Jing Hiah, assistant professor in the Sociology, Theory and Methodology department (STeM) and the Criminology department at Erasmus School of Law, has received a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Research Council (NOW). The Rubicon programme allows recently graduated scientists to gain experience at a foreign top institute. This is an important step in a scientific career.
With the Rubicon grant Hiah will study the labour relations and exploitation on domestic work platforms at the University of Bristol.
The questionable circumstances of domestic work through digital platforms
Digital platforms, mainly transnational corporations, efficiently mediate demand and supply of labour on a large scale creating digital marketplaces for services. Simultaneously, evidence shows that platforms often provide poor working conditions. Nonetheless, platforms have offered migrants, ethnic minorities and workers with familial obligations (often women) alternative channels for subsistence. “This raises questions about how platforms (re)produce existing labour market inequalities related to migration status, ethnicity/race and gender, but also about how labour and data mobilities intertwine with state and international labour regulations, prohibition of labour exploitation and migration control”, according to Hiah.
Empirical research in Bristol
Hiah’s interdisciplinary research is aimed at determining the impact of these digital platforms on labour relations by zooming in on the particular sector of domestic work. A growing sector that is particularly vulnerable to labour exploitation, due to the invisible nature of domestic work.
Hiah commits to a period of fifteen months at the research institute Mobilities, Migration Bristol, a research institute at the University of Bristol, Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, which houses a team of acknowledged (labour)migration experts that research the relationship between inequality, migration, work and digitisation.
- Assistant professor