private households – in Geneva. Platform-mediated work, also called gig work, consists of a platform intermediating between two sides: one looking to book different services and another offering those services. It contributes to expanding insights into platform-mediated work by highlighting the unique experiences of homecare workers. Theoretically and conceptually, it engages with calls within feminist labor geography, as well as scholarship from platfrom-mediated work, on centering the everyday and the micro-politics of work. At the same time, by investigating platform-mediated work in the homecare in Geneva, it sheds light on everyday working experiences in a largely invisible, feminized and migrantised economy.
The main findings investigate the micro-level practices of workers operating through domestic services platforms which I introduce through the term ‘reassembling work’. Resilience in the context of platform-mediated work can be interpreted as an active form of refusal and a proactive renegotiation of one’s position in the labor market under different conditions of precarity. Second the findings reveal that – while carework platforms are becoming an important everyday infrastructure for many homecare workers – access to work isn’t immediate. I argue that marketplace platforms engage in a form of ‘professionalization from above’. They indirectly enforce new requirements regarding code of conduct, client management, and competencies. With this, they create new entry barriers for accessing carework. However, the formalisation of the employment relationship is still externalized to the workers and platform clients. Then, the findings reveal the importance of off-platform social networks such as intra-household relations and relations with wider family, friends, and neighbors in financially sustaining workers despite the inadequacy of their platform income. However, the provision of financial resources to workers through their social networks allows platforms to outsource paying a living wage and social protection. Hence, financial streams from off-platform social networks not only help subsidize workers’ everyday needs but also the platform. This allows platforms to continue offering care as a low-cost service.
Publications:
Ettarfi, K. (2024). Conceptualizing labor agency through resilience: Practices of reassembling work on domestic services platforms. Geoforum, 156, 104130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104130
Ettarfi, K. (2024). Professionalization from above in domestic work: Accessing work on marketplace platforms. Critical Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241297687
Ettarfi, K., & Schwiter, K. (2025). Hidden platform subsidies: The role of social networks in concealing (too) low income on care work platforms. Geographica Helvetica, 80(4), 305–314. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-80-305-2025