Uberized Care: Employment Status, Surveillance, and Technological Erasure in the Home Health Care Sector

Abstract

The emergence of hailing and platform labor applications across industries has generated productive theorizing on new forms of worker control, exploitation, and data commodification. Yet, despite their significant use of labor brokerage platforms, care workers are overlooked in political and scholarly analyses of the current platform-based economy. In this article, I describe two facets of the United States home health-care industry to identify how the problems of platform labor—namely, loss of employee status coupled with decentralized oversight and routinization—germinated in the highly exploitative realm of home health care for decades prior to uberized and gig-economy capitalism. In so doing, I consider how technological oversight of remote care workers codifies care in accordance with managerial priorities and reimbursement protocols and I argue that for-profit home-care jobs in the United States presaged processes of precarity, decentralization, surveillance, codification, and data generation that now appear nearly ubiquitous across industries.