This chapter explores what it means for cleaners to enter the upperworld. It discusses how cleaners approach the upperworld, and interact with upperworlders. Forays into the upperworld constitute both blessing and curse. Through access, cleaners may gain insight, and stories, and the upperworld’s exclusivity may rub off onto cleaners. More often than not, however, the opposite is true. The more exposure cleaners get to the upperworld, the more they come face-to-face with an inflexible status hierarchy that poses a serious ongoing threat to their dignity. The issue is not just stigmatization and abuse by customers, but denial of the cleaners’ personhood. Cleaners are not passive victims, though. They frame their situation and debunk their environment in ways that provide them with a defensive superiority. To varying degrees, they confront upperworlders, sometimes just by making themselves seen and heard. As to escape from the indignities in the upperworld, cleaners also turn to the invisible underworld. Call it the Potsdamer Platz paradox: encounters between those who work and live in the upperworld and those who labor there out of sight tend to drive the worlds further apart.

Online care platforms have become major brokers of informal paid caregiving in the U.S., alongside a patchwork of agencies, informal networks, and online job boards. While domestic carework has been considered a paradigmatic example of “invisible” work, platforms like Care.com emphasize workers’ online visibility – through self-branding and online identity management – as key to a successful job search. Based on interviews with careworkers and a content analysis of company materials, we find that careworkers negotiate overlapping and conflicting “visibility regimes,” which are constructed by platforms, and other social institutions that shape their job searches. While some leverage the individualized visibility of platforms as a vehicle for building a “caring brand,” others find themselves lost in a sea of search results that flatten important professional distinctions. We argue that this complicates policy assumptions that pose increased visibility as a solution for invisible or undervalued work. Instead, these new forms of online scrutiny serve platforms’ interests in making workers legible to clients. As careworkers’ livelihoods become more closely intertwined with the decisions, design, and policies enacted by platform companies, more attention should be paid to their legal and ethical responsibilities for working against entrenched inequalities within the industry.