Seminar (TURBA Lab): "Shifting labor and production relations in the platform economy"

Program

The research seminar, which will be held as a hybrid event from 11.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. (CET) on Wednesday 26 January, will include three lectures by four researchers specializing in the "platform economy".

The event will be moderated by Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, group leader of TURBA Lab.

Programme

Lecture Nº 1: Presentation of the book "Sé lo que hicisteis el último verano. La transformación del turismo urbano antes, en y después de la pandemia" by Jorge Sequera.

Sequera will present the discussions set out in the book.

Lecture Nº 2: "Divisions of platform labour at home: re-thinking social reproduction in Airbnb households", by Maartje Roelofsen (New Perspectives in Tourism & Leisure (NOUTUR) – Faculty of Economics and Business – UOC).

Digital platform Airbnb is often regarded as an enterprise that mediates between the demand and supply of rental housing (rooms or entire properties) usually, but not exclusively, for touristic purposes. A prolific literature has detailed the role Airbnb and similar platforms play in the financialization of housing and the impacts these extractive and accumulative activities have on housing supplies in cities. Increasingly such platforms are analysed from the perspective of urban platform economy and labelled as forms of ‘platform capitalism’. While such accounts are by no means important, what is often overlooked are the everyday contingencies and embodied labour that underpin the provision of these types of accommodation. This presentation explores the politics and practices of Airbnb work and how they play out ‘at home’ engaging with scholarly debates on employment precarity in the tourism sector and scholarship on social reproductive labour. Drawing on ethnographic work in five different cities, the presentation considers how the dynamics between gender, race, class, and other social categories are reflected in who is assigned specific tasks involved in Airbnb work. Work that often complicates neat distinctions between “productive” and “social reproductive” labour and the respective “private” and “public” spaces where this work is carried out. In conclusion, the presentation suggests how Airbnb workers carve out new spaces of possibility as they work through and against some of the existing power dynamics that constitute labour in platform urbanism.

Lecture Nº 3: "La transformación de la ciudad en el capitalismo de plataformas: los casos de Airbnb e Idealista y las plataformas de reparto" by Francisco Fernandez-Trujillo Moares and Pablo Martínez Galíndez (from the Spanish distance learning university, UNED).

The changes undergone by neoliberal capitalism in this last decade have involved many different dimensions. One of the newest and most important of these is the emergence of digital platforms, which have affected various economic and social aspects, such as new labour and non-standard work relations, the appearance of new ways of consuming, and the reconfiguration of the markets, among others. However, this process has also had significant consequences on global cities, which are being affected in every way by the pervasive presence of digital platforms in many aspects of daily life. The aim of this seminar is to discuss how the emergence of large platforms and the development of digital or platform capitalism has set us back in the way we live, work, travel and consume in the city. We will talk about two of the main spheres in which large digital platforms have become established.

We will first analyse the emergence of home-sharing platforms, and more specifically Airbnb. We will look at how the advent of this platform in recent years has transformed the way we obtain income from real estate and how real estate rental and tourist accommodation practices have been reshaped following the COVID-19 crisis, blurring the lines between the rental and tourist accommodation markets and with loss of security for tenants as a direct result.

We will also look at how courier and food delivery platforms have affected not just job insecurity – as is widely known – but also how such job insecurity and the very way courier and food delivery platforms operate have affected how cities are organized in a variety of ways. A few unquestionable examples of this include how the large number of digital platform workers adding to the city's traffic have affected urban travel, the emergence of so-called "ghost kitchens" as an aggressive new component of urban landscapes, or the transformation of how we consume in view of the increasing number of online purchases delivered to our homes to the detriment of shopping locally in our surrounding area.

If you would like to attend the seminar, please contact larguellesr@uoc.edu.