Digitally mediated work and the blurry boundaries of re/production

Abstract

With the proliferation of digital technologies, it seems increasingly difficult to neatly divide work into the spheres of production and reproduction. This redrawing and blurring of boundaries calls for critical examination of the underlying power relations and the forms of work that are obscured and devalued in this process (cf. Knaus et al. 2021). Against this background, this paper explores the influence of digitally mediated work on workers’ everyday experiences of re/production. Empirically, the paper draws on an auto-ethnographic study by one of the authors as a platform worker in Zurich, Switzerland. The rich auto-ethnographic material is complemented by insights derived from biographical interviews conducted with workers performing platform-mediated care work (cleaning, child and elderly care) in Berlin, Germany. On a theoretical-conceptual level, we draw on feminist (labour) geographers who have expanded the notion of “work” beyond waged labour (e. g., Katz 2001; England & Lawson 2005; Meehan & Strauss 2015; Mullings 2021) to explore the connections between paid and unpaid platform work with a range of activities of caring for oneself and others. Following the concept of Intersectional Rhythmanalysis (Reid-Musson 2018), we analyse how platform mediated work affects the spatio-temporal rhythms of these activities. Our findings show how the spatialities and temporalities of reproductive and productive activities repeatedly clash and blur in workers’ everyday lives. In the platform model, this occurs as essential activities necessary for income generation are classified and invisibilised as non-work. Workers’ efforts to nevertheless achieve a sufficient level of income leaves many with a sense of “living at work” (Smith 2013), accompanied by a perceived deficit in recreation and synchronisation conflicts with the daily rhythms of others around them. Platform work therefore often results in a direct intertwining of productive and reproductive precarity. We conclude by reflecting on the challenge of examining workers’ experiences without reproducing a sharp conceptual division between the spheres of production and reproduction.