Latina Housecleaners in Toronto

Summary

This project explores how Latina housecleaners use digital technologies to mediate their work in Toronto, focusing on the paper of asynchronous digital marketplaces (eg. Facebook) as a means of seeking-job when they arrive, and other technologies that shape relations of Latino migrant community.

Description

The focus of this project is to understand how digital technologies shape and mediate care labor practices. In the first phase of the project we have explored how latina housecleaners navigate existing digital platforms and how these technologies are being used for mediating their work. Since their job seeking through social media such as Facebook until the use of Kijiji for selling their services, building entrepreneurial identities and solidarities.

Along with the work practices of housecleaners, there is a technological ecosystem within informal spaces, where we want to explore how digital technologies are being used by this community to foster cohesiveness, organization, and/or fragmentation, and to construct and express the identities of cleaners as migrants and women. These questions would help us map their needs by delving into the experiences lived by workers on digital platforms.

The second phase of this project focuses on how they imagine sustainable technologies for mediating their work through a series of design workshops.

Papers

Jaimes Rodríguez, I., Petterson, A., Doggett, O., Chandra, P. (2024, November). El costo de la independencia: Latino house-cleaners in Technology-Mediated Labour Markets. In Proceedings of the 2024 CSCW Conference. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686999

Petterson, A., Jaimes-Rodriguez, I., Doggett, O., Chandra, P. (2024, May). Networks of care in digital domestic labour economies. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642200