Conceptualizing labor agency through resilience: Practices of reassembling work on domestic services platforms

Abstract

In this article, I attempt to contribute to understanding labor agency in the context of platform-mediated labor, or gig work, in the domestic cleaning sector in Geneva through the category of resilience. First, I briefly summarize different accounts of platform-mediated work to highlight issues around temporariness and flexibility. Then, I present the theoretical framework of the paper, which interweaves literature on workers’ agency that focuses on micro-level and livelihood practices. The second part of the paper is based on empirical fieldwork I conducted in Geneva with workers who engage in platform-mediated labor. I present the findings by juxtaposing vignettes that frame resilience through multiple voices and experiences. The vignettes present specific everyday practices of resilience that I introduce through the lexicon of reassembling work. The vignettes further highlight the relational, spatial, and ambiguous characteristics of resilience in mediating conditions of precarization in the labor market.