Platformizing care in a familistic welfare regime in crisis: migration and social reproduction in Spain

This article examines the platformization of care and domestic work in Spain as part of the broader crisis of familistic welfare regimes in southern Europe. It argues that digital platforms do not represent a rupture with existing care arrangements, but rather an intensification and reorganization of long-standing patterns of privatization, marketization and reliance on migrant labour. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with platform-mediated care and domestic workers in Madrid, combined with collaborative ethnography with migrant workers' collectives, the article situates platform expansion within the structural under-provision of public care services and the transnational reorganization of reproductive labour. Empirically, the analysis shows that platform-mediated care work in Spain is closely embedded in stepwise migratory itineraries shaped by legal insecurity, administrative borders and uneven access to rights. Platforms leverage the temporalities of the migratory process, often operating as gateways into employment while simultaneously generating specific forms of stratification structured by gendered, racialized and legal inequalities. At the same time, the article highlights that in the Spanish context, platformization unfolds in a context marked by pre-existing traditions of collective organizing among migrant domestic and care workers. Grassroots collectives function as alternative infrastructures of social reproduction, providing mutual aid, legal advice and spaces for the politicization of shared experiences. This allows individualized platform-based trajectories to be rearticulated into collective forms of agency and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting that future research should further explore the conditions under which platform-induced isolation can be transformed into collective organization and how legal status, welfare regimes and local organizing infrastructures shape divergent outcomes of platformization in care work.