Household platforms as transactional infrastructures: the case of Urban Company

Much of the literature on platform labor in the Global South has focused upon the hyper-visible workforces of urban transport and influencers in the attention economy. Nonetheless, there have been significant attempts to ‘platformize’ the often invisible economies of domestic labor. In this article, we interrogate the case of Urban Company, a household platform offering domestic services in urban India. UC offers its upper middle class clientele ‘convenience’ and ‘choice.’ Operating as a digital rendition of the gated community, household platforms proffer a modernizing vision of safety, reliability and accountability. Rhetorics of professionalizing the service class combine with the underlying imperative to extract value from the informal sector. Consequently, UC has been praised and condemned for its treatment of workers as it attempts to turn a profit and pump up its market valorization. Here, the demands of venture capital compel the intensifying financialization of UC, where partners now pay for work bundles, training and supplies and UC provides them with loans for this purpose. This credit–debt dynamic is a core characteristic of platform economies in the Global South, whereas the class relations encoded by India’s household platforms are aligned with a platform urbanism serving small and concentrated urban elites.