By Dr. Sai Amulya Komarraju, Assistant Professor in the Communications area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA)
This blog draws on the author’s chapter contribution to The SAGE Handbook of Digital Labour, edited by Ergin Bulut, Julie Yujie Chen, Rafael Grohmann, and Kylie Jarrett.
To cite:
Komarraju, S. A. (2025). Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Care Work(ers). In E. Bulut, J. Y. Chen, R. Grohmann & K. Jarrett (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Digital Labour (pp. 231–240). SAGE Publications.
The grey zones of platform labour
With digital platforms increasingly organising (informal) care work, the question is no longer about the number of jobs created but whether such work can be generated with dignity. Care work everywhere is embodied and (often) invisible. For workers in the Global South, these invisibilities are deepened by histories of gender, class, and coloniality that shape the very design of technology. Location and context, then, become central to designing technologies that ensure the dignity and well-being of platform workers in care work.
Most debates on platform economies begin with the status of workers. They are neither fully self-employed nor employees– neither completely independent nor completely subordinate. Similarly, platforms are neither intermediaries nor employers. They replace the standard employment contract with a triangular relationship between worker, platform, and customer. In this grey zone — especially in the Global South– work is reduced to little more than the matching of supply and demand. But are digital labour platforms, particularly those offering care services, truly in the business of demand and supply?
This ambiguity is not accidental; it is deliberate. The grey zone allows platform businesses to avoid recognising any social form of employment. Terms and conditions can be continually tweaked, while workers’ rights remain elusive. In the Global South, the roots of this problem lie in its neocolonial legacies. Where imperialists pursued a policy of expansion, some degree of labour empowerment followed. Where they pursued extraction — as in much of the Global South — labour laws may exist, but enforcement remains weak. This has led to “ethical dumping”: work that does not comply with labour standards in the West is outsourced to the Global South, where regulatory oversight is lax.
Our dominant understandings of who counts as a worker, what constitutes work, and what “normal” working hours are have been built on a masculine logic. Across the world, care is naturalised as women’s duty or, at best, recognised only as women’s work. When women enter platform-based gigs such as food delivery or ride-hailing, they often remain invisible. Their voices are underrepresented, and their concerns are reduced to “women’s issues,” making it difficult to gain traction with policymakers. Because care is assumed to be part of women’s nature to nurture, even paid care work remains highly devalued. When care intersects with the home — as in paid domestic work — it becomes harder to acknowledge one’s home as someone else’s workplace. Domestic workers have fought long for dignity and recognition, but care platforms risk undoing these hard-won gains by positioning themselves as mere intermediaries “facilitating work opportunities.”
Design and the illusion of autonomy
This deliberate ambiguity extends beyond law and policy into the very architecture of platforms. The design of digital interfaces subtly shapes how workers perceive autonomy, opportunity, and risk. Take nudging, for instance. Borrowed from behavioural economics, nudging describes how businesses steer people’s choices by playing on desires and emotions. On digital labour platforms, such nudging often happens invisibly through algorithmic design. Workers may not report to a human boss, creating an illusion of autonomy, yet ratings, reviews, and algorithmic prompts quietly shape their livelihoods. Platforms cultivate a false sense of ownership — workers are made to feel like independent entrepreneurs, so when things go wrong, they are more likely to blame themselves rather than the system.
These harms are deeply structural and gendered. Consider late-night incentives. Women workers quickly learn that the risks of late-night gigs outweigh the rewards. In the Global South, few women own vehicles; many depend on their husbands or male relatives to escort them to high-risk areas. Their ability to work thus depends not only on market demand but also on family dynamics and social norms. Combined with opaque algorithms designed to maximise extraction, what appears as freedom of choice on paper is anything but in practice.
What the example of nudging reveals is that design is never neutral. Platform architectures encode values — what to prioritise, whom to privilege, and whose risks are worth ignoring. If behavioural design can be mobilised to extract more labour, it can also be reimagined to redistribute care. Designing for dignity, therefore, requires more than technical reform; it demands rethinking the moral and political foundations on which platforms operate.
Designing with a feminist ethic of care
It is because of these historical and structural legacies that an intersectional feminist ethic of care becomes essential. Such an ethic foreground:
- material contexts and embodied experiences– relationships between people, technologies, and environments — rather than treating elements of workers’ life-worlds in isolation;
- location-based interdependencies in analysing the local and transnational linkages of care work; and
- grounded realities of where platforms operate, to design systems that ensure the dignity and well-being of platform workers.
Yet translating this ethic into practice requires identifying the institutional levers through which dignity can be designed. Platforms do not exist in a vacuum — they are sustained by four interdependent systems that regulate everyday life: markets, law, architecture, and norms. Each of these forces can either reproduce precarity or enable justice, depending on how they are shaped.
So how do we design for dignity from a feminist lens? By recognising the urgent need to transform these four interdependent forces of regulation:
Markets: from extraction to empowerment
Law: from paternalistic protection to solidarity and social security
Architecture: from manipulation and opacity to transparency
Norms: from imposed assumptions to context sensitivity
Design is not just about technology — it is about how these four forces are set up to function. Designing for dignity from a feminist lens involves cultivating an ethic of care that is attentive to both the politics of platform governance and the micropolitics of everyday life. To design with a feminist ethic of care is to remain sensitive to location and context. If platforms are shaping the future of labour, our collective responsibility is to ensure they also shape a future of justice — and guarantee dignity of work, in work, and from work.