Rebecca Paraciani, Giovanni Amerigo Giuliani
Comparative literature has mostly focused on labor costs in explaining cross-country variation in the composition of the platform economy while national institutions have been largely overlooked. Therefore, it is still unclear how the platform operational logics – theoretically uniform at the transnational level – are mediated by institutional legacies at the national level. However, there is an emerging body of research that suggests that platforms adapt and respond to institutional conditions, and thus must be studied in relation to national institutional contexts (Chueri & Törnberg, 2023; Törnberg, 2023, Funke & Picot, 2021; Picot, 2022; Valle & Schor 2020). Nevertheless, limited research has yet systematically examined the relationship between national labor and welfare institutions and the platform economy (see Thelen, 2018; Wood et al., 2019; Chueri & Törnberg, 2023; Ametowobla & Kirchner, 2023). Furthermore, when they did it, they adopted a broad focus, thus paying attention mostly on the cross-country differences regarding the structure of the platform economy in terms of the jobs performed by the platform workers (low-skilled vs. high-skilled jobs) (e.g., Chueri & Törnberg, 2023). It follows that we still know very little about how labor market and welfare institutions influence the profile (who they are, in terms of gender and race) and the behavior (in terms of their decisions in the hourly fee setting) of those workers operating in platforms providing low-skilled jobs – that is, cleaning platforms. Comparative perspective can thus shed light on the actual dynamics of platform operation on the ground of transnational platform capital, highlighting the role of national institutions and workers agency in shaping outcomes. By focusing on the case of the Yoopies platform operated in five capitals (Rome, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm and Copenhagen) of countries belonging to three different Welfare regimes (Southern, Continental, and Scandinavian), the research aims at answering the following question: