Angela KINTOMINAS, UNSW Sydney, Australia
Drawing upon new literature on feminized reproductive labour in the gig economy, this paper maps how platform intermediary AuPairWorld is emerging as a global digital marketplace for migrant care labour. The analysis draws upon 32 interviews with migrant workers and parents in Australia about their experiences organizing au pairing, including an analysis of screenshots of their online profiles and a handful (n=6) of contracts shared.
Like other digital care platforms, AuPairWorld uses a ‘marketplace’ infrastructure to match supply and demand, and uses metrics of visibility and security to lower the stakes of intimacy. This rhetoric and infrastructure of ‘match-making’ is key to disavow and obscure the labour and migration processes of au pairing as work.
The paper considers how the platform’s patchwork of online guidances inform the market and influence the rights and expectations of users. AuPairWorld seeks to ambiguously and partially formalize the marketplace through private norms in the absence of state law. But this has an uneven, and at times, contradictory outcomes for formalizing au pairing or securing better conditions. Whilst the platform does provide a vast number of pages of normative guidance, it is ultimately ambivalent about the applicability of local labour law standards such as regarding pay. At the same time, its guidance deepens a powerful normative picture of au pairing as an exceptional category of non-work.
The paper then turns to the role of private contracting in au pairing arrangements. The platform does not ultimately require parties to execute a contract, though it is encouraged, and many choose to do so. Strikingly, AuPairWorld’s template contract is derived from European Union law, invoking a kind of transnational colonial legality for au pairing, sealing off its practices from the jurisdiction of local industrial law.
Mots clés : au pairing|migrant|care|platform|domestic work
A104135AK