Hacking platform capitalism: the case of domestic workers on South Africa’s SweepSouth platform

Abstract

In South Africa, digital labour platforms for domestic work sit at the nexus of formal and informal labour, apartheid geospatial planning, and persisting racialised accessibility to labour markets. Domestic work remains one of the most important sources of income for black African women and its demand is only growing in the digital age. However, the rising demand has not reversed the devaluation of paid domestic work (Ally 2009). The devaluation of paid domestic work is both an extension of the devaluation of women’s unpaid reproductive labour under global capitalism (Fraser 2017) and bottom-of-the-pyramid models of development which redeploy the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making (Dolan and Rajak 2018). Since the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa has made significant strides towards recognising domestic work as work but while the legal frameworkmay have changed, social attitudeswhich devalue domestic work persist. There are over onemillion domestic workers in SouthAfrica.Despite their contribution to the economy – through carework for children, the elderly, the sick, as well as providing psychosocial emotional and intimate support and labour – domestic workers are systematically exploited, and viewed as ‘unskilled’. Platforms create or disrupt markets by bringing together different users to interact and transact. Supporters of digital labour platforms argue that they offer opportunities to ‘bring informal workers out of the shadows and into the mainstream’ (Grunewald 2017). However, Meagher (2018) posits that the rise of platforms has exacerbated a ‘broken social contract’which used to be characterised by stable employment and social welfare provision but has been replaced by ‘an emergent regime of accumulation that encompasses a new capital– labour relation that institutionalises informal work’ (Ettlinger 2017, 69). In sub-Saharan Africa though, the majority have never been formally employed and therefore precarity and informality are the norm rather than the exception (Meagher 2018). SweepSouth is the first Silicon Valley venture capital-backed South African start-up, describing itself as the ‘Uber-for-cleaning services’, and claiming to create employment, with its marketing and branding aimed at poor black African women. Hill Collins and Kunushevci (2017) argue that when women reject the representations of themselves as