Visible but Precarious: How Digital Platforms Reshape Migrant Care Work

This blog post is based on an article published in the Journal of Social Policy by Mert Koçak and Elifcan Çelebi.

Finding someone to care for a child, an older relative, or a sick family member is increasingly difficult, and digital platforms have stepped into this care gap. Families scroll through profiles, compare experience and availability, and search for someone who appears trustworthy. Care platforms promise to make finding care faster and more transparent.

Yet behind this apparently straightforward process lies a largely informal labour market. Many migrant care workers lack work permits, social security, stable wages, and effective protection against exploitation. Although platforms make workers easier to find, the resulting employment relationships often remain outside formal labour protections.

In our recently published article, we examine what happens when the digitalisation of care intersects with migration governance, labour informality, and gender inequality in Türkiye. Drawing on over 15,000 publicly available care worker profiles from four major care platforms, and using computational text analysis and online ethnographic observations, we study how workers present themselves to become employable.

Türkiye is an important setting for this question. Care for children, older people, patients, and households remains heavily dependent on families and private arrangements. Migrant women have long filled gaps in domestic and care provision through informal and insecure employment. Digital platforms enter this landscape as seemingly modern intermediaries, making workers searchable by service, location, gender, and nationality.

Platforms Formalise Visibility rather than Employment

But digitising the search for care does not necessarily formalise care work or guarantee employment. This distinction is central to our argument that platforms formalise visibility rather than employment. Workers become findable and hireable, but the platforms verify identity, not the right to work. That gap matters enormously for a country hosting 5.1 million foreign nationals, only around 4% of whom hold a work permit.

Over 90% of migrant care workers on these platforms say nothing about their legal status at all. This silence allows workers and employers to proceed without directly addressing whether the employment is authorised. Platforms therefore make migrants highly visible as caregivers while leaving the legality of their employment largely unexamined. Rather than reducing informality, digital matching enables recruitment without requiring platforms to verify work permits or assume responsibility for employment conditions.

Digital care platforms give workers public profiles and, in some cases, verification badges. Yet this visibility does not guarantee formal employment, wage protection, social security, or mechanisms for addressing abuse. Migrant workers become more accessible to employers while remaining responsible for navigating the legal and economic risks of employment.

The profiles reveal a sharp gap between documented migration and formal employment as a care worker. Migrants refer to residence permits far more often than work permits, although residence permits do not themselves authorise employment. Mentioning legal residence can reassure families that workers are established in Türkiye and unlikely to face immediate immigration problems.

Gendered and Racialised Employment

Women make up more than 95% of migrant caregiver profiles. Migrants generally report lower and more dispersed wage expectations than Turkish workers, while men list higher wages than women in both groups.

Migrants overall are overrepresented relative to their share of Türkiye’s population. Central Asian workers are especially visible. Syrian workers, by contrast, are almost absent from these platforms (0.26% of profiles), even though they constitute the largest migrant population in Türkiye. This does not mean that Syrians are absent from care work. Instead, it suggests that some may remain concentrated in recruitment channels that are more informal, local, and difficult to observe.

Platformisation therefore does not replace the existing segmentation of the care market. It translates inequalities into searchable profiles, filters, and market signals. Even without complex rating systems or automated rankings, platform design shapes who appears employable, what workers feel compelled to disclose, and how families compare potential caregivers. Digital visibility can therefore coexist with structural invisibility. Some workers become highly searchable without gaining protection, while others remain largely absent from the digital spaces through which care work is increasingly organised.

Building a “Hireable” Self

The burden of producing trust is not distributed equally. Migrant workers face particular pressure to demonstrate cultural compatibility. They highlight their Turkish-language ability, marriage to Turkish citizens, or ability to cook Turkish food. Migrant women mention cooking more than twice as often as Turkish women.

These statements show how workers anticipate employers’ assumptions and attempt to reduce the perceived risk of hiring a migrant caregiver. They actively learn how to make themselves legible and desirable within the platform economy.

These strategies demonstrate agency, but they can also reproduce the gendered and racialised expectations underlying precarious employment. Motherhood becomes an informal credential, cultural assimilation becomes a workplace qualification, and nationality, language, and legal status become proxies for trustworthiness.

The profiles also show that finding care work requires more than listing occupational skills. Workers construct what we call a hybrid persona, combining professional qualifications with emotional and moral qualities.

They mention experience, education, references, punctuality, and language skills alongside patience, compassion, cleanliness, warmth, and love of children. Childcare profiles blend pedagogical experience with maternal identity. Elder and patient care profiles describe intimate bodily labour through nursing knowledge and technical competence. Domestic workers emphasise flexibility, cooking, and their ability to keep household life running smoothly.

A care-platform profile therefore operates partly as a CV and partly as a character testimonial. This reflects the relational nature of care, but it also places the burden of producing trust on workers. Instead of platforms or public institutions guaranteeing employment standards, workers must turn their personalities, family histories, and cultural identities into evidence that they deserve employment.

Connecting Care Across Borders

These questions extend beyond Türkiye. In our podcast series, Transnational Care: Bridging Borders and Digital Landscapes, we explore how migration, labour, and technology are transforming care across countries and institutions.

Conversations with researchers working on migrant labour, digital platforms, and cross-border care demonstrate that care is both intimate and globally organised. The series connects the patterns captured in platform data to wider transformations in how care is recruited, organised, and valued across borders.

What Should Change?

Digital care platforms require clearer regulation and greater accountability. Migrant workers need realistic routes to work authorisation, while platform-mediated care needs enforceable wage standards, greater transparency, and accessible mechanisms for addressing exploitation.

Yet platform regulation alone is insufficient. As long as affordable and accessible formal care remains limited, households will continue to depend on informal arrangements, and migrant workers will continue to absorb many of the resulting risks.

Digital platforms can help workers and households find one another, but they cannot by themselves make care work fair, secure, or properly valued. Evaluating their social impact therefore requires asking more than whether they increase access or efficiency. We must also ask who becomes visible, under what conditions, who remains excluded, and who bears the risks once a match is made.

Reference

Koçak, Mert, and Elifcan Çelebi. 2026. “Visible but Precarious: Gendered and Racialised Representations of Migrant Care Workers on Digital Care Platforms.” Journal of Social Policy: 1–18. doi: 10.1017/S0047279426101469.

About the Authors

Mert Koçak is Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, US.

Elifcan Çelebi is Departmental Lecturer in Comparative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, UK.