On-demand labor platforms offer many in-person services, from ride-hailing to childcare. However, scholars have focused on ride-hailing, leading to a model of “Uberization” that entails the informalization of work. We argue that online carework platforms that match nannies and babysitters to families show the limits of this narrative. Based on a discourse analysis of carework platforms and interviews with workers using them, we illustrate that these platforms seek to formalize employment relationships through technologies that increase visibility. We argue that carework platforms are “cultural entrepreneurs” that create and maintain cultural distinctions between populations of workers, and institutionalize those distinctions into platform features. Ultimately, the visibility created by platforms does not realize the formalization of employment relationships, but does serve the interests of platform companies and clients and exacerbate existing inequalities for workers. As one of the first analyses of carework platforms, this study also points to gendered bias in the scholarly literature about the on-demand economy.

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Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the United States. Over the same period of time, workers at the top and the bottom of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. Despite this connection, we rarely link our everyday technology problems to our economic climate. Left to Our Own Devices explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through one hundred interviews with high- and low-wage precarious workers across the United States, the book explores the surprisingly similar “digital hustles” they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. However, although they shared similar practices, the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. The terms on which workers are included into the digital economy are marked by stark differences in power and privilege. Instead of a cognitive or individualistic approach to our “addictions” to technology, this book explains that our technologies must be understood as essential tools to cope with insecurity and manage the new risks that have emerged in the wake of the Great Recession and the crumbling social contract between employers and employees. In an economic climate characterized by unraveling social safety nets, workers use their devices to weave their own.

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