Abstract
In the chapter by Howcroft, Dundon and Inversi, the nature of precarious work via digital platforms is examined from multiple sources of research. Platform work is variously defined and encompasses crowdwork, on-demand jobs, gig-economy tasks and on-call work. The spatial dynamic arising from platform technology is both global and local. Platforms connect individual workers, recruiting agents and end-users with increasing ease. This activity can occur at the global level for online work tasks, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Upwork. Equally, much activity is locally based on examples including food delivery or transportation services, purchased and ordered via a digital device or mobile application. As platform work opens up new and alternative streams of income generation, some workers rely on platforms for their primary earnings while others supplement this work with additional jobs. In terms of job quality and work equality, there are a number of concerns regarding the role, scope and functions of platforms as intermediary agents. These concerns are amplified in the context of governance and regulation, where power is clearly skewed to serve the interests of the platform. Therefore, in this chapter we contest the claim that platform workers constitute a new entrepreneurial class that has the freedom and flexibility to choose tasks. They are dependent on the power of platforms as intermediary agents, completing work activities that are increasingly precarious and fragmented.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Protectacoat Firthglow Ltd. versus Szilagyi (2009) EWCA Civ 98 CA.
- 2.
Autoclenz Ltd. versus Belcher & Ors (2011) UKSC 41.
- 3.
Case Aslam versus Uber BV (2017) IRLR 4 (28 October 2016) then confirmed by the Employment Appeal Tribunal judgment of Judge Eady on 10 November 2017 Uber B.V. and Others versus Mr Y Aslam and Others (2017) UKEAT/0056/17/DA.
- 4.
Dewhurst versus Citysprint UK Ltd. (2017) ET/220512/2016.
References
Adams, A., & Berg, J. (2017). When home affects pay: An analysis of the gender pay gap among crowdworkers (October 6, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3048711 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3048711.
Aloisi, A. (2016). Commoditized workers: Case study research on labor law issues arising from a set of on-demand/gig economy platforms. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, 37, 635–690.
Barzilay, A. R., & Ben-David, A. (2017). Platform inequality: Gender in the gig-economy. Seton Hall Law Review, 47, 393–431.
Batt, R. L., & Appelbaum, E. (2013). The impact of financialization on management and employment outcomes. Upjohn Institute working paper, no. 13-191.
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets. Conneticut: New Yale University Press.
Berg, J. (2016). Income security in the on-demand economy: Findings and policy lessons from a survey of crowdworkers. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, 37(3), 1–26.
Bergvall-Kåreborn, B., & Howcroft, D. (2014). Amazon mechanical Turk and the commodification of labour. New Technology, Work and Employment, 29(3), 213–223.
BLS. (2017). Contingent and alternative employment arrangements—May 2017. Released June 7, 2018. US Department of Labour, Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/conemp.htm.
Bogg, A. (2012). Sham self-employment in the Supreme Court. Industrial Law Journal, 3, 328–345.
Botsman, R. (2015). The changing rules of trust in the digital age. Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2015/10/the-changing-rules-of-trust-in-the-digital-age.
Brynjolfson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The second machine age: Work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. New York: Norton 7 Company publishing.
Butler, S. (2017a). Deliveroo accused of ‘creating vocabulary’ to avoid calling couriers employees. The Guardian, April 5. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/apr/05/deliveroo-couriers-employees-managers.
Butler, S. (2017b). Deliveroo wins right not to give riders minimum wage or holiday pay. The Guardian, November 14. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/14/deliveroo-couriers-minimum-wage-holiday-pay.
Calo, R., & Rosenblat, A. (2017). The taking economy: Uber, information, and power. Columbia Law Review, 117. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2929643.
Cherry, M. A. (2016). Beyond misclassification: The digital transformation of work. Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, (February 18). Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2734288.
Cockburn, C. (1985). Caught in the wheels: The high cost of being a female cog in the male machinery of engineering. In D. Mackenzie & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The social shaping of technology (pp. 55–66). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Cohen, P., Hahn, R., Hall, J., Levitt, S., & Metcalfe, R. (2016). Using big data to estimate consumer surplus: The case of Uber (Technical report). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cushen, J., & Thompson, P. (2016). Financialization and value: Why labour and the labour process still matter. Work, Employment and Society, 30(2), 352–365.
Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. (2018). Good work: A response to the Taylor review of modern working practices, February 7, 2018. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-response-to-the-taylor-review-of-modern-working-practices.
de Stefano, V. (2016). The rise of the ‘just-in-time workforce’: On-demand work, crowdwork and labour protection in the ‘gig-economy’. In Conditions of Work and Employment Series: No 71. Geneva: ILO.
Dundon, T., & Howcroft, D. (2018). Automation, robots and the ‘end of work’ myth. The Conversation, January 16. http://theconversation.com/automation-robots-and-the-end-of-work-myth-89619.
Dundon, T., & Inversi, C. (2017). Worse than zero hours contracts: Work, pay and (in)equalities in the gig-economy. Policy@Manchester, July 5. http://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/author/tony-dundon/.
Dundon, T., Martinez Lucio, M., Howcroft, D., Hughes, E., Keizer, A., & Walden, R. (2017, November). Power dynamics in work and employment relationships: The capacity for employee influence (CIPD thematic report). London: CIPD. https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work/job-quality-value-creation/power-employee-influence.
Ekbia, H., & Nardi, B. (2014). Heteromation and its (dis)contents: The invisible division of labor between humans and machines. First Monday, 19(6), 1–15.
Felstiner, A. (2011). Working the crowd: Employment and labor law in the crowdsourcing industry. Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, 32, 143–203.
Forde, C., Stuart, M., Joyce, S., Oliver, L., Valizade, D., Alberti, G., et al. (2017). The social protection of workers in the platform economy. Report for EU Employment and Social Affairs Department (IP/A/EMPL/2016-11: PE 614.184). http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2017/614184/IPOL_STU(2017)614184_EN.pdf.
Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. (2017). The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114, 254–280.
Ge, Y., Knittel, C. R., MacKenzie, D., & Zoepf, S. (2016). Racial and gender discrimination in transportation network companies. NBER working paper 22776.
Gillespie, T. (2014). The relevance of algorithms. In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski & K. Foot (Eds.), Media technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goldman, E. (2011). Regulating reputation. In H. Masum & M. Tovey (Eds.), The reputation society: How online opinions are reshaping the offline world (pp. 51–62). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., Wood, A., Barnard, H., Hjorth, I., & Simon, D. P. (2017). The risks and rewards of online gig work at the global margins. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/publications/gigwork.pdf.
Grimshaw, D., Johnson, M., Rubery, J., & Keizer, A. (2017). Reducing precarious work protective gaps and the role of social dialogue in Europe. Report for European Commission (VP/2014/004), EWERC, University of Manchester (November). http://www.research.mbs.ac.uk/ewerc/Portals/0/Documents/Comparative-Report-Reducing-Precarious-Work-v2.pdf.
Guzman, D. M. (2018). Uber wins fair work commission case over drivers’ employment rights. The Age, January 5. http://www.afr.com/news/policy/industrial-relations/uber-wins-fair-work-commission-case-over-drivers-employment-rights-20180105-h0duqq.
Healy, J., Nicholson, D., & Pekarek, A. (2017). Should we take the gig economy seriously? Labour and Industry, 27(3), 232–248.
Howcroft, D., & Bergvall-Kåreborn, B. (2018). A typology of crowdwork platforms. Work, Employment and Society, 29(6), 969–988.
Howcroft, D., & Rubery, J. (2018). Gender equality prospects and the fourth industrial revolution. In M. Neufeind, J. O’Rielly, & F. Ranft (Eds.), Work in the digital age: Challenges for the fourth industrial revolution. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Howe, J. (2008). Crowdsourcing—How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. New York: Crown Publishing Group.
Huws, U., & Joyce, S. (2016a). Crowd working survey: Size of the UK’s ‘Gig Economy’ revealed for the first time, FEPS. Available at: http://www.feps-europe.eu/assets/a82bcd12-fb97-43a6-9346-24242695a183/crowd-working-surveypdf.pdf.
Huws, U., & Joyce, S. (2016b). Crowd working survey: Size of Sweden’s ‘Gig Economy’ revealed for the first time, FEPS. Available at: http://www.feps-europe.eu/assets/3f853cec-1358-4fb4-9552-274b55e05ecf/crowd-working-survey-swedenpdf.pdf.
Huws, U., & Joyce, S. (2016c). Crowd working survey: New estimate of the size of Dutch ‘Gig Economy’, FEPS. Available at: http://www.feps-europe.eu/assets/778d57d9-4e48-45f0-b8f8-189da359dc2b/crowd-working-survey-netherlands-finalpdf.pdf.
Huws, U., Spencer, N. H., Sverre Syrdal, D., & Holts, K. (2018). Working in the gig economy: Insights from Europe. In M. Neufeind, J. O’Rielly, & F. Ranft (Eds.), Work in the digital age: Challenges for the fourth industrial revolution. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Hyman, R. (1987). Strategy or structure? Capital, labour and control. Work, Employment and Society, 1(1), 25–55.
ILO. (2016). Non-standard employment around the world: Understanding challenges, shaping prospects. Geneva: International Labour Organization (ILO).
Kaine, S. (2015). How a US ruling on Uber drivers could disrupt the disrupters. The Conversation, June 22. http://theconversation.com/how-a-us-ruling-on-uber-drivers-could-disrupt-the-disrupters-43459.
Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic possibilities for our grandchildren. In Essays in persuasion (pp. 321–332). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-59072-8_25).
Koslowski, N. (2016). Is France’s bid to ban out-of-hours work email fanciful? The Conversation, June 2. https://theconversation.com/is-frances-bid-to-ban-out-of-hours-work-email-fanciful-59416.
Lee, M. K., Kusbit, D., Metsky, E., & Dabbish, L. (2015). Working with machines: The impact of algorithmic and data-driven management on human workers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seoul. Retrieved from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mklee/materials/Publication/2015-CHI_algorithmic_management.pdf.
Lehdonvirta, V. (2016). Algorithms that divide and unite: Delocalisation, identity and collective action in microwork. In J. Flecker (Ed.), Space, place and global digital work (pp. 53–80). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Libert, B., Beck, M., & Wind, J. (2016). The network imperative: How to survive and grow in the age of digital business models. Harvard Business Review Press.
Mazzucato, M. (2018). The value of everything: Making and taking in the global economy. London: Allen Lane.
McCann, L. (2014). Disconnected amid the networks and chains: Employee detachment from company and union after offshoring. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 52(2), 237–260.
McKelvey, C. (2014). Marx on automated industry. View from the South, posted 1/8/2014, Global Learning, Cuba. http://www.globallearning-cuba.com/blog-umlthe-view-from-the-southuml/marx-on-automated-industry.
O’Sullivan, M., Turner, T., McMahon, J., Ryan, L., Lavelle, J., Murphy, C., et al. (2015). A study on the prevalence of zero hours contracts among Irish employers and their impact on employees. University of Limerick. https://www.labour.ie/download/pdf/studyontheprevalenceofzerohourscontracts.pdf.
Pollman, E., & Barry, J. (2017). Regulatory entrepreneurship. 90 S. California Law Review 383. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2741987.
Raval, N., & Dourish, P. (2016). Standing out from the crowd: Emotional labor, body labor, and temporal labor in ridesharing. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
Rosenblat, A., & Stark, L. (2016). Algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: A case study of Uber’s drivers. International Journal of Communication, 10, 3758–3784.
Rubery, J. (2015). Change at work: Feminization, flexibilisation, fragmentation and financialisation. Employees Relations, 37(6), 633–644.
Rueda, D. (2007). Social democracy inside out: Partisanship and labor market policy in industrialized democracies. Oxford: OUP.
Scholz, T. (2017). Uberworked and underpaid: How workers are disrupting the digital economy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. Penguin Press.
Slee, T. (2015). What’s yours is mine: Against the sharing economy. New York: OR Books.
Spencer, D. (2018). Fear and hope in an age of mass automation: Debating the future of work. New Technology, Work and Employment, 33(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12105.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. London: Polity Press.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury.
Statista. (2017). Number of available apps in the Apple app store from July 2008 to January 2017. Available at: http://www.statista.com/statistics/263795/number-of-apps-in-the-apple-app-store.
Stone, K. V., & Arthur, H. (2013). Rethinking workplace regulation: Beyond the standard contract of employment. New York: Russell Sage.
Sundararajan, A. (2016). The sharing economy: The end of employment and the rise of crowd-based capitalism. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Taylor, P. (2015). Labour and the changing landscapes of the call centre. In K. Newsome, P. Taylor, J. Bair, & A. Rainnie (Eds.), Putting labour in its place: Labour process analysis and global value chains (pp. 266–286). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices. (2017). Available at: https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/good-work-taylor-review-into-modern-working-practices.pdf.
Wajcman, J. (2006). New connections: Social studies of science and technology and studies of work. Work, Employment and Society, 20(4), 773–786.
Weatherby, L. (2018). Delete your account: On the theory of platform capitalism. In: Los Angeles review of books, April 24. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-on-the-theory-of-platform-capitalism/#!.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Howcroft, D., Dundon, T., Inversi, C. (2019). Fragmented Demands: Platform and Gig-Working in the UK. In: O’Sullivan, M., et al. Zero Hours and On-call Work in Anglo-Saxon Countries. Work, Organization, and Employment. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6613-0_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6613-0_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-6612-3
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-6613-0
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)