Abstract
This article explores the various forms of physical and digital intermediation in the provision of home care services in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and their impacts on the segregation and labor autonomy of migrant and native women employed in the sector. We analyze autonomy from three different approaches: understood as flexibility, from a post-operaist perspective and as conviviality. A qualitative methodology was employed, based on in-depth interviews with care workers, along different kinds of intermediaries, such as placement agencies, uberized platforms and care cooperatives with different levels of digitalization. While uberized platforms primarily mediate in precarious and short-term temporary jobs and tend to reduce workers’ autonomy in the three analyzed aspects, cooperatives emerge as a model that can improve autonomy across all business models, especially in the case of migrant workers.
Introduction
The effects of the platform economy on labor conditions and labor autonomy have been a subject of debate in recent years. While some scholars have posited that platformization enhances freedom of choice of employees and facilitates labor market entry for disadvantaged groups, alternative perspectives suggest that it engenders an increase in labor precarity, a growing ethnic and gender segregation and a refinement of control over workers. In this milieu, some scholars have proposed the platform cooperative model as a way to reconcile digitalization with dignified labor conditions. Although the implementation of this organizational model is not without contradictions, empirical evidence suggests that it affords greater autonomy to workers and enhances workers’ control over the production process.
This article deals with the issue of the platformization and cooperativization of home care in the context of the Basque Country. The Basque Country serves as an intriguing case study due to three distinctive characteristics: a high prevalence of salaried home care work; a special hiring regime in the domestic sector favoring the presence of intermediaries; and an economic environment characterized by a significant presence of social economy in the form of cooperatives. 1
With regards to the first characteristic, at the demographic level, the Basque Country has an aging population that generates a high demand for home care services that are only minimally covered by public administrations (Sainz et al., 2014; Moreno, 2014). Direct public coverage, the so-called Home Help Service (Servicio de Ayuda Domiciliaria) is provided by the public sector through subcontracted companies. This service is insufficient to guarantee care for dependent persons as it covers a maximum of 10 hours per week. Therefore, the home care system in the Basque Country is mainly based on the work of families and the hiring of domestic workers through the market.
Connecting with the second characteristic, the recruitment of domestic workers through the market is favored by the legislation. There are public subsidies for hiring caregivers in the market (Martínez Buján, 2011) and there is also a special labor contracting modality for domestic employees, with fewer labor rights, which makes direct hiring of salaried female workers cheaper than contracting the service to a company (Civersity, 2019). Poor working conditions in the home care sector result in a predominance of vulnerable workers, especially impoverished women of Latin American origin with dependent families in their home countries (Barba del Horno et al., 2023; Nogueira and Zalakain, 2015). The hiring of domestic workers by families, despite having lower costs, means that families are faced with uncertainty and lack of information when hiring. As a result, there has been a proliferation of placement agencies that act as intermediaries between workers and families. Their main function is to put both parties in contact, facilitate the bureaucratic procedures associated with hiring and mediate in the event of problems arising in the employment relationship (Nogueira and Zalakain, 2015). In a context of digital transformation, other companies have appeared on the market that, with business models based on the platform economy, are engaged in automated digital intermediation between families and domestic workers (Digital Future Society, 2021). We will call these companies uberized care platforms, although, as we will see, the algorithmic control involved in these companies is more limited than in companies, such as Uber.
Regarding the third characteristic, the Basque Country is one of the regions of the world where the cooperative movement has developed the most. The Mondragon cooperative 2 , the largest cooperative business group in the world, is headquartered in the Basque Country and brings together large and small cooperatives from different sectors, some of which have a significant transnational presence. Likewise, there is an ecosystem for research and promotion of cooperativism that integrates the Basque Government and different companies and research centers (Bakaikoa and Morandeira, 2012). The Mondragon Group has its own university and within the public university of the Basque Country research groups have also been developed around cooperativism (see, e.g. GEZKI).
Cooperatives have also emerged in the home care sector, acting as intermediaries between families and workers. Most cooperatives are worker-owned, but integral cooperatives have also emerged, uniting both users and workers.
We have, therefore, that the home care system in the Basque Country continues to rely largely on family care. However, an increasing demand, combined with limited public intervention that also favors hiring in the market, has led to a rise in the employment of domestic workers and the emergence of new agents that mediate between workers and families: placement agencies that facilitate the hiring process between families and workers, digital platforms that mediate through algorithms, and care cooperatives through which workers organize to achieve more favorable working conditions.
This paper has assessed the possibilities for labor autonomy development in three different types of intermediaries in the care market: uberized platforms, placement agencies, and care cooperatives. We propose an analysis of autonomy from three different perspectives: understood as flexibility in the choice of tasks, schedules, and procedures; understood in a post-operaist sense as productive autonomy potentially independent of the mediation of capital; and understood as conviviality, in a sense that it is linked to collective political empowerment. As we will see below, different levels of digitalization are present in all these intermediation modalities. The objective of the article is to analyze the effects in terms of autonomy of two distinct technologies: on one hand, digital technologies implemented through platformization processes, and on the other hand, social technology related to the cooperativization of labor.
Platform capitalism, labor autonomy, and platform cooperativism
Platforms are digital infrastructures that enable interaction between two or more groups (Srnicek, 2017: 99). The technological development and economic deployment of platforms has taken place in a capitalist context (Zuboff, 2019) that has conditioned the very development of technology in what could be called a process of real subsumption (Walsh, 2023).
From a capitalist point of view, the platform presents different advantages for capital accumulation. By positioning itself as an intermediary between people’s social interactions, the platform collects data that are economically valuable as predictive tools (Zuboff, 2019). On the other hand, platforms allow rapid scalability with reduced marginal costs and network externalities, granting advantages to those companies that are able to mobilize large amounts of capital (Vasudevan, 2022).
In general, terms, platforms have favored a deepening of the labor outsourcing phenomena emerging in the neoliberal period (Rosenblat, 2018; Degryse, 2022). Outsourcing gives competitive advantages to companies because it allows, in some cases, to circumvent labor legislation (Ravenelle, 2019) and provides flexibility to adapt to demand without the need to hire and fire female workers (Dubal, 2017).
The effects of platformization on working conditions and labor market segmentation have been the subject of debate in recent years. Some studies have highlighted the positive effects of platforms that would improve the chances of labor market insertion of the most vulnerable groups (Gerber, 2022); while other research has concluded that platforms strengthen the segregating dynamics of markets (Piasna and Drahokoupil, 2017; Van Doorn, 2017) and contribute to greater labor precariousness (MacDonald and Giazitzoglu, 2019).
One of the attractions that has been highlighted about working on platforms is the supposed flexibility it provides, allowing to choose the working day and place of work (Wood et al., 2019; Woodcock and Graham, 2019), as well as the time slots in which one wants to work (Katsnelson and Oberholzer-Gee, 2021). This flexibility is however constrained by the need to earn a minimum income in a highly precarious market and also, by algorithmic design that in many cases rewards the ability to adapt to the needs of the platform at the expense of flexibility (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016; Shevchuk et al., 2019; Sun et al., 2023). Moreover, the type of flexibility to which platforms give rise benefits employers the most (Van Doorn, 2017).
Another of the debates surrounding platform work is that of autonomy, in which the tradition of Italian post-operaism has had an important influence. Post-operaists argue that the technological and labor transformations that have taken place since the 1960s have led to the preeminence of immaterial labor, a type of labor linked to knowledge, based on cooperation and social relations, which is neither automatable nor directly controllable, and which is endowed, in this sense, with autonomy vis-à-vis capital (Hardt and Negri, 2017). This autonomy of labor with respect to capital creates favorable conditions for the emancipation of the working multitude through the appropriation of the means of production, transforming private property into commons (Hardt and Negri, 2017).
This optimistic view regarding the relationship between technology, immaterial labor and autonomy has received different criticisms among which three could be highlighted: a feminist critique, which we will develop in the following epigraph; a Marxist critique that rejects the idea that immaterial labor cannot be automated (Steinhoff, 2021); and a third critique that starts from the non-neutrality of technology, which defends that the technological designs of the platforms themselves contain pro-capitalist biases that make them hardly appropriable for an emancipatory project (Christiaens, 2022).
One of the most novel proposals to address the problem of the emancipation of labor in the context of digital capitalism is the constitution of platform cooperatives (Christiaens, 2024; Scholz, 2017). This cooperative model has been deployed in recent years giving rise to the creation of concrete projects that have already begun to operate in different sectors and have also been the subject of study from the academic field (Foramitti et al., 2020; Papadimitropoulos and Malamidis, 2024). In a way, platform cooperativism recovers the unfulfilled promises of the collaborative economy (Rendueles, 2017) as an area in which it is possible to develop community economic relations that are not governed by the logic of capital accumulation.
However, as has been pointed out by numerous authors for more than a century, cooperatives have limitations as instruments for emancipation (Christiaens, 2023; Sandoval, 2020). These limitations are related to bureaucratization and hierarchization in decision-making (Cornforth, 1995); to the need to reduce costs to compete in capitalist markets (Sandoval, 2016); or, in the specific case of platform cooperativism, to the presence of individualistic values and a competitive ethic that turns some cooperatives into instruments that are difficult to appropriate from an anti-capitalist logic (Sandoval, 2020). Other authors have pointed out that conflicts do not disappear in cooperatives, but take on new forms (Kasparian, 2021).
From a position in favor of cooperative platforms, Christiaens (2022) has developed a concept of autonomy as conviviality that seeks, on one hand, to address the limitations of post-operative autonomy and, on the other hand, to highlight the potential of technology to address the problems of the cooperative model. Instead of proposing the collectivization of existing technologies, Christiaens argues that it is preferable to start from a social technology, such as cooperatives and, from there, develop platforms that respond to the needs of the collective project. Based on the work of Ivan Illicch (1973), Christiaens proposes the need for platform cooperatives to develop convivial technologies, that is, technological tools whose design contributes to individual independence, collective self-determination and the creation of resonant interpersonal relationships (Christiaens, 2022). In addition, convivial tools can help to limit the capitalist and bureaucratic dynamics found in cooperatives (Christiaens, 2024).
Specificities of the platformization and autonomy of care work
Although the analysis of the effects of the platformization of work has been abundant in recent years, in the field of domestic care work research has been much less (Ticona and Mateescu, 2018). This responds to the dynamics of invisibilization that have always characterized this type of work (Masterson and Hoobler, 2019). Through these dynamics, domestic work, the effort, or the qualifications required to develop it are made invisible, and also the scientific and political reflection on care work as a social and economic phenomenon is made invisible.
Another singularity of domestic care work is that it has historically been regulated by gender and colonial power relations (Moya, 2007), as well as by class relations. Domestic care work is mostly performed by women in the family setting and by salaried women who in a high percentage belong to disadvantaged classes and ethnic minorities (Federici, 2020; Moya, 2007). An important part of the workers in this sector are poor migrant women who send part of their income to their countries of origin to economically support their families, a phenomenon known as global care chains (Yeates, 2004).
From the point of view of class struggle, domestic work is also unique, since it is characterized by the atomization of employers and the isolation of workers (Dalla Costa and James, 1975), which makes it difficult to organize union movements. Because of this, domestic work is also exceptional in its regulatory dimension. The invisibilization and weakness of women workers in the class struggle have resulted in the absence of regulations or, subsequently, in specific regulations that grant fewer labor rights than other occupations (Moya, 2007).
Another differential characteristic of care work is the importance attached to mutual trust in its performance (de Ruijter and van der Lippe, 2009; du Toit, 2023). This trust emanates from the social interactions between providers and clients, and also depends on the presumption of an ethical caring position that is linked to female gender roles (Lanoix, 2013).
The dimension of trust is one of the keys to understanding both the traditional provision of this work through informal networks (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994) and the more recent emergence of intermediaries. As we noted earlier, in the case of the Basque Country, the care crisis (Isaksen et al., 2008) has been addressed to a large extent by resorting to the recruitment of salaried domestic workers under a special regime in the market. In this context, intermediary companies between workers and employers try to offer confidence to families facing the uncertainty of hiring, by managing recruitment or mediating in case of conflict (Digital Future Society, 2021).
All these differential characteristics of domestic care work have influenced the processes of platformization that have taken place in recent years, so that, care platforms also present some specific characteristics. Unlike companies, such as Uber, in the case of care, platforms do not focus their activity on the direct organization and supervision of work; offline service provision is one of the distinctive features of care platformization (Fetterolf, 2022). Care platforms fulfill similar functions to traditional placement agencies, but on a digital infrastructure, that is, they mediate between workers and employers by providing information and trying to monopolize the trust that care work requires (Fetterolf, 2022). On these platforms, for example, reputational evaluation systems have been implemented through which client–employers have access to the evaluations that other clients have made about a worker. This information is, however, asymmetric because workers do not usually have access to information about employers (Masterson and Hoobler, 2019).
Some studies have argued for the positive effect that platforms can have by providing greater visibility to care work (Ticona and Mateescu, 2018). However, most studies have highlighted that platforms have deepened the dynamics of segregation and casualization in the domestic care market (Fetterolf, 2022; Rodríguez-Modroño et al., 2022; Ticona and Mateescu, 2018). Some studies have observed, for example, how educated White women have advantages derived from their digital cultural capital that allow them to position themselves better on the platforms (Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2019).
The debate on autonomy among post-operaists has also taken place in the context of care work. For post-operaists, care work is a type of immaterial labor, the affective labor, which emerges from human interactions (Hardt and Negri, 2001) and which, like other immaterial labor, is endowed with autonomy. This autonomy can be linked, in the case of care work, to the trust we spoke of earlier; a trust that emerges from the interactions between workers and clients, but which intermediary companies try to appropriate.
The post-operaist vision of care work has been criticized from feminist positions; for not considering the material character of care work (Bolton, 2009); for not taking into account that, in addition to the capitalist exploitation relation, care work would be defined on the basis of gender and colonial domination relations (Lanoix, 2013; Oksala, 2016); and because, by focusing only on commodified domestic work, it contributes to the invisibility of care work that takes place within families (Federici, 2020). Trust as an affective dimension linked to care work could also be oppressive for the care workers, because it can hide labor rights behind the veil of love (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007). These critiques argue, in short, that emancipation is not possible without politically problematizing the gender and colonial power relations that exist behind the very social construction of care work.
A notion of autonomy, such as the one proposed by Christiaens may be more appropriate to confront these inequalities of power. Work autonomy understood as conviviality (Christiaens, 2022) implies the collective determination of the work process and the creation of social relations that contribute to the collective satisfaction of needs. In the field of domestic work, this would imply the political problematization of gender and colonial power dynamics that lead to market-based domestic labor being predominantly carried out by racialized women. From this point of view, cooperatives, as devices that strengthen conviviality, can be appropriate instruments to confront the power relations that are hidden behind care work.
Methodology
To analyze the autonomy of women workers in the home care sector, three types of companies were considered: uberized care platforms, placement agencies, and care cooperatives. These companies produce several types of services: non-specialized service, specialized service, live-in service, which is characterized by the worker residing in the client’s home, and on-demand service. A qualitative methodology has been employed, establishing a comparison among three types of companies. The aim has been to determine the effects of digital technology (platforms and other media technologies) and organizational technology (cooperative-capitalist) on the labor segregation and autonomy. In this context, placement agencies serve as an example of slightly digitalized capitalist intermediation; uberized platforms serve as a model of highly digitalized capitalist intermediation; and care cooperatives serve as a counterpoint in which the intermediation is cooperativized.
Our analysis is based on three different concepts of autonomy in domestic work described in the previous sections. First, we analyze autonomy understood as flexibility in the choice of tasks, schedules, and procedures, from the point of view of the worker. Second, we evaluate autonomy from a post-operaist perspective, as the workers’ ability to keep the affective dimensions of the work outside the control of capital. Here, we will focus on the dimension of trust. Third, we analyze autonomy as conviviality, that is, as the workers’ capacity to problematize and politicize the power dimensions (gender and colonial) present in the provision of care work.
For this purpose, 24 workers in the home care sector were interviewed 3 , whose work trajectories covered the three business models to be studied. The sample consisted of 23 women and 1 man, aged between 35 and 64 years, foreign and national, and with different periods of residence in the Basque Country (see Table 1). The interviews were structured and the interviewees were asked about their working conditions throughout their working career in the care sector.
Classification of interviewees.
Source: Own elaboration based on the interviews.
Contact with the workers was made through the companies providing the services and, in some cases, through personal contacts of the researchers. All participants were informed of the conditions of participation in the study and anonymity was guaranteed at all times, avoiding mentioning the names of both the individuals and the companies, as well as other data that could identify them.
Information on work experiences in the uberized platforms was collected from three different platforms, two at the international level and one at the national level. In the case of care cooperatives, workers from three cooperatives with different models were interviewed. The first is a cooperative that manages an outsourced public service; the second cooperative provides specialized nursing care in the market; and the third is an integral cooperative, which brings together workers, clients and organizations that aims to promote a fair care model under a single organization. The information about the placement agencies has been obtained from previous experiences of the workers interviewed on the platforms and cooperatives, as well as through a key informant.
A mixed cross-sectional/longitudinal procedure was used to compare labor autonomy. On one hand, the testimonies of female workers from different types of companies were compared and, on the other hand, each of the interviewees was asked to compare the working conditions of the different types of work they have carried out throughout their careers. As additional sources of information, we also analyzed the companies’ websites and interacted with the digital platforms to learn about their operation.
Results
The interviews and the analysis of the different modalities of care work show that there is significant ethnic segregation in the care market, with foreign women concentrated in jobs with the worst working conditions, such as live-in service and informal employment.
Although an important part of the jobs referred to by the people interviewed are still obtained through informal ties, a tendency toward greater formalization of labor relations in the domestic care sector can be perceived in the trajectories. This trend may be a consequence of the workers’ greater labor integration, and also of a progressive formalization of this type of labor relationship due to the legislative changes that have taken place in recent years. In any case, in the case of women workers in an irregular situation, informal work continues to be the norm. Although not specifically analyzed in this paper, the search for employment through bonds of trust continues to be one of the main routes in the care sector.
Placement agencies: Monopolizing trust
The recruitment agencies studied try to monopolize the trust generated in care relationships by acting as intermediaries between clients and domestic workers. They carry out contact tasks, mediation in case of conflict, and various management procedures: formalization of contracts, coverage of sick leave and vacations, and processing of permits for foreign workers. These companies offer different combinations of digitalization and personal attention. There are companies that operate throughout Spain and are more digitalized, where personal contact is reduced; and others, of a more local nature, that have a web page, but where the intermediation work is done in person.
Agencies provide specialized and non-specialized services; but the most characteristic service of this type of intermediation is the live-in service. This service is characterized by extremely precarious working conditions that in practice can involve working 20-hour long shifts 6 days a week.
The placement agencies reproduce processes of ethnic labor segregation based on the working conditions of the service. According to key informant 21, with an experience of more than 20 years in the sector, in the live-in service, almost all of the workers are of Latin American origin (E21). Employers prefer to hire workers of Latin American origin due to their knowledge of the Spanish language. The live-in service, due to precarious working conditions, has more demand than supply; and many workers avoid it if they are in a position to do so.
There is a lot of live-in work available; if you have documentation, you can start working tomorrow because many people don’t want it. (Key informant, E21)
However, this type of job can be attractive to people who have limited labor options or need to minimize their expenses, particularly those who must send remittances to their countries of origin (Barba del Horno et al., 2024).
Flexibility and work–life balance in this type of hiring must be negotiated with the families. In some cases, agencies may send substitute workers to cover eventual absences. But the flexibility generated by the agencies’ intermediation is aimed at meeting the care needs of the clients: they offer the possibility of having additional workers to cover needs that go beyond the main worker’s employment contract.
According to key informant 21, once the contract is signed, the labor relationship is between workers and clients and the company only mediates in case of conflict, so that, the company’s attempt to monopolize trust is incomplete.
The interviews reveal numerous references to the emotional bond that develops between female workers and users, which could be seen as a form of autonomy in a post-operaist sense, since the affective and cognitive resources needed to provide the service are autonomous from capital.
This does not, however, imply greater bargaining power for the workers, as their position is one of significant vulnerability. In the caregiver–client relationship, there are unequal affective dynamics, where labor rights become concessions granted by the client, for which the worker must feel grateful (E10; E12).
The mediation process is activated when the labor aspects of the work emerge from the affective relationship, especially in cases where clients begin to suffer from significant cognitive impairment, that imply the deterioration of labor conditions:
She started screaming at night, that I was beating her, and the police came. Fortunately her daughter was there, otherwise they would have taken me to jail . . . she [the agency workers] brought us together to solve the problem, because I wanted to leave it [the job] (E21).
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But mediation often involves, especially when demanded by care users, job changes that are, in reality, hidden dismissals.
If the family doesn’t want you to continue, the agency will place someone else and find you another house (E21).
We can conclude that, in agency work, relations between workers and clients are informal and in a context of unequal power. Agency mediation is exceptional and when it occurs, it is usually to defend the interests of the clients. The mediation of agencies tends to conceal and manage the conflicts and power imbalances underlying domestic work, thereby reducing workers’ autonomy, understood as conviviality.
Uberized care platforms: Sharpening the competition
Uberized platform work is predominantly on-demand, attracting both local students and migrant/domestic workers seeking additional income. This modality grants increased flexibility in the selection of schedules and tasks, albeit at the expense of heightened income instability and greater uncertainty. Therefore, as this employment modality does not ensure economic sustenance, it is incompatible with a wide notion of flexibility.
Contrary to what happens in the live-in service, there is an oversupply in the on-demand service. All the platform workers interviewed stated that the number of offers circulating on the platforms is too small for the volume of workers registered.
One difference with respect to agency work is the possibility of employment for workers in an irregular administrative situation. However, this does not occur in all the platforms, since the national platform under study carries out a more exhaustive filtering process, checking that work permits and qualifications are in order. This causes a phenomenon of segregation by platform; while international companies are dominated by workers of foreign origin, the national platform is dominated by native workers.
As platforms provide users with information and photographs of the workers, they facilitate the discrimination of racialized or foreign-born individuals. Unlike when the interaction occurs in person, clients do not need to verbalize their racial preferences; it is enough to contact only those workers who meet their expectations.
Regarding the payment of fees (which allow greater access to offers and better positioning), among the people interviewed, two undocumented foreign women paid the fees to gain more visibility on the platform (E22, E23).
They weren’t responding to my applications, so I decided to pay to have access to more opportunities; but I still haven’t gotten a job (E22).
The number of interviews conducted does not allow for generalization in this regard, but the experience of these two women suggests the possible existence of an asymmetry, where the most vulnerable workers are the ones bearing the greatest burden of paying fees.
The flexibility provided by the platforms is relative, as the on-demand model, in a context where supply far exceeds demand, sometimes makes it difficult to earn a sufficient income to live on, forcing female workers to rely on other sources of income. Moreover, in the case of international platforms, supply is expanding on a global scale. Two of the women interviewed chose and had been working in other regions of the country and abroad (E18, E20). This global and atomized supply, combined with information asymmetries and the vulnerability of some workers, generates extreme competition that could deteriorate working conditions.
Therefore, the flexibility promoted by the platforms in this context is, above all, flexibility for the clients or for those workers who do not rely exclusively on the income provided by the platform.
As in the case of agencies, the strategy of the platforms is to monopolize trust, offering supposedly secure contacts through information verification and online evaluation systems. There is no control over the work process that is arranged between the families and the workers. However, the information provided by the platforms is clearly asymmetric and could generate insecurity problems for the workers:
They ask you for a lot of information, but they don’t give you information about the clients, you don’t know who you are talking to. When I’ve gone to interviews I’ve met in a bar and I’ve gone accompanied because I was scared (E19).
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The platforms’ monopolization of trust is even more limited than in the case of agencies. All interviewees underwent a personal interview with clients after the first contact through the platform. According to the people interviewed, in their cases, once the first contact is made, a personal relationship is established and the platform is no longer used for further contact (E19; E20).
In this way, from a post-operaist perspective, we could say that platform technology does not undermine the autonomy linked to trust, which continues to rely on the affective ties established between workers and clients.
However, from a political standpoint, the growing competition among workers, information asymmetries and new possibilities for discrimination make it difficult to politicize and foster public debate about the care model and the gender and colonial power asymmetries that underlie care work. This results in a reduction of autonomy if we understand it as conviviality.
Care cooperatives: Toward a fair care model?
In contrast to agencies and platforms, care cooperatives reduce competition among workers. In the three cooperatives from which interviews have been collected, workers almost unanimously maintain that working in a cooperative allows them to be part of a group and to face the labor market collectively and to be able to decide collectively on working conditions.
The three cooperatives offer different services and have different ethnic compositions among their workers. The first one is a cooperative specialized in nursing services where almost all staff are native-born women. The second one is a subcontracted cooperative responsible for public home care services where approximately half of the workers are native-born and the other half are of foreign origin. The third one is an integral cooperative formed by workers, clients, and social entities where the majority of the workers are of foreign origin.
Although none of the cases involve a cooperative platform, the study of labor dynamics can shed light on the potential of cooperatives as a social technology to enhance workers’ autonomy. It may also be useful for identifying how digital technologies can amplify the positive effects of cooperative dynamics on autonomy.
The use of digital technologies is higher in the case of the integral cooperative that uses messaging applications for organizing work and social media for communicating with member-users and the general public. They also have a website with which interaction is possible. The specialized cooperative has a website and uses social media for recruitment, and the subcontracted cooperative does not use digital platforms.
Within cooperatives, processes of segregation by origin also take place. Services such as specialized ones, which have higher social status and more favorable hiring conditions, have a greater presence of native-born individuals. In the case of subcontracted cooperative, foreign-born workers are hired to cover shortages due to a lack of native-born workers, but they often are not made members of the cooperative (E1, E3). Workers from these companies state that the exclusion of foreign-born individuals and men occurs because clients demand native-born women for care work (E7). This discrimination is more pronounced in rural areas where there is a higher availability of native-born workers (E1, E2). These discriminatory practices do not occur in the integral cooperative, which is mainly composed of foreign workers. As we will see later, this cooperative aims to promote a fairer care model.
Regarding salary and rest conditions, cooperatives generally offer the minimum conditions mandated by labor legislation because they are forced to compete in the market with other capitalist enterprises (E7), which has led two of the cooperatives to lose services and have to reduce working hours. However, unlike capitalist enterprises, in cooperatives, labor rights are upheld without workers having to resort to conflict to claim them (E3). Nevertheless, salaries are, in some cases, insufficient to guarantee total economic independence for women (E3, E6, and E8). In addition, the majority of interviewed women believe that the work they perform is not socially valued. This indicates that, despite having better working conditions than capitalist enterprises, cooperatives do not guarantee, on their own, the overcoming of the inherent precariousness of care work.
In all three cooperatives, there are individuals specialized in management, although they also provide home care services. This specialization in management work and the lack of communication mechanisms result in very limited participation of some workers in decision-making (E1, E6, and E9). Nevertheless, coordinators are receptive to the needs for work–life balance of the workers in almost all cases, allowing for greater flexibility. Workers also have a certain level of decision-making capacity regarding the services offered by the cooperative; for instance, in the case of the integral cooperative, it was decided not to offer live-in service due to the precariousness of the associated working conditions (E10 and E14).
In the case of cooperatives, workers collectively appropriate the trust generated in the provision of the service. Coordinators try to assign each worker to the position where they will fit best, considering the needs of the clients and also those of the workers. Coordination among workers ensures effective coverage of absences and builds trust with clients (E6, E7, and E8). Furthermore, the greater involvement of workers results in the service provided being of higher quality than in other types of companies where pressure to perform more services leads to poorer attention (E13).
However, this autonomy that emanates from control over affective work and the trust it generates is not achieved in favorable working conditions and in a high social valuation of care. The integral cooperative has a design that can contribute to overcoming some of these limitations, as it starts from a politicization of care work as a socially valuable task for which all of society must share responsibility. By integrating users, workers, and other entities that want to promote a model of responsible care, the integral cooperative exposes the debate on the care model in the public space.
The training and awareness-raising activities carried out by this cooperative are interesting in this regard: organizing training workshops for its workers and talks and events where the shift toward a fairer care model is proposed, as well as implementing projects aimed at creating social ecosystems, so that, elderly people are more integrated into community networks.
The politicization of care promoted by the cooperative also emerges in the speeches of some of the workers:
The cooperative (. . .) faces a monster, because many people have seen profit in the care sector and have monopolized it and want to exploit it. (. . .) Care work has many aspects, and it is thought that the caregiver is just there and her whole life is that bond. However, care involves emotional, physical, intellectual work; there are many things at stake and they are not valued. It is thought that the caregiver has to be at 100%, and that’s why they end up getting sick. And if they’re not, well, they’re out, because another one will come. Awareness of its value is needed, which is the engine for many to work, and also that it should not be forgotten that the person who cares needs to be cared for. (. . .) People need that affection, that warmth, that feeling of being listened to. We are not machines, and we are not caring for machines, but human beings (E10).
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As we were saying earlier, this cooperative is the one that makes the most intensive use of digital technologies, using social networks and its website to promote social debate around the care model. It becomes apparent here the role that communication technologies can have when designed and used appropriately for the development of autonomy understood as conviviality.
Discussion
The dynamics of outsourcing, deregulation, and control observed in the platformization of other sectors (Rosenblat, 2018; Degryse, 2022) do not operate in the same way in the care sector for several reasons. First, because we are dealing with a sector that was predominantly informal before platformization, in which the emergence of intermediaries may even promote greater formalization (Ticona and Mateescu, 2018). Second, in the case of care, control over work activity is indirect, through evaluation systems, and limited because the service is provided offline (Fetterolf, 2022). These divergences from the literature probably stem from the fact that the effects of platformization have not been homogeneous, and there has been a certain bias in the literature that has focused more on successful processes than on those that have encountered resistance (Seibt, 2024).
Regarding the dynamics of segregation and discrimination, the results show that they continue to exist in all the models of companies studied. In the case of cooperatives, discrimination appears linked to the need to compete in the market and adapt to customer demands. In platforms, algorithms perform a similar role in many aspects (Piasna and Drahokoupil, 2017; Van Doorn, 2017).
In regard to the debate on flexibility, in line with what other authors have proposed, the analysis of the interviews shows how, on platforms, information asymmetry, job precariousness, and an excess of supply limit the supposed flexibility of workers to choose work and hours, benefiting primarily the users of care services and the platforms themselves (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016; Shevchuk et al., 2019; Sun et al., 2023). These dynamics imply greater flexibility for employers (Crandford, 2020) and result in a reduction in the autonomy of the workers, understood as flexibility in choosing tasks and schedules.
In the case of care cooperatives, however, the cooperative union limits competition among workers and provides greater flexibility to determine schedules due to the coordinators’ receptiveness to their colleagues’ reconciliation needs.
In relation to conflict management, intermediaries sometimes apply practices that favor the interests of the care users. Similarly to Crandford’s (2020) work, we have detected a tendency among capitalist intermediaries to resolve conflicts through dismissal when it is the users who want to terminate the employment relationship.
The results of the interviews also show the incapacity of platforms to achieve an effective monopoly on the trust necessary to provide care services. This is quite consistent with the post-operaist idea that domestic work, as affective work, is endowed with autonomy from capital because it is based on non-automatable interpersonal relationships (Hardt and Negri, 2017).
However, an emancipatory proposal for domestic work cannot evade the specificities of this labor. Care work has physical dimensions, involves qualifications and efforts that are not recognized as such because they are naturalized based on gender roles (Masterson & Hoobler, 2019). The employment relationship of domestic work is often contaminated by a gender-based power relationship in which affectivity itself is used as a tool to discipline women workers and contributes to making the effort and qualifications necessary to perform the work invisible (Lanoix, 2013; Oksala, 2016). Thus, the ethics associated with care and the dimension of emotional effort are naturalized and made invisible so as not to be recognized as qualifications and effort but as qualities inherent to being a woman.
The notion of autonomy as conviviality proposed by Christiaens (2022) can be an interesting alternative from which to advance toward a fair care model. From this perspective, we can understand the care cooperative as a social technology driving conviviality, which makes visible the qualifications of domestic work, collectively manages the dimension of trust, and politically problematizes the labor relationship. In the context of the cooperative, communication technologies can favor participation and deliberation dynamics that contribute to the transformation of the care labor relationship. We have seen how these political dynamics of participation in decision-making and the problematization of care work occur within cooperatives, particularly in the case of the integral cooperative. In other studies also, care cooperatives have been shown to be effective tools for empowering women and transforming gender relations beyond the workplace (Komposch, 2022). Other studies have assigned a similar role to community-based groups (Crandford, 2020).
The market salaries and racial discrimination in the cooperatives studied demonstrate that the cooperative model per se does not guarantee fair social relations, especially when cooperatives have to compete in the market with companies that operate based on capitalist logics (Sandoval, 2016). A partial solution to limit the penetration of capitalist logics into the cooperative is to organize care within integral cooperatives. If care is managed within an integral cooperative (Berguier, 2019), the politicization of care itself may lead users to be willing to pay higher prices than market rates. In this way, it could partially avoid the need to compete in capitalist markets because services would be provided within an ethical community rather than through the market.
Regarding the role of technology, we have seen how digitization in capitalist enterprises stimulates competition among workers, creates asymmetries in intermediation, and promotes the segregation of certain groups. However, communication technologies could have positive effects on working conditions (Christiaens, 2022; de Vita, 2023). In this sense, they can contribute to increasing and democratizing communication flows within the cooperative: politicizing care, overcoming the typical isolation of domestic work, better coordinating tasks, increasing transparency, facilitating participation in the functioning of cooperatives, or reducing the distance between coordination tasks and care work. In addition, they can be used to combat the co-optation of cooperatives, contributing to the creation of vocabularies that confront the logic of capital (Sandoval, 2020).
The role of technology in care cooperatives is linked to the idea of convivial technologies proposed by Christiaens (2022). A platform with a design that promotes horizontal communication can facilitate the democratic organization of the work process, democratic decision-making, and deliberation around a socially just care model.
Conclusion
It is important for projects to originate from cooperatives that develop technology based on their needs, rather than the other way around (Christiaens, 2022). Connecting with this idea, some studies have highlighted that the formation of new platform cooperatives may present problems in the field of care, and that it would be more viable to platformize existing care cooperatives (Bunders et al., 2022).
Overall, cooperatives can serve as an appropriate mode of organization for unleashing the potentials of communication technologies within the care sector, fostering dignified working conditions and real autonomy for the workers.
A fair care model will not naturally emerge from any digital technology. However, an appropriate combination of deliberative social technologies, such as the integral cooperative, and digital technologies serving the goals of these cooperatives can contribute to a positive transformation of the care model.
