The Future of (Care) Work

In Spent behind the Wheel, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray offer a sharp intervention into an emerging scholarly and public discourse about the so-called future of work.1 Their focus on the taxi and ride-hailing industries as key sites of contemporary social reproduction struggles renders their research provocative and timely.

Spent behind the Wheel breathes new life into the concept of emotional labor in the workplace, a concept that has captured the imagination of sociologists of gender and work for the last few decades. Referring to the expectations placed on workers to expend their emotional capacities while at work, emotional labor can include such things as the expectation to make small talk on the job, arrive early and leave late, and put on a friendly smile while on the clock, among others. This type of work has been typically, though not always, associated with those occupations that are largely done by women workers, as highlighted in Arlie Hochschild’s now famous ethnography of flight attendants.2 Beyond the management of workers’ physical bodies, scholars in this vein seek to understand the commercialization of human feeling, gender as a technology of flexibility, and differentials in wages and working conditions among subjects with intersectional identities and experiences.3 These scholars argue that, from the point of view of capital, feminization functions to produce labor that is unremunerated and unvalued or undervalued insofar as they are socially constructed as merely labors of love. Priti Ramamurthy, in a 2010 essay on cottonseed production in India, takes this one step further when she argues that the feminization of labor can be understood as an index of the patterns of recomposition in labor and capital more broadly.4 Gender, whether as embodied or as symbolic, cultural power, she observes, can work to create interactions that hold meaning to workers themselves (desires to care, to attend to) that align with the desired new forms of value creation and circulation of capital.

Thousands of miles from Ramamurthy’s Indian cottonseed plants, in the streets of New York City and other cities across the United States, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray take up a similar approach to the feminization of labor when they critically analyze the narratives and stories that make up the architecture of the gig economy’s infrastructure and give it a kind of discursive stability in the male-dominated taxi-driving and ride-hailing industries. Drawing on interviews with drivers and critical media analysis, the authors describe the penetration of Silicon Valley companies Lyft and Uber into the existing taxi industry—shifting labor demands in which possession of technical skills like memory and navigation take a back seat to the labor of attending to and securing a pleasant experience for passengers. “The so-called innovation of companies like Lyft and Uber is in selling the idea of industry,” they write, “but the premise of their accumulation entrenches long-standing modes of extracting from what might best be described as reproductive lives in the service of consumer lives” (6). For instance, they compellingly illustrate the ways that Lyft and Uber weaponize the rampant overpolicing of men of color to discipline their behavior and make for docile workers and the ways Lyft and Uber work hard to sell the idea of “innovative disruption” in order to penetrate existing labor markets as if the modernized systems of management they introduce do not harness the power of symbolic racist and sexist tropes, or what the authors call “racial power,” that further entrench racist scripts.

In my own thinking on technological disruption in the care work sector, I observe the same digital and discursive infrastructure of the gig economy whose promises of algorithm-enabled metrics of trust and care are seductive to clients and opportunities for entrepreneur drive nannies and other care workers to train themselves to perform respectability in real life and in virtual personas to hack the platforms; though already feminized and racialized, the care work sector remains largely informal and, from the point of view of some in Silicon Valley, ripe for establishing new patterns of accumulation. In my work, I have become intimately familiar with the ways that care is powerful (anyone who has ever cared about someone or something will tell you how). As a private emotion, care may hold great value to the caretaker and the person being cared for. But as a commodified asset, care holds a yet-indeterminate potential exchange value, not to mention an infinite cultural currency.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the rise of the internet and digitally mediated marketplaces demands greater attunement to embodiment, not less, as workers navigate the corporeal demands elaborated by emotional labor scholars, with new demands on their disembodied, online avatars both on the marketplace platform and in their personal social media platforms (some care work platforms, for instance, grant preferential treatment to caretakers who link their personal Facebook accounts). Spent behind the Wheel is further evidence that affect in its various iterations will continue to be a feature of the future of work.5 Corporate giants like Lyft and Uber have both the capital and, increasingly, the cultural cachet to produce propaganda like “June: Life Is Better When You Share the Ride” that sticks, which in turn grants them carte blanche in the highest levels of state governance, like in my home state of California, where they pushed through unpopular marketplace contractor legislation.6 As Premilla Nadasen illustrates in her discussion of the “mammy craze,” the language of care can impress a fictionalized fable of stable race relations by elevating certain racialized and gendered bodies and occupations to a level of respectable difference via subservience and lives that exist to serve.7

For these reasons, this book deserves a fair audience with scholars thinking about the future of work. Hua and Ray manage to historicize Silicon Valley and to consider the ways that unfree labor and unpaid social reproduction form part of the calculus and DNA of the gig economy. When is a gig just a gig? And when is it drawing on histories of Black male exclusion from the breadwinners’ wage? The unpaid and poorly paid work of women who are more likely than not to perform the work of caring for homes, children, and dependent adults? When are trainings and gamification part of a longer history of deskilling and dual-labor markets that have been key to the economic success of Silicon Valley since its inception?8 And how does the middle-class consumer come to imagine that “some lives [are] valuable only insofar as they enable other, independently valuable lives to flourish” (76)? I commend the authors for their important work historicizing ride-hailing within a longer trend toward the economization of life (Murphy, 2017), the history of the insurance industry, and the American war state, even while I think Spent behind the Wheel leaves many questions of theory and strategy left for others to answer.9 For instance, as a Marxist feminist with autonomist proclivities myself, I wonder, does the tendency toward datafication, aggregation, and economies of scale of Silicon Valley suggest the need for new theories of the feminized mass worker, feminized strategic chokepoints, and feminized forms of refusal and autonomy?

Author Profile

Magally “Maga” Miranda is a doctoral candidate in Chicana/o and Central American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research explores care work in the age of networked information and the intersections of race, gender, labor, migration, and technology. Informed by feminist and workerist methods of activist research and knowledge production, her research emphasizes the coproduction of knowledge with rank-and-file workers.