Digital Labor Platforms, Domestic Work and Formalization: Evidence from Argentina

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance and fragility of care systems globally, resulting in multiple new challenges for women, who comprise the majority ofworkers in this sector. In particular, domestic work is the main source of employment for vulnerable women in Argentina, a sector globally characterized by high degrees ofinformality, low pay, and precarious working conditions. In this context, digital labor platforms are emerging as new contracting intermediaries, thus raising questions on their impact in terms of the generation of new labor and income opportunities for women. This article inspects the role of platforms in the definition of working conditions for domestic workers, by considering their influence in the formalization of the sector.Empirical evidence is provided to evaluate the contribution of platforms to the establishment of formal employment contracts for domestic workers. Based on surveydata from 300 women working through the sector's leading platform in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (transformed into 1048 worker-job observations), a fixed-effects model is estimated at the job level to measure the formalization effect of the platform. Results show that working through the platform almost triples the probability of landing a formal job, controlling for both observable and unobservable attributes of workers.