More of the same or one step further? A comparative analysis of work on digital home care platforms in Belgium and Spain

This paper examines how digital care platforms interact with different institutional contexts and regulatory frameworks in the domestic labour sector and demonstrates the outcomes of this interaction in terms of power dynamics, employment arrangements and working conditions. By contrasting two qualitative studies of domestic care platforms in Belgium and Spain in a cross-national comparative analysis, we show that national institutions not only shape the platform landscape in this sector, but they also condition the platforms’ capacity to increase the power imbalance inherent in paid domestic work and modulate the effects of their labour management model on boosting informal employment.