The Gig Economy

A Critical Introduction

Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509536375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Politica economica

All of a sudden, everybody's talking about the gig economy. From taxi drivers to pizza deliverers to the unemployed, we are all aware of the huge changes that it is driving in our lives as workers, consumers and citizens.

This is the first comprehensive overview of this highly topical subject. Drawing upon years of research, stories from gig workers, and a review of the key trends and debates, Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham shed light on how the gig economy came to be, how it works and what it's like to work in it. They show that, although it has facilitated innovative new services and created jobs for millions, it is not without cost. It allows businesses and governments to generate value while passing significant risk and responsibility onto the workers that make it possible. This is not, however, an argument for turning back the clock. Instead, the authors outline four strategies that can produce a fairer platform economy that works for everyone.

Woodcock and Graham's critical introduction will be essential reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in the massive shifts that characterize our modern digital economy.

1
Where did the gig economy come from?

In this chapter, we critically examine how the gig economy came into being. We begin by considering earlier forms of work that were marked by on-demand labour and precarious conditions, and explore how these dynamics have shifted and transformed into what is commonly referred to today as ‘gig work’. In other words, contingent jobs that happen through, via and on digital platforms.

In the early stages, new kinds of gigs held ambiguous possibilities. As Sarah Kessler (2018: x) recounts in a story from a startup founder, the gig economy had a promise that ‘we could work for our neighbours, connect with as many projects as we needed to get by, and fit those gigs between band rehearsals, gardening, and other passion promises.’ At this point, some commentators began talking about the ‘sharing economy’ (Sundararajan, 2017), a term that sounds very optimistic in light of the evidence that followed.

Although there have been changes in the gig economy, it still involves work. At its core, paid work involves a relationship in which one person sells their time to another. This entails transferring the ownership of labour power (the capacity to work) from the worker to the owner of capital (the owner of the things needed to produce work). As Marx (1976: 272) noted, this relationship requires workers who ‘are free in a double sense’. They are free to choose who to work for, but at the same time (lacking capital) also ‘free’ from any other way of making a living other than by selling their labour power. This means that the worker is put at a disadvantage when selling their time. They rely on work to meet their needs, and are under constant pressure to both find and keep work. From this simple starting point of one person buying the time of another, work has developed into vastly more complex forms. Relationships of work now spread across the world, bound in complex chains of supply and demand, and bringing people together in new and different ways. However, despite the organizational complexities of modern work, the fundamental relationship between the person who buys time and the person who sells it remains a core concern.

Work has always been a changing phenomenon, both evolving over time and changing as it is fought over. The transformation of work has become a popular topic of research, debate and discussion. It is, after all, the activity that most of us will spend the majority of our time doing. The gig economy, particularly mediated through new digital platforms, is at the forefront of changes in work today. However, before focusing on the growth of the gig economy and its implications, we must consider how it is connected to the kinds of work that came before. The recent changes in work relationships are often discussed as a break from the so-called ‘standard employment relationship’. This term refers to the kinds of work found in the Global North after the Second World War. For workers, this meant the expectation of a ‘stable, socially protected, dependent, full-time job … the basic conditions of which (working time, pay, social transfers) are regulated to a minimum level by collective agreement or by labour and/or social security law’ (Bosch, 2004: 618–19). These kinds of work involved a ‘link’ between the work relationship (i.e. between the buyers and sellers of time) and the ‘wider risk-sharing role of the welfare or social state’, which came to prominence by the middle of the twentieth century (Fudge, 2017: 379). This meant that the risks of work were increasingly mitigated through social agreements, particularly with social security nets that could cushion workers from some negative outcomes, such as lack of work, poor working conditions or illness and accidents. Of course, referring to ‘the standard employment relationship’ carries with it the implication that this is somehow the ‘normal’ state of affairs. It then follows that precarious work should be understood as a break from this norm, as an attack that newly undermines long-standing conditions and benefits.

Precarious work, however, has a much longer history than the standard employment relationship. Work that is precarious (unstable or uncertain) is ‘not necessarily new or novel to the current era; it has existed since the launch of paid employment as a primary source of sustenance’ (Kalleberg, 2009: 2). As Bent (2017: 3) has argued, when looking at work over time and across the world, ‘the relative stability and security of employment in the West post-WWII, then, was an anomaly.’ And even within this context, it was reserved primarily for white men in the Global North. The standard employment relationship simply was not extended to many women and minorities, and certainly was not something seen extensively outside of a few industrialized economies. The standard employment relationship is therefore a bit of a misnomer, with unstable and precarious forms being both older and more widespread. The relationships of work are determined by the relative power of workers (selling their time) and capital (buying that time), along with the societal contexts in which work is carried out. It is therefore no surprise that what we think of as work is continuously evolving over time and space.

An important historical example of this kind of precarity is the dock work that took place in the East End of London, following the rapid growth of shipping docks in the nineteenth century that brought commodities from the colonies into the heart of imperial Britain. The raw cotton, sugar and tea could not get themselves out of the holds of the ships and into the warehouses, so large numbers of workers were needed. However, this did not mean employing people to work on the docks. It was estimated that ‘about two-thirds of dock labour was casual’, and as Weightman and Humphries (2007: 41) note, ‘there was no guarantee of work from one week to the next and the vast majority of labourers were hired or fired on a day-to-day basis.’ The arrival and departure of ships meant that dock work was not constant, with peaks in demand that needed to be met quickly. This was due to the strict timetables ships had to follow as they were caught up in a wider network of trade. Even before platforms, workers’ schedules were shaped by global economic forces. Each day, prospective workers from London’s deprived East End would queue up outside the gates of the docks, waiting to see if they would be ‘called on’ by a foreman. As Ben Tillett (1910: 8), a dock worker who later became a union organizer, explained:

We are driven into a shed, iron-barred from end to end, outside of which a foreman or contractor walks up and down with the air of a dealer in a cattle market, picking and choosing from a crowd of men, who, in their eagerness to obtain employment, trample each other under foot, and where like beasts they fight for the chances of a day’s work.

This is obviously a difficult environment for workers, who will be selling their time at a huge disadvantage. However, workers did not always passively accept this way of organizing work. In fact, it ‘generated much anger among the dockers’ (Tillett, 1910: 8). In the 1880s, other groups of workers were beginning to organize, most notably the ‘Matchwomen’ and their strike at the Bryant and May match factory in the East End of London (Raw, 2009). The strike was the result of low pay, long hours, fines, as well as severe health and safety problems related to the use of white phosphorous in the production process. After Annie Besant covered the conditions of the factory in a newspaper, the management of the factory tried to get the workers to sign a letter saying the claims were not true. After they refused, the managers tried to dismiss one of the workers. This triggered a strike of 1,400 women and girls. They elected their own committee to run the strike and successfully beat Bryant and May. As a result, they formed the largest female trade union. Louise Raw (2009: 224) argues that they were ‘the mothers of the modern trade union movement’.

The success of the Matchwomen was then followed by the South London Gas Workers strike in 1889. Then, in August of 1889, 100,000 dock workers went on strike over a reduction in ‘plus’ money – a bonus paid for unloading a ship quickly. The workers put forward a series of demands: wage increases, overtime pay, removing the ‘plus’ system, guarantees of minimum work and union recognition. The next month they won their strike demands. Their victory established strong, recognized trade unions on the dock, an important moment in the ‘new unionism’ movement in the UK (Duffy, 1961). Across different sectors, union membership rose from 750,000 members in 1888 to over 2 million by 1899. While the strikes did not end the precarious work on the docks, they proved that these workers could organize. This long period of struggle continued until the late 1960s, by which time ‘virtually all dockers [were] on permanent terms’ (Mankelow, 2017: 383). The London docks can therefore be seen as the ‘ground on which the great battle against the most degrading forms of casualization was fought’ (Mankelow, 2017: 384), and indeed – at least until the massive changes brought about by modernization and containerization in the late 1970s – dockers were able to win concessions from employers.

A similar story can be told of factory work. The development of factories entailed the movement of workers from the countryside to the city, with work concentrated within large workplaces like factories. Within the factory walls, ‘employers could directly control when and how workers worked, adding new layers of insecurity to employment’ (Bent, 2017: 4). In the early twentieth century in the US, for example, seasonal and peak demand pressures shaped the work relationship in many economic sectors. In the glass and textiles industries, workers would be employed for only three-quarters of the year to match demand, and broadly speaking, the numbers of jobs in industrial work could fluctuate by around 14 per cent, meaning many people risking loss of their employment. In the car industry, this fluctuation could be as high as 45 per cent (Jacoby, 2004: 16–17). However, by the end of the Second World War, in both the US and the Global North more broadly, these industrial jobs were highly unionized and workers had won much more stable employment conditions: protecting individual workers from down cycles, and placing more of the risk associated with doing business onto the firm rather than the individual worker.

There is a risk in seeing this development as a linear process – that is, one in which particular stages follow each other inevitably to a particular end. The thinking might go: first, industrialization introduces new forms of work, in which workers are made to accept unfair conditions. Next, industrial workers successfully organize and precarious conditions are overcome through the collective power of workers. However, because contemporary worker power is premised on the ‘standard employment relationship’ brought about by industrialization, all that workers have collectively achieved is threatened by waves of de-industrialization.

Although there are examples of the process developing like this, in many parts of the world the experience of industrialization was very different. For example, Bent (2017: 12) argues that large-scale industries were established in both Egypt and India under British imperial rule. This industrialization was deeply shaped by the exploitative relationships of the British Empire. Despite worker resistance, the industrialization that took place ‘was highly disruptive to existing social and economic systems … these changes resulted in the creation of working arrangements that were unstable, insecure, and contingent – in a word, precarious’ (Bent, 2017: 14). However, as Webster et al. (2008) have argued, in low- and middle-income countries, the majority of workers were excluded from stable employment, unlike high-income countries. While there was a growth in more stable employment relations in low- and middle-income countries, the benefits of the standard employment contractor have never been widely felt by workers. Therefore, for most people, most of the time, work has been a precarious relationship. Precarity is the global norm.

The notion of precarious work is important for understanding the gig economy. A starting definition for precarious work can be found with the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2011: 5), which defines it thus:

In the most general sense, precarious work is a means for employers to shift risks and responsibilities on to workers. It is work performed in the formal and informal economy and is characterized by variable levels and degrees of objective (legal status) and subjective (feeling) characteristics of uncertainty and insecurity. Although a precarious job can have many faces, it is usually defined by uncertainty as to the duration of employment, multiple possible employers or a disguised or ambiguous employment relationship, a lack of access to social protection and benefits usually associated with employment, low pay, and substantial legal and practical obstacles to joining a trade union and bargaining collectively.

The problem, as Angela Mitropoulos (2005: 12) has noted, is that the term ‘“precariousness” is both unwieldy and indeterminate. If it is possible to say anything for certain about precariousness, it is that it teeters.’ This is a useful starting point in ‘emphasizing some of the tensions that shadow much of the discussion about precarious labour’ (Mitropoulos, 2005: 12).

It is easy to observe the growth of this kind of precarious work, including temping, outsourcing, agency work and the gig economy. However, growth in the gig economy is not only driven by the private sector. In the UK, the largest employer of precarious workers is the state. There has been a huge growth of temporary workers across education, health and public administration, affecting both professionals and the lowest paid (McDowell et al., 2009: 9). The debate about precarious work is not just about whether or not there are workers with insecure contracts and conditions. However, the arguments about precarity really begin when the implications are considered. For Ulrich Beck (1992: 144), precarious work involved a break away from the system of either ‘lifelong full-time work’ or unemployment towards a ‘risk-fraught system of flexible, pluralized, decentralized underemployment, which, however, will possibly no longer raise the problem of unemployment in the sense of being completely without a paid job’. In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu (1998: 95) argues that ‘précarité’ is a ‘new mode of domination in public life … based on the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity aimed at forcing workers into submission, into the acceptance of exploitation’. Guy Standing (2011) goes even further, claiming that this has led to the formation o...