Theorising the gig economy and home-based service work

Abstract

The history of domestic servants in Australia offers a provocative challenge to the prophets of the digital gig economy. Like home-based service workers today, 19th-and 20th-century domestic servants worked without the protection of minimum wages or hours, unions or independent arbitration and endured perpetually porous boundaries between their work and non-working time, low status and pay. This article argues that digital platforms are instruments of a fundamental shift in the governance of home-based service work, from a system of ‘dyadic’ to one of ‘structural’ domination. Intermediaries played virtually no role in the operation of the former system, but they play a fundamental role in the latter, as aggregators of data about workers’ responsiveness and speed that enable market-based disciplinary mechanisms to operate without reference to public law and across a much larger spatial context than was previously possible. Short-termism and the fungibility of workers are pre-eminent features of the gig economy model, processes which are inherently corrosive to quality caring relationships that demand an atmosphere of trust and non-instrumentality. The historical analysis that is advanced gives rise to a number of implications for the regulation of digital platforms, union responses and industry planning in the future.