 Welcome everyone once again. Let's talk about social inclusion today on this episode. Let's explore the world of the gig economy based domestic cleaning where gender inequalities intersect with other axes of disadvantage. And I've invited Laura Wiesbock from the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna in Austria to explore the experiences of female cleaners in private households. So I'm covering here today the challenges they face in this fragmented and, of course, informal sector. With Laura, we will examine how platform-based cleaning laborers face, for example, power imbalances, objectification, information asymmetry, and understand more about the reality. Laura, welcome to our episode. Hi, pleasure to be here. So Laura, the growing marketization of domestic work and coupled with the emergence of the gig economy platforms in the sector requires more research. And I believe that's why you started this study with your colleagues. Definitely. Well, first of all, if we look at research in the gig economy, there is an institutional gender bias. So we can see a lot of research on delivery services, on drivers and all that. But not so much in the domestic field where mainly women, as you already mentioned, women with migratory experience work. And this is a particularly vulnerable group as they work in isolated, unprotected spaces, unprotected because, as you already mentioned, they work in the informal sector, most of them. But also because there is no social control, there are no other people present except the employer, there are no other colleagues present. So it's a rather invisible group. So it's much more important to look at this kind of group, but also much more difficult, which also contributes to this lack of research. Complementary to exactly that. So let's look a little bit more that before we jump into the finding. So what was missing in the research specifically that you wanted to address? Well, we started with a very open question. We wanted to know how do domestic cleaners experience working in the gig economy. We were interested in, yeah, how does the job differ from experiences from beforehand, so to say. Because we know that many of those platforms position themselves as neutral mediators. So there are people looking for domestic service, people offering those kind of service and platforms, many platforms don't take any employer responsibilities. It's a kind of matchmaking platform and the way you, yeah, the way you work with your employer, with your client is not up to us. But we find that this is not particularly true because the platform structure, this kind of employment field, this structure, opportunities for workers. And we were interested in how do workers, domestic workers experience working in the gig economy very openly. Well, share with us the main findings and conclusions of that then. Yeah, with a great pleasure. So we found three dominant themes throughout the 15 interviews we conducted with domestic cleaners. And one of them was reserve army mechanisms, because as we know on those platforms, there are so many profiles of potential workers, of potential service providers. So through this visual oversupply, there is the tendency of wage dumping. So domestic cleaners we interviewed said that clients even want them to work for 10 euros and we have to keep in mind this was last year, where the inflammation was kind of at its peak, at least in Austria. So there is reserve army mechanisms, wage pressure, but also a culture of exchangeability. So workers would tell us if they have to cancel one gig because they're sick, they won't get any gigs anymore from these clients in most cases. And this is different to, for example, in the informal labor market when I, when I'm looking for a domestic cleaner and you say, hey, I have a domestic cleaner, you can, I can recommend you this person. Then there is not this kind of visual oversupply and this reserve army mechanism to that extent. So another theme that we found that was quite dominant was, as you already mentioned, objectification, lookism, but also many incidences of sexual harassment. So this is also kind of due to the, to the platform logic on the websites. Profile pictures are the main component of profiles. So users would select cleaners based on their looks on their appearance on their attractiveness. And this is also something that the cleaners told us that they would get compliments for their looks. And they, for example, one cleaner also told us a client asked her to come for this gig. And then he said, you're not my type. After all, you can leave before she even started working. There were also many incidences of sexual harassment, which is not nothing new. It's also due to this setting, this informal isolated setting. But now this was taking place digitally and also in person. So cleaners would receive unwanted masturbation content or were asked to send nudes or some stuff like that. And they are not able to fight this kind of violence because they're in an informal setting. And they told us, many of them told us that clients are well aware of those power imbalances, which is the last theme on these websites that we analyzed. Several power imbalances and information asymmetries are installed in the website design. So for example, cleaners were not able to rate their experiences with clients, but clients were able to do so based on a five-star rating system. And this was a huge problem for cleaners because, for example, for those sexual harassment incidences, many cleaners told us we want to warn other colleagues, but it's not possible. So that's a very one-sided power asymmetry. And interestingly enough, clients can evaluate or rate cleaners when they were in touch with them, when they communicated with them once. So what is happening is that it's not only the cleaning service is rated, but also the communication style, for example, if the cleaner answered the requests in a timely manner. And that means that a new job profile is created for cleaners in the informal labor market. They have to act like a digital entrepreneur, so to say, and this is very hard for them because when working, it's not possible to answer to those requests. But then they would get a bad rating for not answering immediately and that would influence their future job opportunities. Also, as already mentioned, pictures are in the center of the profiles of cleaners, but not of clients. So many times they don't know who they're talking to. And one could say, well, that's standard in employment situations that workers, people looking for a job, have to present the person more and employers more at a job. But in this particular setting, in this isolated private intimate setting without any social control, we would think and also the cleaners pointed to the fact it would be important to get more information about the person. So these are three main themes we found which, yeah, also taken all together, show that power asymmetries change to some extent and also the job profile changes. And in this informal segment for a very vulnerable and I would also say exploited group. It is probably a bit obvious to assume that practical implications of these would require, would mean more protection and regulation, more responsibility maybe for the platforms that as you mentioned before is missing. Definitely. And this is a topic that is many researchers in the social political fields deal with this topic. It's quite difficult, for example, the platform we analyzed for the platforms operating Austria, but the company is based in Berlin or another platform operating in Austria is based in Switzerland. So different legal circumstances are complicating this kind of fact. But what we would say in our case is that those platform profit from the unregulated informal labor market. And for political reasons, I think that's scandalous. And for us, it was the social political aspect was very important. So in our advisory board, we had several unionists straight unionists and also labor law experts because we're social scientists sociologists. And it was also important for us not only to take information from this vulnerable group, but also based on the problems they told us about, create a website in 16 languages where they can where cleaners can inform themselves about their legal rights. It was launched a couple of days ago geek clean dot net. And so, yeah, the project is very interwoven with social political aspects. And so you mentioned the work done by your colleagues and by researchers out there what should be steady now from now on what's what's ahead of us. Yeah, I mean, I think we should ask big question, big question society is speaking so how do we want to organize care in in our current societies apparently we're in a crisis of social reproduction that is inherent to capitalist systems. So how do we want to continue this, this topic this field in aging societies, especially, and also scientifically speaking we should be very critical about all those. Yeah, numbers that are supposed to represent equality, for example, if we look at the participation rates of women in the formal labor market this is often used as an indicator for equality are more and more women are participating in formal labor market so it means more equal societies. But behind those numbers are less privileged women working informally doing the social reproduction activities that those middle class women did for free before. And so, feminism equality work life balance who are we talking about we're talking about a particularly group of women. So, this is also I think in the responsibility of researchers to point to that. Well, sometimes quantity of work does not mean quality of work for equally for everybody. Laura, if you had this has been a very straight on point episode but if you had to make a punchline of this conversation in one or two sentences for people to remember about this talk. What would it be. I mean it also depends on the audience and if the audience is scientists I would say, I would look closely on how to conduct research with vulnerable groups that research itself doesn't come near and exploitative. So, I mean, for example, we provided an incentive for all interviews for 20 euros to remunerate for that time and also work closely with social political actors and creators websites. I know that it's not possible in every research project and I'm sure that not everybody is interested in this linkage. But yeah, I would say in current times it might be more and more relevant also for scientists to position themselves in that way. And for a general audience I would say, yeah, I mean on a personal note it would be interesting to talk in the in the own social circles about why it is so normalized. This kind of huge informal labor market. Yeah, why is it so normalized that women with migratory experience less privileged women do the base work of our national economy in informal labor market and nobody actually are not so in the public discourse it's normalized and not so much problematized. Laura, thank you very much. Thank you. For those who are watching us on YouTube, you can find all the resources, all the materials, including the study that Laura just mentioned on the let's talk about social inclusion website. And you can also listen to this episode, whatever you get your podcast you can subscribe to our newsletter to stay in touch with new episodes and follow us on Twitter. Thank you very much.