Mediating encounters between cleaners and clients: embodied power relations in platform-mediated domestic labour

While domestic service labour has long depended on informal referrals and personal contacts, an increasing number of digital labour platforms now offer a new, digital mode of matching households and cleaners, shaping how clients and workers encounter each other within both the digital space and the private space of the home. This paper examines how this new form of digital mediation through platforms influences the embodied encounters between cleaners and clients, focusing on the ways the digital mediation alters dynamics of trust, intimacy, and control for both cleaners and clients. Platform-based cleaning services are often associated with convenience and stress relief for clients and flexible (additional) income opportunities for workers. Drawing on interviews with domestic cleaners and clients in Vienna (Austria), we argue that the digital mediation has distinct impacts on the way cleaners and clients interact. Cleaners' experiences range from interpersonal care to disrespect, microaggressions, and/or (sexual) violence. These experiences reveal how platform mediation shape the private home as a site where economic dependences, embodied care, and intersectional power asymmetries between cleaners and clients converge, as cleaners must navigate not only the emotional demands of intimate labour but also the surveillance and control embedded in both digital interfaces and domestic spaces. To analyse these dynamics, we combine feminist political economy perspectives on platform labour – highlighting broader structures of exploitation and the devaluation of social reproduction – with micropolitical approaches that examine embodied relations between cleaners and clients. These relations unfold both through digital interfaces and during encounters within domestic spaces. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper shows how domestic service platforms are structured by, and actively reproduce, underlying power relations, which are simultaneously experienced, negotiated, and reproduced in cleaners' and clients' interactions, thereby spatialising the ongoing devaluation of domestic work in contemporary urban platform economies.