“Oh, you’re watching me”: Care workers’ experiences of surveillant assemblages on the platform and in the home

Abstract

Domestic workers have long been marginalized, even as they are made hypervisible to their employers. This is a process increasingly augmented by digital technologies. These technologies include care platforms, which have increasingly mediated the process of finding employment. This article reports on interviews with in-home childcare workers or “nannies” who shared experiences of scrutiny and surveillance across the labor process, both on and off the platform. This includes background checks, in-person monitoring, hidden cameras, and more. Although these practices might be legitimized as an extension of parental care or benign monitoring, workers’ negative afffects—fear, worry, anger—disrupt this normalization. Their stories make visible harm and hidden burdens from this hybridization of care and control. Through their accounts, a surveillant assemblage comes into view that intensifies uneven visibility regimes and reinstates the racialized and gendered power dynamics that have long defined domestic labor.