First heard in the installation “Technologies of Care” (2016). Retold in Mošorin in 2023, Berlin and Orléans in 2024.
One of the workers that Elisa Giardina Papa interviewed for her project on care in networked digital work—identified as Worker 1—told her:
I am a 51 year-old woman, single, mother of three. I work as a university professor in ███████. I have a Master’s degree in ██████████ and a PhD ██ ████████████. I work online because we are going through a high inflationary process in my country. Online freelancing has become increasingly popular here because it offers the possibility to generate income in dollars. My daughter began on Upwork three months ago, and I opened an account on Fiverr. We do research, scientific papers and articles, homework for a variety of subjects, and translation (English to Spanish or vice versa). We work with two accounts. On Upwork, you have to link the account to your resume and upload an accurate photo of yourself. On Fiverr, a higher degree of anonymity is accepted, so we present ourselves under a single male profile. I work in academia. I am no stranger to the wage gap and heteronormativity in our society. I am sure that women make less than their male counterparts for the same work, and I am also Latin American. Being a Latina woman makes me more prone to receiving less for the same hard work. Our clients are students with no time or no interest in fulfilling their academic assignments. Also, other freelancers require help with their orders. They never state it up front, but when you check their reviews, you see they are freelancers advertising exactly what they have asked you to do. I assume they get paid more than I do, so it is convenient for them…when you are starting as a freelancer, you need to take on jobs that are pretty slave-like in order to catch your first clients. So together, me and my daughter, we took on an enormous amount of work that could only be delivered on time if there was more than one person doing it.