Beyond Disruption | Data & Society
▻https://datasociety.net/output/beyond-disruption
New Data & Society ethnographic report Beyond Disruption uses interviews with over 100 domestic and ridehailing platform workers in major U.S. cities to reveal how technology is reshaping the future of labor.
While ridehail driving and other male-dominated sectors have been at the forefront in conversations about the future of work, the working lives of domestic workers like housecleaners and nannies usually aren’t included.
By bringing these three types of platforms and workers together, this report complicates simple narratives about technology’s impact on labor markets and highlights the convergent and divergent challenges workers face when using labor platforms to find and carry out their work. Interviewees reported increased financial and personal risk due to platform policy and design loopholes. For example, workers with marginalized identities (e.g. people of color and undocumented workers; largely women) report inequitable conditions that arise from common features such as rating systems.
“Beyond Disruption” highlights important differences, challenges, pressures, and inequalities within the two different types of labor platforms and sets the stage for more nuanced understandings of how technology is shaping the future of work beyond the “gig economy.”