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The Growing “Gig Economy”: Implications for the Health and Safety of Digital Platform Workers

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... Importantly, the generation of this intersubjective affective atmosphere informs care-workers' assessments, as our participants make clear, not only of 'fit' but of personal safety. This is a critical assessment given that working alone in a client's home exposes domestic service workers to heightened risks of harassment, workplace violence, and exposure to physical hazards (Berg and Meagher 2018;James 2022; and see summary in Williams, McDonald, and Mayes 2022). ...
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While there is emerging research on the motivations of workers who engage with specific digital platforms, scant attention has been afforded to the contours of the digital economy as they affect workers in occupational or professional contexts. Drawing on interviews with 51 Australian photographers, the authors examined the extent to which, and why, photographers engage with or resist digital platform work. The photographic profession is an ideal context in which to examine such questions due to the fragmentation of the workforce and the recent proliferation of platforms. The findings revealed that the level of worker engagement is explained by platform control over price, service and product quality, and relationship management. The experiences of self-employed, freelance workers complicate our understanding of work afforded by digital platforms. Engaging with the political economy surrounding freelance creative labour, the study enables a richer theorisation of the experiences of platform-generated work in this context.
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Workers actively negotiate contradictions between discourses of flexibility and entrepreneurialism and actually existing conditions of risk and precarity endemic to online self‐employed work. This article examines how ride‐hail drivers counter‐branded UberPool—a carpool ride‐hail service—as ‘UberPoo’. While marketed as a solution to congestion, UberPool created risky and coercive working conditions for ride‐hail drivers. Our analysis is from a study on ride‐hail driver experiences of health and safety risks in a large Canadian city. We engage the concept of organisational misbehaviour to explore how drivers mocked and avoided carpool rides despite the threat of penalties. We characterise misbehaviour as a struggle over lack of control and lack of autonomy in self‐employed work, providing evidence that despite their structural powerlessness, some ride‐hail drivers do set limits around the work they are willing to accept. Algorithmic management and ambiguously classified ride‐hail work are thus subject to some degree of subversion.
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This working paper presents the results of the ETUI Internet and Platform Work Survey conducted in Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia in 2018-2019. The objective is to map the extent of digital labour in central and eastern Europe (CEE). We analyse two types of online sources for generating income: internet work; and its subset, platform work. We find that past experiences with generating income on the internet are relatively common among working age adults. However, the prevalence of regular internet and platform work remains very low in all five CEE countries; indeed, lower according to our estimates than in other comparative surveys. We attribute the differences to the inconsistent quality of non-representative samples of internet users that were deployed in other studies and, in particular, the use of paid, opt-in online surveys which themselves are examples of online gig work. We do not find evidence that internet and platform work is creating a qualitatively new labour market that encroaches on traditional age and gender segmentation. Neither is it a market of ‘student jobs’. Moreover, the labour market situation of internet and platform workers was somewhat more precarious than that for employed people generally, with a higher incidence of non-standard and fragmented employment. Finally, services requiring higher skills and creativity were among the least prevalent forms of internet work, suggesting little overlap with the knowledge-based economy.
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This study analysed the platform economy in terms of time, geography and type of platform, with a view to present estimations on its size in terms of revenues and the number of active workers.
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The rapidly growing number of people who find work via online labor platforms are not employees, nor do they necessarily fit traditional conceptualizations of independent contractors, freelancers, or the self-employed. The ambiguous nature of their employment status and its implications for worker well-being have attracted substantial controversy, but to date most empirical research in this area has focused on the market efficiency of a single platform rather than on workers themselves and related human resource management issues. Research progress will require understanding how online labor platform work differs from other types of nonstandard employment arrangements, as well as critical differences across different labor platform firms in how work and workers are managed. This paper proposes a conceptual classification framework to facilitate research on the attitudes, experiences, and outcomes of workers who use these platforms. We explore how labor platform firms' operational choices shape how control is allocated across workers, clients, and the firm, and how they influence workers' autonomy, incentives, and degree of economic dependence on the firm. Implications for theory development, research, and managing worker-firm relations are discussed.
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This article uses two ethnographic retail case studies to investigate contemporary workplace control. The findings highlight how flexible scheduling has serious consequences for workers and causes insecurity. This provides managers with a powerful and unaccountable mechanism for securing control. The benefits for managers of using flexible scheduling to secure control are shown to be its ambiguity and flexibility. Moreover, flexible scheduling creates an environment where workers must continually strive to maintain managers’ favour. Little evidence is found to suggest that this control is aided by work games obscuring workplace relations. Flexible scheduling does, however, enable misrecognition of workplace relations due to the schedule gifts which it entails. Schedule gifts act to bind workers to managers’ interests through feelings of gratitude and moral obligation.
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For social analysts, what has come to be called the “sharing economy” raises important questions. After a discussion of history and definitions, we focus on 3 areas of research in the for-profit segment, also called the platform economy: social connection, conditions for laborers, and inequalities. Although we find that some parts of the platform economy, particularly Airbnb, do foster social connection, there are also ways in which even shared hospitality is becoming more like conventional exchange. With respect to labor conditions, we find they vary across platforms and the degree to which workers are dependent on the platform to meet their basic needs. On inequality, there is mounting evidence that platforms are facilitating person-to-person discrimination by race. In addition, platforms are advantaging those who already have human capital or physical assets, in contrast to claims that they provide widespread opportunity or even advantage less privileged individuals.
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Digital platforms have the potential to create benefits for their suppliers or workers as well as their customers, yet there is a heated debate about the character of this work and whether the platforms should be more heavily regulated. Beyond the high-profile global platforms, the technology is contributing to changing patterns of work. Yet the existing framework of employment legislation and public policy more broadly – from minimum wages to benefits and pensions – is structured around the concept of ‘the firm’ as the agent of policy delivery. To reshape policies in order to protect the interests of people as workers as well as consumers, it is important to understand why digital innovators make the choices they do, and therefore how labour market policies can improve working conditions without constraining the productivity and consumer benefits enabled by digital business models.
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In many markets, new technologies allow traditional jobs to be divided into discrete tasks that are widely distributed across workers and dynamically priced given prevailing supply and demand conditions. This "sharing" or "gig" economy represents a more flexible work system, and is most common in two-sided markets in which a firm acts as a platform to connect service providers and consumers. One prominent example of this is the ride-sharing company Uber, which connects riders and driver-partners, and dynamically prices trips using a system known as "surge" pricing. In this talk, I discuss the practical problems of designing such a dynamic pricing system, how that dynamic pricing coordinates workers who can now earn compensation on a flexible schedule, and more broadly how the "gig" economy is evolving and growing as a form of market organization.
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The generalization of flexible labour markets, the declining influence of unions and the degradation of social protection has led to the emergence of new forms of employment at the expense of the Standard Employment Relationship, as well as a considerable amount of research across social and scientific disciplines. Years ago we suggested the urgent need to disentangle the consequences of new types of employment for the health and well-being of workers, contending that the study of precarious employment and health is in its infancy. Today, research challenges include clearer, more precise definitions of the original concepts, a more detailed understanding of the pathways and mechanisms through which precarious employment harms worker health, stronger information systems for monitoring the problem and a complex systems approach to employment conditions and health research. All of these must be guided by the theoretical and policy debates linking precarious employment and health, and be geared towards developing better tools for the design, implementation and evaluation of policies intended to minimize precariousness in the labour market and its effects on public health and health inequalities. Our aim in this paper is to outline an agenda for the next decade of research on precarious employment and health, establishing a compelling programme that expands our understanding of complex causes and links.
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Paper available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2682602 The so-called “gig-economy” has been growing exponentially in numbers and importance in recent years but its impact on labour rights has been largely overseen. Work in the “gig-economy” includes “crowd work”, and “work-on-demand via apps”, under which the demand and supply of working activities is matched online or via mobile apps. Whilst these forms of employment present significant differences among themselves, they also share striking similarities. They can provide a good match of job opportunities, allow flexible working schedules and potentially contribute to redefining the boundaries of the firm. However, they can also pave the way to a severe commodification of labour. This paper discusses the implications of this commodification and advocates the recognition of activities in the gig-economy as work, as the risk of labour being hidden under catchphrases such as “gigs”, “tasks”, “rides” etc. is currently extremely high. It shows how the gig-economy is not a separate silo of the economy and how it is part of broader phenomena such as casualization and informalisation of work and the spread of non-standard forms of employment. It then analyses the risks associated to these activities with regard to Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, as they are defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and addresses the issue of misclassification of the employment status of workers in the gig-economy, based on existing service agreements, business practices and litigation in this sector. Current relevant trends are thus examined, such as the emergence of forms of self-organisation of workers. Finally some policy proposals are critically analysed, such as the possibility of creating an intermediate category between “employee” and “independent contractor” to classify workers in the gig-economy, and other tentative proposals are put forward such as advocacy for the full acknowledgment of activities in this sector as work, extension of fundamental labour rights to all workers irrespective of employment status, and recognition of the role of social partners in this respect, whilst avoiding temptations of hastened deregulation. This paper is to be presented at the seminar on Crowd-Sourcing, the Gig Economy, and the Law, hold at the Wharton School – University of Pennsylvania, on 7 November 2015. Contributions presented at the seminar will be published, after review, in a special issue of the Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, in 2016.
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A new form of service outsourcing has emerged, namely the global online job marketplace for freelance contractors. Such platforms are currently the closest proxy to the idea of a global labour market where everyone competes for jobs regardless of location. In this article, we examine how competition manifests itself on one such global online platform, namely oDesk. We present a comparative analysis of the relative wages and the rewarding of skills and expertise of contractors from selected countries and investigate whether, via labour arbitrage, wage convergence takes place between Western and developing countries. We find that wage convergence is noticeable but experience and skills hardly translate into better remuneration. While service outsourcing (or microwork) via global online marketplaces provides new employment opportunities for freelancers around the world, the intense competition and the inherent restrictions of this type of marketplace limit the financial gains for most contractors.
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Critics of online labor markets claim that employer abuses are endemic in these markets. Surveying a sample of workers, I find that, on average, workers perceive online employers to be slightly fairer and more honest than offline employers.
Digital platforms: to regulate or not to regulate? Message to regulators: fix the economics first
  • A Strowel
  • W Vergote
Strowel A, Vergote W (2018) Digital platforms: to regulate or not to regulate? Message to regulators: fix the economics first, then focus on the right regulation.