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This book chapter is part of an edited collection titled Working in the Context of Austerity: Challenges and Struggles, edited by Donna Baines and Ian Cunningham. The chapter examines how, under nationally and locally distinct conditions of austerity urbanism, marginalized workers navigate platform-mediated gig economies. It focuses specifically on the experiences of immigrants and minorities working through domestic cleaning platforms. In NYC, we meet Kenny, an African American cleaner who was driven to the Handy platform – and to cleaning work more specifically – through his encounters with labor activation schemes. He has an ambivalent relationship to the platform, which provided him with a somewhat steady income stream when he sorely needed one, while also making it difficult to transition out of gig work and into a more secure and sustainable occupation. In Berlin, we hear from Kostas, a young Greek man who left his austerity-ridden country to look for better opportunities in the nation widely held responsible for enforcing the measures that bled Greece dry. Yet when such opportunities proved harder to come by than he had initially imagined, he turned to Helpling as an easily accessible “employer of last resort” (sans employment contract). Like Kenny, Kostas has a deeply ambivalent relationship to the platform, which is nevertheless articulated in distinctive ways. The paper concludes by stressing the value of cross-national comparative ethnography as a methodological approach able to grasp the local iterations of global phenomena like “neoliberalism", “austerity” and "gig work", while highlighting the deep yet severely unequal mutual dependency between local-serving labor platforms and migrant/minority workers.