A New Phenomenon of the Platform Economy?

Isabel Pauline Hildegard Georges^[1] and Yumi Garcia dos Santos^[2]

Abstract

Contemporary work situations are becoming increasingly informal, a shift often associated with the so-called “platformization” of the global economy. These massive changes in the world of work, which have contributed to unprecedented inequality, have attracted scholarly interest (Abílio, Amorim, and Grohmann 2021). Such informality, however, has been characteristic of the everyday experience of women—most notably poor and racialized women and those in the Global South—throughout the development of modern capitalism. Now, with precarity becoming more general, also affecting men who once held stable wage-earning jobs, new analytical tools have emerged in the Global North itself, among them the concept of the “gray zone” (Dieuaide and Azaïs 2020). To what extent can this help us in the South understand the old and new forms of life and work whose coexistence has been entirely taken for granted here, and their current transformations?

Taking up the gray zone approach, this chapter breaks with long-accepted dichotomies, tracing the historic and contemporary entanglements between their supposed poles. After a historical account of women’s work, an in-depth analysis of two representative empirical cases—those of community health workers in Brazil and Filipino care workers in Canada—highlights how the possibility of its commodification arises from ambiguities common to both. The idea of ambiguity that is central to the gray zone approach allows us to trace continuities in the historical dynamics of women’s work on a global scale, brought into sharper focus in case studies of women from the Global South. 
   
Keywords: Commodification; gray zones; informal work; platform economy; women’s work.

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Introduction

Latin American social science has long recognized that much work falls on the blurry boundary between formal and informal, legal and illegal, public and private (Telles and Hirata 2007; Cabanes et al. 2011; Abílio 2014; Georges and Santos 2016, to cite only a few Brazilian studies). Brazilian sociology, in particular, faces a labor market in which the rate of formalization is not only low, standing at only 57.7 per cent in 2023, but also uneven (IPEA 2023). While the rate among economically active workers with a higher education was 74 per cent in that year, it was no more than 36 per cent for those who had not completed elementary education (IPEA 2023).

Brazil is a country of the Global South where the wage-earning society that emerged on the basis of Fordism and state social protection in the Global North never fully established itself.^[3] Consequently, the neoliberal transformations analyzed by Castel (2003), Sennett (1998), and Dardot and Laval (2016) did not have the same significance in this region of the world. Indeed, the first period of Lulist government (2003–2016)^[4] saw the introduction of social-protection, poverty-reduction and minimum-wage policies unprecedented in the history of the country, whatever might have been their shortcomings (Singer 2009), in this running counter to the dismantling of social welfare in the Global North. We thus have, in Brazil, a structural situation very remote from the classical template or “structural rule” of the West (Oliveira 2003 [1972], 61), where concerns have been raised about the radical transformations of work brought about there by the adoption of digital technologies (Carelli, Cingolani, and Kesselman 2022).

In Brazil, in fact, digital platforms would seem to function less as the precipitant of a new kind of work than as yet another tool facilitating the extension of the Toyotist, just-in-time model of work to the precarious workers of the urban periphery (Abílio et al. 2021). It would therefore be more accurate to describe this as an “Uberization” of work, characterized by a shift away from the regulation of employment through collective bargaining, for example.

The growth and spread of informality in the North has led to a reassessment of this well-established category that has its origins in the South, and to the proposal of new categories. The erosion of collective labor rights, supplanted by an ethos of “entrepreneurship of the self” (Silva 2002), has seen the labor markets of North and South become increasingly similar. It has also led to the emergence of new markets and new forms of hierarchy, which take specific forms in the South (Georges 2024). In the North, in response to this, the late 1990s saw the emergence of new analytical categories, leading to the development of concepts such as that of the “gray zone,” a term first used by Italian scholars of employment law (Supiot 2000).

Yet even as the platform economy has come to play an increasingly central role in shaping labor relations and their social effects, impacting precarious workers in South and North alike, this does not, by itself, explain how the negotiation of the conditions of work and employment of certain categories of workers has become ever more opaque and individualized, nor how the rendering indefinite and invisible of the power relations involved has become a strategic mechanism of governance across both regions (Minassian 2011). We believe that the notion of the “gray zone” can contribute to a better understanding of the object of our own research—women’s work—as it captures the processes involved in the current transformations of work in general. This chapter, then, examines the continuities and discontinuities in the work of women of the Global South in order to reveal the impact that they may have had on it.

Efforts to identify the characteristics of women’s work—of care work more particularly—in both North and South, have revealed a number of features it has in common with the “new”, uberized forms of work, sharing in the ambiguities—the gray zones—associated with them. Such zones, in fact, are associated with many factors, gender, class, race and sometimes nationality among them (Kergoat 2010). By “women’s work” is meant women’s everyday activities in the reproductive sphere, including housekeeping, childcare, elder care, and care for the sick, the tasks that have been taken to be natural to women, as if their supposed “feminine qualities” made them intrinsically suited to them (Kergoat 1989). Notably, in the Americas, such activities were historically performed by enslaved women, today replaced by “racialized” workers and/or internal migrants from poorer regions (as in Brazil and other Latin American countries) or by migrant workers from the Global South (as in the United States and Canada).

Women’s unpaid activities within their families and communities have now given rise to occupations in the fields of health care and social services, such as the community health workers of Brazil and grocery delivery workers in the United States, only two examples of the professionalization of everyday activities traditionally carried out by women. Such activities constitute what might be called the “female sphere,” which stands on a continuum between paid and unpaid, formal and informal, and public and private work. To what extent has the transformation of the classical labor market, now expanded, deregulated, platformized and monetized, impacted these longstanding forms of women’s work, more especially in the Global South?

Our goal here is to shed light on the commodification of women’s everyday activities in the context of contemporary social transformations, both local and global, and to explore the meanings that women workers attach to these activities amid limited alternatives and avenues to empowerment. In doing so, we aim to move beyond the dichotomies discussed above, seeking to understand how traditional and emergent forms of work and life evolve in mutual entanglement. Our analytical framework thus seeks to clarify what has changed and what has not in the way that women’s work is valorized,^[5] with particular attention to the types of women’s work typically found in the Global South.

The discussion, then, will fall into four parts, beginning with a historical overview of women’s work in its broader context (1), followed by a presentation of the different forms of women’s work and their respective ambiguities—their gray areas, or gray zones, as we have come to call them in this context (2). We then present a more detailed analysis of two empirical case studies, of the work of community health workers in Brazil and of Filipino care workers in Québec. We then conclude by examining how the potential for the commodification of women’s work arises from three types of ambiguity seen in both cases, and showing how the essential content of women’s work remains unchanged. At the same time, it is reshaped by changes in the labor market more generally, among them the fall in traditional employment and the rise of the digital economy.

1. Women’s Work in Historical and Global Perspective

With the Industrial Revolution, a separation was established between the productive and non-productive spheres, the first characterized by wage labor, the second by unpaid labor in the home, so dividing work from non-work and producing the classic social and sexual division of labor (Romero 1994) essential to the expansion of capitalism (Mies 1986). This spatial and social differentiation gave rise to the dichotomy between the private and public spheres leading to the emergence of two different realms of activity, one in which the work done was formally recognized as such, and another in which it was not. In today’s world, where the boundaries between private and public spheres are becoming increasingly blurred, what are the implications of this for how women’s labor is recognized? In other words, how it is acknowledged, in terms of the kind and quantum of value ascribed to it.

In the private sphere, most domestic tasks are assigned to women, whether paid or unpaid. Accordingly, all kinds of “women’s knowledge” are attributed to them on the basis of their traditional role in the home and treated as “natural” (Kergoat 1989). Anthropological analysis of women’s tasks further reveals the existence of a set of heterogeneous or mixed activities dealing with the relations between private and public spheres.^[6]

In the South, the precarity and informality characteristic of women’s work, typically accompanied by the juggling of multiple social roles, recognized or not, was not entirely confined to poor women but was equally the lot of certain men, such as street vendors, for example (Rangel 2019; Araújo Filho 2021). And in Brazil, and more particularly in the big cities, the exploitation of male workers—notably through low wages, even in the relatively rare cases of formal employment—has been closely tied to the provision of unpaid labor by women. In other words, the historic phase of industrialization, of the “Brazilian miracle” and the subsequent modernization, relied on women’s unpaid (re)productive labor, both within the home and beyond.

Women’s presence at the sites of the (re)production of life has led to the variety of different tasks they performed there being treated as indissociable, in the sense of the “bundle of tasks” described by Hughes (1951)—a pattern particularly visible in the work of female domestic servants and nannies. In a very similar way, women in Brazil came to have a “bundled” social role, playing a leading part in the collective construction of housing in peripheral neighborhoods, in organizing local networks to manage care responsibilities, and in mobilizing community efforts to secure access to education, healthcare, and transport (Sader 1988).

The exploitation of this role through the use of poor women’s labor in Brazil’s public sector has been one aspect of the functionalization of poverty (Oliveira 1972), “capitalism Brazilian-style” being reliant on a highly distinctive form of the social and sexual division of labor (Saffiotti 1969; Gonzalez 1982; Souza-Lobo 1991; Georges 2017). Associated with this has been a naturalized conflation of forms of life and forms of work, notably in the case of women.

During the first period of Lulist government (2003–2016), and under progressive Latin American governments more generally, a range of different policies were adopted that ran counter to the trend to increased precarity seen in the Global North. Among them were attempts to formalize informal work by the grant of basic social rights, as exemplified by the individual microentrepreneur legislation of 2008 and the statutory integration of domestic workers into the formal workforce in 2013.

More recently, informal work situations have become increasingly widespread, globally, a trend intensified in Brazil by the sweeping employment law reforms of 2017. Some of these were related to the so-called platformization of the global economy (Abílio, Amorim, and Grohmann 2021). These profound changes in the world of work have since fueled unprecedented increases in social inequality (Abílio, Amorim, and Grohmann 2021), attracting the attention of scholars in both South and North.

We are now entering a new stage in the “uberization” of work, one marked by a pervasive blurring of the boundaries between public and private spheres, notably as expressed in time and space, that is affecting men and women alike, both North and South. Historically, the distinction between these spheres rested on yet another dichotomy: the different ways in which the work of men and women was recognized and accorded value, manifest in the longstanding, systematic undervaluation of women’s work and of activities associated with the domestic sphere. In today’s context, characterized by a systematic blurring of boundaries—between the public and private spheres, between forms of work and life (in terms of ways of living, forms of access to housing or land, skills, education, family structure, etc.). —what has changed in the ways in which women’s work is recognized and valued? And to what extent can analytical tools like the notion of the gray zone help us understand shifts in the relationship between the public and private spheres from a gender point of view?

To address these questions, we propose a typology of the diverse range of activities, most traditionally undertaken by women, that are characterized by the overlap of life and work, highlighting their intrinsic ambiguity and liminality, before going on to look at how the nature, conditions, and valorization of this work have changed (or not).

2. Women’s Work: Variety, Ambiguity and Resistance to Male Participation

In Brazil, as in the Global South more generally, the diversity of daily activities undertaken by members of the popular classes, some possibly formal, so many not, has seen the naturalization of a certain entanglement of work and life. Its effects on men and women are different, notably with respect to their relationships to productive and reproductive labor. Unlike wage labor, unwaged activities have neither a standardized value nor any predefined system for their recognition. In the case of women, there is a range of more or less “traditional” activities all characterized by a certain ambiguity that together make up a gray zone within which women operate. Below, we give some typical examples of women’s work, notably characterized by their reliance on knowledges rooted in the private sphere and the ways in which spheres either merge into each other ambiguously or remain mutually impermeable.

1. Women in family farming: This is the classic example of how the congruence of unit of production and unit of reproduction in the family has persisted worldwide, rendering women’s agricultural labor invisible. In Brazil, ongoing changes in the rural world, and notably the emergence of needs for new skills since the 1990s, have raised questions about the distribution of tasks and knowledge within the family unit, in family farming in particular. A rural retirement scheme has provided pensions to this group since the 1970s.
2. Domestic and home-care workers: This is a paradigmatic example of women’s work, where women’s labor—the effort they expend on care and household tasks—and the associated knowledge gained in the domestic context, are paradoxically recognized when deployed in waged work. While this type of work is not confined to the Global South, it takes on particular characteristics in that context, where inequalities of gender, class, and race, among others, are more pronounced. At the same time, the variety of forms it takes there is particularly wide, ranging from mutual aid within communities to paid domestic work in private households (Georges 2008; 2011)—forms that vary widely, too, in the degree to which that work is recognized. In Brazil, domestic work was among the sectors that benefited from the promotion of formalization during the Lulist period (2003–2016), which saw the passage in 2013 of a bill amending the Constitution to categorize paid domestic work as employment and such entitled to the benefits and protections afforded by Brazil’s codified employment legislation (the CLT).^[7] There is also care for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, a growing sector in the Global North where the work is mainly done by women from the Global South. Most are employed in the private sector, though where public or quasi-public provision exists, the work is typically performed by immigrant, poor, and racialized women (Glenn 2009; Parreñas 2001, 2015).
3. Social and community work: Like voluntary community service in combining work and the exercise of civic responsibility, this is generally done in the service of the state, which makes use of women’s (socially ascribed) propensity for care to implement social policy. A paradigmatic example is that of Brazil’s community health workers, whose role emerged from a variety of mutual-aid initiatives in the more disadvantaged regions of the country, such as the Northeast. It is ambiguous in standing half-way, as it were, between formal employment and community service, at the intersection of the public and private spheres, with work being done on behalf of the state yet on an often precarious basis (Georges and Santos 2016).
4. Au pair work: This activity occupies a liminal space between travel and cultural exchange on the one hand and childcare and/or other care work on the other, more cheaply paid for being aimed at young women, with the whole justified by the supposed existence of a family-like relationship (Redondo 2018; Oliveira 2023). In the post-COVID period and with growing platformization, the facilitation of contact between prospective au pairs and host families has paradoxically intensified competition among candidates and increased the difficulty of matching candidates to families’ requirements. One of the fundamental ambiguities here lies in the overlap of the spaces of life, work and leisure. Alongside the ambiguity of the young woman’s status, the collapsing of distinctions of space and time creates a setting conducive to an imbalance of power.
5. Cosmetics resellers: Another type of work involving community and social proximity is that of the cosmetic resellers. Here, the sale of cosmetics to friends and neighbors, in their homes, sees a blurring of the distinctions between work and socializing, on the one hand, and shopping and socializing on the other (Abílio 2014). It is interesting that this again is an activity that is found in different social milieux and which sustains forms of female sociability, a serious obstacle to men’s entering this market. It may provide an income to unemployed women who can take advantage of their everyday neighborhood networks of sociability, or indeed supplement other earnings. It is, then, another way of turning women’s social relations into commercial relations; it can also entail the contracting of debt and the financialization of social relationships.

From among these female occupations, in which the boundaries between private and public spheres are blurred and which are largely impermeable to male participation, we have chosen two classic cases for a closer look, drawing on our empirical research to consider both the content of the work and the conditions under which it is carried out, and the ways it is valorized in the context of recent transformations of work.

3. Two Types of Women’s Work: Community Health Workers in Brazil and Filipino Care Workers in Montreal

The first category of workers from the Global South whose everyday activities at household or community level have been professionalized—turned into paid occupations—in support of productive labor, in this case by helping meet families’ essential needs, are the community health workers who implement the Family Health Strategy of Brazil’s Ministry of Health.^[8] The second are the women who migrated to Canada from the Philippines to provide domestic support or care for children or the elderly under that country’s caregiver immigration programs. Both represent state-sponsored occupations mainly reliant on women to do care work, as a social investment in the next generation (Jenson 2011) and as a response to what has been described as a shortage or crisis of care (Jenson 2000; Fraser 2016).

3.1. Community Health Workers (Brazil)

There is a wide range of activities carried out by women in the peripheries of Brazilian cities, in the context of social services and other programs that have emerged out of long-standing grassroots mobilizations to demand and secure the public services that their communities lacked. As well as the community health workers, there are the social workers of São Paulo’s Serviço de Assistência Social à Família e Proteção Social Básica no Domicílio (SASF); the promotoras legais populares,^[9] a non-state network of community legal educators originating in the feminist movement; and the workers of the housing co-ops that emerged from the urban popular movements and were later formalized as a requirement for their participation in the Minha Casa, Minha Vida program, a federal housing initiative launched during the first Lulist period to provide affordable housing to low-income families.

The work of the agentes comunitárias de saúde or community health workers under the Family Health Strategy^[10] exemplifies the professionalization of activities traditionally undertaken by the women of Brazil’s working-class communities by their formalization during the 1990s. The Family Health Strategy’s predecessor, the Community Health Worker Program launched in 1991, mainly recruited women who already held leadership roles within their communities by virtue of the kinds of community engagement described earlier (Georges and Santos 2016). Through these women, who had an intimate knowledge of local issues, the state gained insight into the living conditions of the population of Brazil’s urban peripheries. In 1994, the Ministry of Health launched the Family Health Program, staffed by medical teams ideally consisting of a physician, a nurse, a nursing assistant, and five community health workers (Georges and Santos 2016). Recognition of the role as an occupation followed in 2002.^[11] Today, Brazil has approximately 265,000 community health workers (Brazil, Ministry of Health 2023), the vast majority being women. In 2011, with the Ministry of Health’s adoption of the National Primary Care Policy (Portaria [regulatory order] No. 2.488, October 21, 2011), the program was renamed the Family Health Strategy (Brazil, Ministry of Health 2012) and made into a government service. Community health workers, however, are not civil servants; they are hired on fixed-term contracts, either directly or indirectly, by municipalities, which determine their terms of employment. Residence in a specific micro-area is a requirement, as community health workers are expected to possess strong local social capital (Lima and Cockell 2008) and to serve as intermediaries between the residents and the medical team.

Community health workers visit households in their assigned micro-areas on a daily basis, gathering information from the responsible person (usually women, the mothers) about the health of family members and also about housing conditions. They note needs for medical care and also any spontaneous requests, communicate upcoming appointments, and provide details of health campaigns in which family members are expected to participate. These and other activities are carried out in coordination with the medical team (Georges and Santos 2016), but such visits are understood as an extension of activities traditionally engaged in by women as members of the same community, sharing family roles, religious affiliation, and lived experiences (Santos and Rosas 2014). Community health workers often play an important role in simply listening to (and sometimes advising) the women responsible for their families’ care. As a result, their interactions with service-users often extend beyond health-related matters to encompass broader dimensions of well-being, such as marital, family and neighborhood issues, and also mental health concerns.

So, one thing I really appreciate about this job is that I feel useful. When I visit a family and see they’ve achieved what they wanted, that they’ve got better, that they’ve got things under control, it’s really rewarding. I can see that what I’m doing is getting results. (Telma, 43, Brown, married, mother of 5, 2011)

Their work can also help them break free of the sense of oppression they felt when their lives were still confined to domestic duties:

Looking back, I think this job pretty much saved me from falling into depression. With my husband being responsible for everything, I was getting depressed without even realizing it. Because everything was him, he was the one who handled everything, he decided everything. And once I started working… it’s like you wake up to life, you know? Like, I’m alive, I need to do something. I feel like myself; I’m someone, I work, I’m a citizen. For me, it was the best thing that could’ve happened. (Telma, 2011)

On the one hand, the health workers express genuine satisfaction with the important role they play for those who rely on them for medical care and a listening ear. On the other, they feel pressured by the demands of their work, even on their days off, if they are to maintain good relations with neighbors and ensure that their work goes smoothly.

Life as a community health worker isn’t easy, especially when it comes to neighbors. (…) They don’t separate Noemi the person from Noemi the health worker. That’s something all of us complain about. You have to be available all the time: Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, always ready to help them out. (Noemi, CHA, 36, Black, married, mother of three, 2011)

I haven’t had a breakdown yet, I don’t even know how. You know when you just feel like throwing everything up in the air and walking away? And when you spot one of your clients on the street and you want to avoid them because you know they’re going to ask you something work-related on your weekend? (Fernanda, CHA, 34, Brown, single mother of three, 2011)

Some demands cannot be met by the service due to structural limitations. Among these are inadequate infrastructure, a shortage of physicians and other healthcare professionals, and the unavailability of medication.

Here’s the thing: I end up having to justify everything. Why does it take so long to schedule an appointment? Because the system is slow. I spell it all out clearly: the system is slow; it’s not the girls on the front desk. It’s the city’s system, it’s slow, even turning a page takes forever, anything that depends on the computer is slow. And why does it take so long to see a doctor? I tell them, ‘People, you live in the biggest public housing project in Latin America!’ (Noemi, 2011)

One of the key responsibilities of the role, then, is managing people’s demands, demands that can never be fully met. This brings to mind Francisco de Oliveira’s notion of “policies that functionalize poverty” (2003), in which poor women like the community health workers are compelled to act as agents of “social pacification,” mediating between a dissatisfied population and the state. The community health worker’s work therefore includes calming and de-escalating users’ frustrations, a task from which higher-ranking members of the medical team seek to shield themselves. At the same time, they enjoy a legitimacy that allows them to exercise authority over users, an authority sometimes reinforced by their belonging to the community yet simultaneously undermined for the very same reason, leading them, for example, to “avoid” users on their days off.

The (few) men who have worked as community health workers in the past typically remained in the position only briefly, and were generally more successful than their female counterparts in moving on to better-paying jobs. More broadly, men’s work as street-level social or community workers (as per Lipsky 1980) affords opportunities for integration into the labor market to residents of the urban peripheries, Black men and gay men. For Black men living in the periphery, such work also provides a degree of protection, reducing the likelihood of their being drawn into illegal activities such as drug trafficking, and/or being targets of police violence (Santos and Georges 2021).

3.2. Filipino Care Workers in Montréal

The work of Filipino care workers in Canada illustrates the commodification not only of women’s activities but also of their affects, a phenomenon observable across the world and notably in North America (Parreñas 2001, 2015; Mozère 2004; Hochschild 2012). Research in the province of Québec in 2022 (Santos 2023) found foreign^[12] or immigrant^[13] care workers originating from the Philippines, Haiti, French-speaking Africa, and Latin America. Faced with demographic change and also shifts in the gendered division of labor (Hirata and Kergoat 2007), Canada, like many countries in the Global North, found itself short of caregivers and recruited women from abroad to fill the gap (Jenson 2000; Parreñas, 2001; Abu-Laban et al. 2023). To meet demand from private households, the Canadian federal government has, since 1981, maintained special immigration programs for domestic and care workers. The Live-in Caregiving Program/Programme d’aide aux familles was introduced in 1992 and under its current (2014) version applicants can obtain a two-year work visa without the earlier requirement that they reside in the employer’s home (Canada 2021; Abu-Laban et al. 2023). It is within this specific niche that Filipino women in Québec are concentrated, as the linguistic requirements of the francophone province significantly narrow their opportunities across the care sector more generally.

Working in Canada, as well as other countries of the Global North, has been an appealing option for Filipino women since the 1960s and ’70s, when many migrated as nurses. The Philippines were then under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1964–1986), following earlier periods of Spanish, U.S., and Japanese rule. Successive political and economic crises and the need to repay foreign debt have led, since the 1980s, to the impoverishment of the middle class (Parreñas 2001, 2015; Mozère 2004). Because of the great responsibility for their families’ well-being traditionally assigned to them, and because many could rely on their parents to care for their children, Filipino women (many mothers among them) looked for work in the rapidly expanding global care market, as nurses or nursing assistants, and more especially as nannies (Parreñas 2001, 2015; Mozère 2004; Galerand et al. 2023). These women are celebrated by the Philippine government as “heroines of modernity”, a narrative that reinforces the continuation of such migration for work, generation after generation (Boti and Smith 1997; Santos 2023).

Common destinations are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Western and Northern Europe, the United States, and Canada, making this outward migration both geographically extensive and at the same time heterogeneous, variously shaped by local demand (Parreñas 2001, 2015; Mozère 2004). The Philippines’ colonial history under Spain and the United States has given these Filipino emigrants a certain distinctiveness, in cultural terms, combining proficiency in English with Catholic upbringing and “Latina” affective expression, a distinctiveness further accentuated by the fact that they are graduates from middle-class backgrounds (Mozère 2004; Santos 2023).

What makes Canada particularly appealing compared with most other countries of the Global North is that foreign care workers can become eligible for permanent residence on completion of their employment under the caregiver program. And once they obtain permanent residence, they may apply for Canadian citizenship (Abu-Laban et al. 2023). This permits long-term migration planning, including family, especially the children, allowing care workers to envision a complete “migration career” (Santos 2023). This, however, imposes a heavy emotional toll, calling for extended separation from family, years away from their children’s daily lives, as well as the burden of lengthy and costly bureaucratic procedures before permanent residence is granted and family reunification becomes possible. Magnolia’s experience encapsulates these emotional and logistical challenges: she migrated on a caregiver visa, leaving her one-year-old daughter and husband in Manila, and was only able to bring her daughter to Canada when the child was five. She recalled, “Yeah, it was . . . it’s very, very hard . . . because I always think of her while I’m taking care of children like her. . . . So I’m, I’m so torn in between, you know every time I give them a bath or I feed them or, like, playing with them.”

Their accounts show how the work of these caregivers, who are subject to Canadian immigration law, falls into a gray area in terms of Fordist labor rights, with a lack of separation between work-time and non-work time, a lack of health and workplace-accident insurance, of protection against unfair dismissal, of unemployment or welfare benefits, and little scope for negotiation with employers. Amarylis, 39, who had previously worked in Hong Kong, had expected that in Canada the specified working hours and locations would be respected. They were not. She explained, “I’m working eight hours, eleven to fourteen hours in a day, and I’m only paid eight hours,” referring to her work as a nanny while separated from her sixteen-year-old son in the Philippines. Intrusions into her privacy by the children she cares for are also part of daily life: “In the basement where I belong, where I stayed, I don’t have my proper bathroom. The kids come in and out of my bathroom while I do shower.”

Caregivers were also expected to perform their duties in accordance with the religious rules of the employing family, a requirement that in certain cases could quickly become onerous given the constant rhythm of religious festivals and rituals, the demands of large households, and conflicts related to dietary and cleaning habits. All the Filipina caregivers interviewed were Catholic, except for one who belonged to an evangelical church. More than half had worked for affluent Jewish families—a circumstance favored by their shared use of English—and had experienced tensions related to customs and values rooted in religion and class. Two had worked for families of Italian origin, and while a shared Catholic background provided some common ground, they still encountered hierarchies of class, race, nationality, and indeed language, in francophone Québec.

Mothers have to lose out on the full experience of motherhood and family life, relying instead on social media to maintain contact with children and relatives. These realities are not unknown to them when they decide to work in Canada; rather, they are understood as choices within the very limited set of possibilities available to them as educated, middle-class women in their home country. Working abroad is itself a marker of status and can also serve as a path to possible emancipation from the life they led in the Philippines, something particularly evident among single women. In addition, there is the promise of an income that would enable them to support or even completely sustain their family back home, and the longer-term prospect of family migration.

However, gaining citizenship is by no means a guarantee of economic or social security. Only three of the fourteen interviewees owned their own homes, and most of those who have lived in Canada for more than fifteen years express disappointment at not having achieved their goals. Many also feel insecure when they think about old age, a concern that has become increasingly pressing among long-term immigrants (Santos 2023).

The two cases presented here reveal social interactions heavily reliant on affect and emotion, elements inseparable from the reproduction of life. The returns are modest: limited financial autonomy and a comparative emancipation (whether from spouse or from home country), and expressions of gratitude or affection from some clients or service users. The often-touted “freedom” associated with platform work is not necessarily materialized in the work of the women of the Global South examined here. Once again, the primary beneficiaries of the precarious labor of poor and racialized women are the state and the private actors who profit from their great dedication to work and family.

4. Between Public and Private: The Commodification of Structural Ambiguities

On the basis of the empirical studies presented above, we will now consider how the forms of exchange associated with women’s activities exceed the customary bounds of political economy, both in their diversity and in their naturalization in terms of the taken-for-granted social and sexual division of labor. In other words, the low pecuniary value of most work associated with the sphere of reproduction is supplemented by a value that is not expressed in monetary reward or social rights, but manifests itself instead in other forms of recognition, including the gratitude of users, friendships, relationships of trust or even dependence (even when this sometimes has negative repercussions), as seen in the experiences of the community health workers of Brazil and the immigrant caregivers in Canada.

Milkman et al. (2021) identify new trends in the commodification of women’s everyday activities, such as grocery shopping via digital platforms, already observable before the COVID-19 pandemic but intensified by it. Beyond the transposition of a growing range of activities from the private sphere into the marketplace—including dating (Miskolci 2021) and the planning and realization of weddings, previously social and family activities belonging to the private sphere (Hochschild 2012)—the platformization of the economy has also allowed new categories of workers, men and students among them, to engage in this kind of work, while at the same time fostering the commodification of women’s everyday activities. We would say, however, that this shift owes less to any change in the characteristics of the workers than to the tendentially hegemonic generalization of a particular way of valorizing work. That is, what has changed, essentially, is the way in which work is accorded value, as it comes to be understood exclusively in terms of market exchange, and so in terms of money.

Contrasting sharply with the changes now observed in the Global North, the experience of women workers from the Global South puts into question both the supposed novelty of ambiguity in work and the supposed hegemony of market-based forms of valorization, as shown by the cases of both Brazil’s community health workers and of the Filipina home caregivers in Montréal, engaged in activities that historically belonged in the private sphere. As noted above, the limited development of formal work across much of the southern hemisphere has long been associated with the existence of a wide array of alternative forms of work and income generation (Abreu 1986; Telles and Hirata 2007; Georges 2011; Abílio 2014), including by way of international migration (Debert 2012; Parreñas 2015; Hirata 2022).

Returning to the distinction we started with between public and private—which stems from the dichotomous separation between productive and non-productive spheres—this dualistic vision likewise presupposes an overly schematic view of how work in each sphere is rewarded: paid work (waged employment) versus “work done with love” (Hirata and Le Doaré 1998), a distinction that grounds the unequal recognition granted to the respective types of work.

And, returning to the idea of the distinctive perspective of the Global South, we again observe the inseparability of way of living and way of working. As we have seen in the various kinds of women’s work, characterized by a certain liminality, this inseparability of work and life has many consequences, particularly with regard to women’s work and its connection, in one way or another, with the domestic sphere. In Brazil, as in much of the Global South, the way in which the world of (industrial) work has been impacted by the reorganization of production since the 1990s has left the kind of work traditionally reserved to men so insecure and precarious that reproductive labor—or “care work” in the wider sense—has become vital to the population’s survival (Cabanes and Georges 2014; Destremau and Georges 2017). It has also tightened the connection between work and life for the population as a whole, across social classes, and for both men and women (Georges and Araújo Filho 2024). It has, too, affected the overall relationships between generations and between genders, etc., especially among working-class and low-income groups, and opened up the possibility of different forms of engagement with work.

For women, their position at the interface between public and private spheres also affects the ways in which their work is valued or devalued—quite aside from the question of wages—giving rise to various kinds of ambiguity: ambiguity of spaces and times, of the content of work, of the origin (in the domestic sphere) of the skills and knowledges involved, of the shifting boundary between work and citizenship, of the boundaries between rights, mutual aid, and forms of solidarity.

In the cases of Brazil’s community health workers and of the migrant care workers who leave the South for the North, the ambiguity of the relationship between work and citizenship is evident, while it is clear that the appeal of citizenship serves capital as a loophole, prompting workers to accept conditions of work that are far from favorable. At the same time, they appropriate these activities, making them their own and seeing in them certain relative advantages. In the face of a scarcity of jobs, the “range of possibilities” inevitably expands.

In general, however, we are witnessing the diffusion of the idea that all activities must entail some sort of quid pro quo, a necessary exchange that, in turn, calls for standardization. Every kind of activity becomes, potentially, work, that is, the source of some kind of income or benefit in exchange. We want to ask: what are the implications of this for the various tasks historically performed by women, whether in the domestic sphere or out of it, and often enough, indeed, at the boundary?

What is more, public care policies, which themselves instrumentalize women’s care work even as they valorize it (Georges and Santos 2016), have become essential to the reproduction of the population (Destremau and Georges 2017), representing in many ways the paradoxical obverse of the commodification, the uberization and so the platformization of labor. Here in the South, then, far from the social context of Europe’s postwar trente glorieuses, not only did social protection fail to establish itself as a mechanism for mediating workers’ dependence on the owners of capital, but social policy, in its design and implementation, became a means to the functionalization of women’s unpaid labor at the interface of private and public, shaping the very organization of social work itself (Georges and Santos 2016).

Brazil’s community health workers emerged from women’s own grassroots efforts to address such problems as the malnutrition and infant mortality associated with drought and poverty in Brazil’s Northeast. These initiatives were later formalized as public assistance programs, ultimately leading to the creation of a new occupational category at national level, albeit under precarious working conditions (Georges 2011; Santos and Georges 2021). In the case of Filipino caregivers in Canada, the activities they had long performed within their own families became paid work exchanged for the prospect of a migration pathway. In both cases, what is seen is a commodification of the functions of social protection earlier ensured at grassroots level, outside the market, driven on the one hand by the population’s growing dependence on work and on the other by the increasingly precarious conditions under which that work is done.

5. Concluding Remarks

In the context of today’s capitalism, characterized by an unprecedented rise in inequality and the globalization of informality, it is undeniable that the platformization and uberization of the economy are affecting all workers, women and men alike. This reflects a rise in unqualified dependence on work itself, a driver of its growing commodification. At the same time, they pave the way for a normative valorization of activities that strips them of any meaning beyond their monetary value. In doing so, it sets the stage for the emergence of a hegemonic commodification, with the ever more widespread diffusion of the idea that any aspect of life can be converted into a marketable product (Airbnb, Uber, and so on).

What is relatively new here is the expansion of informality in the Global North, with men both North and South—including middle-class men—experiencing situations analogous to those long faced by women, expanding the sector of the labor market earlier thought of as reserved to women and generalizing the ambiguities typical of it—ambiguities that serve as a gateway for a commodification of everyday activities and tasks that redraws the spatial and temporal boundaries between public and private.

The various means of social reproduction that sustain human life, alongside the means of production, have become products themselves. With this, humans find themselves alienated not only from the means of production but also from their means of social reproduction. That is, there is the widespread adoption of the mindset of the “entrepreneurial self,” which sees nearly any activity as something that must yield a return, and which now permeates virtually every domain of human life, from transport and housing to food, cleaning, care, and culture.

Taken together, then, these changes in work are responsible for certain global trends, among them (1) the expansion of the domain of the market, as any human activity acquires use value and becomes potentially marketable, whether or not mediated by digital platforms; and (2) the emerging hegemony of a mode of valorizing of human activity in cash terms, in other words, the monetarization of the recognition of work’s value. The consolidation of this private global market marks a departure from the decommodification of social protection conceptualized by Esping-Andersen (2008). It responds both to the need represented by the crisis of care (Jenson 2011; Fraser 2016) and to the shrinkage of the state in the North, and its limitations in the South, relying on the labor of poor women, whether nationals or immigrants.

Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that, in spite of everything, and despite objective forms of domination, women’s choice to embrace values such as love—for work or for others—and the religious meanings attached to it, can also represent an alternative to capitalism and to its corollary, the elevation of money and material wealth as the sole measure of value.

Ultimately, this analysis in terms of gray zones has revealed, on the one hand, a historical continuity in the character of women’s work, globally speaking, as notably illustrated by the experience of the women of the Global South, and on the other, a discontinuity, represented by the extension of its characteristic features to every sphere of social production and reproduction.

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