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Plattformarbeit und soziale Ungleichheit in Deutschland und den USA

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Abstract

The platform economy has been criticized for exacerbating social inequalities. This study draws on these discussions and examines the extent to which social inequalities are being reproduced within platform work. The first central question is that of the precariousness of this form of work and the vulnerability of the platform workers as a group. This is followed by a second question about the role of classical dimensions of inequality of education and gender within the group of platform workers. The study focuses on inequalities related to income, workload, and the subjective perception of platform work. It follows a comparative approach, building on institutionalist analyses developed in labor market and inequality research. The empirical analysis is based on case studies of 15 crowdwork platforms in the United States and Germany and on an online survey of crowdworkers in both countries. While platforms represent a global organizational model, they are embedded in different models of capitalism. The study shows that existing labor market segmentation and social welfare systems determine who works on platforms and to what extent. The weaker the social safety net, the more likely platform work is to be both a curse and a blessing: It offers a much needed and flexible source of income, albeit under extremely precarious conditions. The stronger the social safety net, on the other hand, the greater the market power of workers vis-à-vis the platforms.

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The term “crowdwork” describes a new form of digital work that is organized and regulated by internet-based platforms. This chapter examines how crowdwork platforms ensure their virtual workforce’s commitment and control its performance despite its high mobility, anonymity, and dispersion. The findings are based on a case study analysis of 15 microtask and macrotask platforms, encompassing 32 interviews with representatives of crowdwork platforms, and crowdworkers, as well as an analysis of the platforms’ homepages and community spaces. The chapter shows that performance control on crowd platforms relies on a combination of direct control, reputation systems, and community building, which have until now been studied in isolation or entirely ignored. Moreover, the findings suggest that while all three elements can be found on both microtask and macrotask platforms, their functionality and purpose differ. Overall, the findings highlight that platforms are no neutral intermediaries but organizations that adopt an active role in structuring the digital labor process and in shaping working conditions. Their managerial structures are coded and objectified into seemingly neutral technological infrastructures, whereby the underlying power relations between capital and labor become obscured.
Article
By taking an historical perspective, and by drawing on our own empirical work from the UK in the 1980s and more recently, we argue three main things. First, we need to understand the particular conditions of ‘the gig economy’ as a concentrated form of a more general de-standardisation of employment that has brought multiple forms of insecure work. Second, although there is clamour and excitement about ‘the gig economy’ in fact it shares strong parallels with earlier forms of insecure enterprise. Third, while not uniform nor as yet fully empirically demonstrated, young adults’ encounters with the ‘gig economy’ and other aspects of the contemporary labour market (such as the ‘low-pay, no-pay’ cycle, self-employment, ‘zero-hours contracts’) appear to be typified by a lack of choice and control, and experiences of disempowerment, low pay, degraded work conditions, alienation, anxiety and insecurity. This stands at odds with more celebratory proclamations about ‘the gig economy’.
Article
This article explores the changing nature of twenty-first-century capitalism with an emphasis on illuminating the political coalitions and institutional conditions that support and sustain it. Most of the existing literature attributes the changing nature of the firm to developments in markets and technology. By contrast, this article emphasizes the political forces that have driven the transformation of the twentieth-century consolidated firm through the firm as a “network of contracts” and toward the platform firm. Moreover, situating the United States in a comparative perspective highlights the distinctive ways US political-economic institutions have facilitated that transformation and exacerbated the associated inequalities.
Chapter
Dieser Beitrag skizziert aus vergleichender Perspektive die Grundzüge der Entwicklung des westlichen Wohlfahrtsstaates seit den 1980er Jahren. Er beleuchtet anhand verschiedener Indikatoren die Debatte um Stabilität oder Rückbau sozialpolitischer Leistungen und zeigt aktuelle Entwicklungen sozialstaatlicher Politik auf.
Article
I use the case of the transportation network company Uber as a lens to explore the comparative politics of the platform economy in Europe and the United States. Within the advanced capitalist world, different countries have responded in very different ways to this new service, from welcome embrace and accommodating regulatory adjustments to complete rejection and legal bans. I analyze Uber’s arrival and reception in the United States, Germany, and Sweden, documenting three very different responses to this disruptive new actor. I show that conflicts over Uber centered on different issues in the three countries. These differences were consequential because the specific regulatory “flashpoints”that Uber provoked mobilized different actors, inspired the formation of different coalitions, and shaped the terms on which conflicts over Uber were framed and fought.
Article
In many traditional labor markets, women earn less on average compared to men. However, it is unclear whether this discrepancy persists in the online gig economy, which bears important differences from the traditional labor market (e.g., more flexible work arrangements, shorter-term engagements, reputation systems). In this study, we collected self-determined hourly bill rates from the public profiles of 48,019 workers in the United States (48.8% women) on Upwork, a popular gig work platform. The median female worker set hourly bill rates that were 74% of the median man's hourly bill rates, a gap than cannot be entirely explained by online and offline work experience, education level, and job category. However, in some job categories, we found evidence of a more complex relationship between gender and earnings: women earned more overall than men by working more hours, outpacing the effect of lower hourly bill rates. To better support equality in the rapidly growing gig economy, we encourage continual evaluation of the complex gender dynamics on these platforms and discuss whose responsibility it is to address inequalities.
Research
In dieser Kurzexpertise werden die Positionen erhoben, systematisiert und analysiert, die maßgebliche Akteure auf nationaler, europäischer und internationaler Ebene zum Phänomen der Plattformökonomie artikulieren. Der Fokus liegt auf dem Bereich Crowdworking beziehungsweise Cloud- und Gigworking als plattformvermittelte Arbeit. Dabei werden sowohl die grundlegenden Einschätzungen über die aktuelle Bedeutung und zukünftige Entwicklung des Phänomens, als auch die konkreten Bewertungen der Akteure dargestellt. Der Schwerpunkt der Expertise liegt auf den von den Akteuren formulierten Regulierungsperspektiven. Die von den Akteuren favorisierten Regulierungsvorschläge und -forderungen werden systematisiert und den drei zentralen Diskursen – dem Transformations-, dem Wachstums- sowie dem Sicherheits- und Beteiligungsdiskurs – zugeordnet.
Article
This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle‐income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa, we find that the specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of organisation, in which social media groups play a central role in structuring communication and unions are absent. Previous research is limited to either conventional freelancers or ‘microworkers’ who do relatively low‐skilled tasks via online labour platforms. This study uses 107 interviews and a survey of 658 freelancers who obtain work via a variety of online platforms to highlight that Internet‐based communities play a vital role in their work experiences. Internet‐based communities enable workers to support each other and share information. This, in turn, increases their security and protection. However, these communities are fragmented by nationality, occupation and platform.
Article
Online platforms not only serve to exchange information and goods but increasingly also service work provided by the self-employed. The emergence of crowdsourcing of paid work has created a global market for online labour where services can be fully acquired and provided irrespective of location via platforms such as upwork.com or freelancer.com. Drawing on a content analysis of the websites of 44 globally operating platforms, this study has investigated the discursive construction of this new type of labour market. The findings show that platforms address the online workforce in different ways, for instance, as workers or freelancers. Contrary to their blanket characterisation as an anonymous crowd in previous academic debate, in most cases, online workers are forced to present themselves as talented experts to distinguish themselves from the mass of competitors. The control over online labour that these platforms exercise challenges existing conceptions of professionalism and self-employment.
Book
‘Drawing on current experiences of start-ups, supporting institutions and established firms, the cross-disciplinary team of contributors provides a challenge for academics, practitioners and policymakers seeking to create an environment supportive of both incremental and radical innovation.’ Stephen E. Little, Asia Pacific Technology Network UK ‘This is an interesting and timely text concerning entrepreneurial behaviour in relation to the increasingly important areas of radical and disruptive innovation in the rapidly expanding digital market space.’ Ian Chaston, Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand Taking the themes of entrepreneurship, start-ups, innovation and collaboration, this book seeks to answer the urgent question of how countries and companies can stay competitive in an ever-changing digital environment. The authors determine which entrepreneurial processes will work for whom and under what circumstances, presenting methodological implications for business research, start-ups and policy making. Examining the success of Germany as an innovation powerhouse, and comparing this with the USA, this edited collection provides valuable ideas for improving practice, facilitating start-up activity, and ultimately ensuring a country’s competitive edge.
Conference Paper
We present an analysis of the population dynamics and demographics of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers based on the results of the survey that we conducted over a period of 28 months, with more than 85K responses from 40K unique participants. The demographics survey is ongoing (as of November 2017), and the results are available at http://demographics.mturk-tracker.com: we provide an API for researchers to download the survey data. We use techniques from the field of ecology, in particular, the capture-recapture technique, to understand the size and dynamics of the underlying population. We also demonstrate how to model and account for the inherent selection biases in such surveys. Our results indicate that there are more than 100K workers available in Amazon»s crowdsourcing platform, the participation of the workers in the platform follows a heavy-tailed distribution, and at any given time there are more than 2K active workers. We also show that the half-life of a worker on the platform is around 12-18 months and that the rate of arrival of new workers balances the rate of departures, keeping the overall worker population relatively stable. Finally, we demonstrate how we can estimate the biases of different demographics to participate in the survey tasks, and show how to correct such biases. Our methodology is generic and can be applied to any platform where we are interested in understanding the dynamics and demographics of the underlying user population.
Article
Unter Online-Arbeit sind Formen bezahlter Arbeit zu verstehen, deren Abwicklung vollständig online und entsprechend den Regularien einer Internet-Plattform erfolgt (‚Crowdworking‘). Auf der Grundlage mehrerer aktueller empirischer Studien (einschließlich einer eigenen Online-Befragung selbstständiger ver.di-Mitglieder) werden Ausmaß, Charakter und Auswirkungen von Online-Arbeit in Deutschland abzuschätzen versucht. Es zeigt sich, dass die Gruppe der Online-Arbeitenden ausgesprochen heterogen ist und gleichermaßen Solo-Selbstständige, Angestellte und Nicht-Erwerbstätige umfasst. ‚Crowdwork‘ wird ganz überwiegend als Zuverdienst gesehen und mit verschiedensten Einkommens- sowie Erwerbsarten kombiniert. Die Unzufriedenheit mit den Arbeitsbedingungen ist vergleichsweise hoch, vor allem im Hinblick auf die geringe Bezahlung, unbezahlte Leistungen und den harten Preiskampf. Diese Ergebnisse werfen nicht nur Fragen der Gestaltung von Online-Arbeit über Internet-Plattformen auf, sondern auch nach der gesellschaftlichen Relevanz und der arbeits- sowie sozialpolitischen Regulierung von Einkommens- und Erwerbskombinationen generell.
Book
Exploring the new professional scenes in digital and freelance knowledge, this innovative book provides an account of the subjects and cultures that pertain to knowledge work in the aftermath of the creative class frenzy. Including a broad spectrum of empirical projects, The Reputation Economy documents the rise of freelancing and digital professions and argues about the central role held by reputation within this context, offering a comprehensive interpretation of the digital transformation of knowledge work. The book shows how digital technologies are not simply intermediating productive and organizational processes, allowing new ways for supply and demand to meet, but actually enable the diffusion of cultural conceptions of work and value that promise to become the new standard of the industry.
Article
This article analyses the ways in which creative crowdwork is managed and controlled within social and economic power relations. It presents findings from a research project on creative crowdworkers focussing on aspects of management and control. The research shows that the design of the platforms and the strategies of their operating companies clearly structure the triangular relationship between platform, clients and workers. In addition to bureaucratic rules and surveillance exercised by the platform, rating opportunities and other control features utilised by clients strongly impact on crowdworkers’ time use, income and creativity and thus on their working and living conditions.
Chapter
Marx posited that labour is ‘disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production’ (1906: 836–37). The regimented nature of factory work and life in an industrial community provided the material basis for collective action and for the shared identity required to support it. But is this still true of the mechanisms of twenty-first century informational capitalism? Castells notes that in informational capitalism, ‘[t]he work process is globally integrated, but labour tends to be locally fragmented’ (Castells 2000: 18). The exploitation of global wage, skill, and regulatory differentials means that workers are often physically, temporally, and administratively detached and desynchronised from each other (Ashford et al. 2007). In the extreme case, coordination of workers’ efforts is achieved algorithmically, that is, by automated data and rule based decision making (O’Reilly 2013), leaving no opportunity for human-to-human communication. Under such dispersal and disconnection, it would seem difficult for a common identity, let alone effective organisation, to arise among workers.
Article
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 overlooked. Forms of work in the “gig-economy” include “crowd work”, and “work-on-demand via apps”, under which the demand and supply of working activities is matched online or via mobile apps. These forms of work can provide a good match of job opportunities and allow flexible working schedules. However, they can also pave the way to a severe commodification of work. This paper discusses the implications of this commodification and advocates the full recognition of activities in the gig-economy as “work”. It shows how the gig-economy is not a separate silo of the economy and that is part of broader phenomena such as casualization and informalisation of work and the spread of non-standard forms of employment. It then addresses the issue of misclassification of the employment status of workers in the gig-economy. 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 of worker between “employee” and “independent contractor” to classify work in the gig-economy, and other tentative proposals are put forward such 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.