The assetization of care work. How digital platforms transform care labor markets

The assetization of care work. How digital platforms transform care labor markets Iris Wallenburg, Fenna Nijboer, Syb Kuijper, Martijn Felder & Roland Bal Markets for healthcare have accelerated and diversified in post-pandemic years, bringing in new logics of care. We focus on how digital labour platforms and social media (e.g. TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook) are increasingly used as platforms to organize and commodify care work. Digital labor platforms, as intermediaries, play a critical role in the commodification of care labour by managing the distribution of work through algorithms that connect gig workers with healthcare employers. These platforms are usually financed by international compagnies that operate in various sectors simultaneously. They are often financed by private investors, bringing in a new investor logic in the healthcare sector. Social media platforms, in turn, offer possibilities to exchange care needs (e.g. a family needing 24/7 support for a disabled child) and provide care services in informal manners, bypassing the traditional diploma-based professional infrastructure. This ‘assetization of care’ (Birch, 2020; Henry & Loomis, 2023) is reshaping how care workers navigate their professional roles and economic opportunities, blurring the lines between professional caregiving and self-entrepreneurship. At the same time, state actors, unions, professional associations, and healthcare organizations oppose this trend of self-employment and assetization of care work. They stress the financial burden as well as harmful effects for continuity of care and enhanced work pressure among traditionally employed care workers. Building on the growing literature on commodification and assetization, we study how the rhythms of organizing care and caring itself are being harmonized by the needs of both capital investors and micro-level entrepreneurial care workers – and how this clashes with traditional ways of providing care, yet is also embraced as a possible solution to increasing staff shortages. Using data from ethnographic and online research and document analysis, we show how the affordances of digital platforms allow for personal branding and self-expression (attracting new contracts and income) and provide choice to healthcare workers as economic agents about how and where they want to work (Lien, 2023). It also shows that care work through digital platforms comes with new difficulties, like meeting formal requirements (expensive insurance schemes, quality obligations), obtaining enough gigs to earn a wished-for income, and working in care teams that are not very welcoming to platform care workers. We study how the assetization of professional (‘high-skilled’) and informal care work occurs in the intertwinement of digital and traditional care provision, as well as its distributional consequences – e.g. who takes advantage, how do existing power relations transform, and what new forms of precariousness emerge? References Birch, K. (2020). Technoscience Rent: Toward a Theory of Rentiership for Technoscientific Capitalism. Science, Technology & Human Values, 45(1), 3-33. Henry, C., & Loomis, J. M. (2023). Healthcare as asset: Private equity investment and the changing geographies of care in the United States. Geoforum, 146. Lien, C. Y. (2023). Temp nurses go digital: examining gig care in US nursing homes. Sociology of Health & Illness, 45, 542-559.