Platform work regulation is failing cleaners

Gig economy. In Europe, thousands work via cleaning apps such as CleanWhale or Helpling. How many of them exactly rely on this type of intermediation, remains anyone’s guess. The latest survey on the gig economy estimated that 28 million Europeans were engaging at least once a month in app-intermediated work in 2021. Of these, 3 million were drivers and 1 million were doing “low-skill, on-location” jobs (the rest worked online), but no further breakdown by sector is available.

In a way, cleaners were uberized long before Uber. The activity has been, and still is, largely informal, and full-time employment is the exception. In addition, the drive to outsource cleaning to smaller, specialized firms in the 1990s made it almost impossible for cleaners to obtain a secure and decently paid position.

New research. Researchers have studied drivers and couriers extensively, but cleaners have long been shunned. However, new work published in the last two years is starting to change that. Academics have interviewed dozens of cleaners in Austria, Norway and Berlin, and the EU-funded Origami project, which was completed last month, conducted research in Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.

For cleaners who use apps, one aspect of the work is fully automated: the assessment of the time needed for a job. Most online services set the time needed for a booking based on the size of the premises, which is input by the client. This very rough calculation – not to mention the incentive for clients to lie and input a lower value – often leads to conflicts. Once at the client’s, cleaners have to explain that they cannot complete the job, or that they need to stay longer and be paid accordingly.

Stars. In practice, cleaners have very little leverage. Because a one-star rating can prevent a cleaner from getting new jobs, and because they bear the burden of proof in case of a conflict, many conclude that working the extra time for free is the least-bad solution. In one case in Denmark, a cleaner explained that she checked the size of the house on the property register before accepting a job, in order to ensure that the client’s input matched reality.

Cleaners, who are overwhelmingly female and foreign-born, also face sexual harassment. In this regard, algorithm-powered apps do not change things much. The apps often list cleaners with large pictures, encouraging cleaners to appear more desirable and clients to objectify them.

Platform work directive. In late 2024, European institutions passed the platform work directive, which is set to apply in late 2026 and to make it much easier for gig workers to claim the status of a regular employee. However, law scholars Antonio Aloisi and Nastazja Potocka-Sionek argue that cleaners will not benefit from this clause. Because they set their own price and receive instructions from clients, the intermediaries might not qualify as employers, they write. There is no obvious hierarchical relationship between an app and a cleaner.

Testimonies from cleaners collected by academics, however, show that support personnel from the apps often do exert a certain amount of pressure. They sometimes encourage cleaners to wait (without compensation) for absent clients to show up on the premises. A cleaner who sets prices too high or too low might also be reprimanded. And some have been told that declining more than three jobs in a row would lead to the termination of their account. While many cleaners do enjoy the flexibility of gig work, they clearly do not reap all of its supposed benefits.

This is an excerpt from the Automated Society newsletter, a bi-weekly round up of news in automated decision-making in Europe. Subscribe here.