Cover: The Gig Economy by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham

The Gig Economy

A Critical Introduction

Jamie Woodcock

Mark Graham













polity

Acknowledgements

We would first like to thank George Owers for commissioning and then supporting the book throughout the whole process, as well as Julia Davies and the rest of the team at Polity. We would also like to thank our three anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback. We are very grateful to Adam Badger who worked with us to source background material for the book and provided many insights and suggestions along the way. Adam is a wonderful colleague to work with on this sort of project. Thanks as well to David Sutcliffe for his extensive editorial support and always sharp suggestions, and to Ian Tuttle for his careful copyediting.

Giorgio Marani patiently worked with us on many drafts to get figure 1 just right, and we appreciate his skill and attention to detail in the final product. The fantastic illustrations in the final chapter were made by John Philip Sage. Thank you for visualizing the futures we hope to travel towards.

We owe an important thanks to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), as well as the ESRC (ES/S00081X/1) for supporting our research in this area. We would like to acknowledge also the Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2016-155), the European Research Council (ERC-2013-StG335716-GeoNet), and The Alan Turing Institute (EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1) for their ongoing support.

The book has drawn on previous and ongoing research projects at the Oxford Internet Institute. We are particularly thankful to the Fairwork team, including Sandy Fredman, Paul Mungai, Richard Heeks, Darcy du Toit, Jean-Paul van Belle and Abigail Osiki on the South African project; Balaji Parthasarathy, Mounika Neerukonda and Pradyumna Taduri in India; Sai Englert, Adam Badger and Fabian Ferrari in the UK; as well as Noopur Raval, Srujana Katta, Alison Gillwald, Anri van der Spuy, Trebor Scholz, Niels van Doorn, Anna Thomas and Janine Berg – many of whom also discussed the ideas and offered feedback on the manuscript. We also owe a debt of gratitude to our brilliant colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute who apply a critical lens to digital work and the gig economy. We especially wish to thank Amir Anwar and Alex Wood for the many collaborations and conversations that have shaped our thinking on this topic. But we also acknowledge the rest of our research cluster for collectively building a research environment so conducive to critical, innovative and engaged research into the digital economy. Thank you to Sanna Ojanperä, Michel Wahome, Sai Englert, Adam Badger, Martin Dittus, Joe Shaw, Margie Cheesman, Marie-Therese Png, Fabian Braesemann, Chris Foster, Stefano de Sabbata and Ralph Straumann.

In addition, we would like to thank Phil Jennings, Abigail Hunt, Sanna Ojanperä, Nick Srnicek, Alessandro Gandini, Callum Cant, Wendy Liu, Robert Ovetz, Darcy du Toit, Sandy Fredman, Marc Thompson and Jason Moyer-Lee for taking the time to read an earlier draft of this book and for offering their incredibly valuable insights and feedback on the manuscript. Any faults or omissions are of course only our own. We are grateful to the role played by Antonio Casilli and ENDL in building a community of scholars focused on digital labour: a community that provided a fertile group for discussions that shaped this book. We would also both like to acknowledge Six Silberman and Christina Colclough for their support and friendship over the last few years. It has inspired and shaped much of the work we do.

Jamie would like to thank Lydia for her continuing and invaluable support, both in general and with more book writing projects. He would also like to thank the editors of Notes from Below who offered feedback as well as ongoing theoretical and practical inspiration. Callum Cant’s Riding for Deliveroo (which is due to be published at the same time as this book) has been an important influence on making sense of the gig economy from the perspective of workers. Mark would like to thank his family. Jean Graham for raising a family whilst working in the gig economy. Thanks for your endless support to all of us despite all the challenges you have encountered as a precarious worker. And thanks to Kat: for always being a steady source of wisdom, advice and good humour – no matter how difficult a day of work has become.

Finally, we would like to thank all of the workers we have spoken to and whose voices we have tried to feature within the book. Ultimately, this is a book about hope for fairer futures of work. As such, we dedicate it to the workers whose stories are not already written.

Introduction

Everybody is talking about the gig economy. From newscasters to taxi drivers to pizza deliverers to the unemployed, we are all aware of the changes to our jobs, our professions, our economies and our everyday lives wrought by the gig economy. There are now an estimated 1.1 million people in the UK working in the gig economy, delivering food, driving taxis and offering other services – this is as many people as work for the National Health Service (Balaram et al., 2017). Eleven per cent of workers in the UK have earned income from working on digital labour platforms (Huws and Joyce, 2016), while 8 per cent of Americans worked on a ‘gig’ platform in 2016, rising to 16 per cent for the 18–29 age bracket (Smith, 2016). An increasingly common feature of the gig economy is the use of digital labour platforms – tools that allow employers to access a pool of on-demand workers. It is predicted that by 2025, one-third of all labour transactions will be mediated by digital platforms (Standing, 2016). Around the world, the number of people who have found work via platforms is estimated to be over 70 million (Heeks, 2017). Even more headline-grabbing are the numbers released in a 2015 study by McKinsey:

Up to 540 million people could benefit from online talent platforms by 2025. As many as 230 million could find new jobs more quickly, reducing the duration of unemployment, while 200 million who are inactive or employed part time could gain additional hours through freelance platforms. As many as 60 million people could find work that more closely suits their skills or preferences, while an additional 50 million could shift from informal to formal employment. (Manyika et al., 2015)

We have written this book as a critical introduction for those who want to find out more about how work is changing today. Throughout the book we draw on examples from our own research, stories from workers themselves, and the key debates in the field. Work is not just an interesting concept or debating point, but also something that most of us have to do. The conditions under which we find and undertake work can therefore tell us much about society around us – including issues of power, technology and who benefits in the economy. We wrote this book as engaged researchers, not only to document the rise of the gig economy, but also to critically explore how it is being changed right now by both workers and platforms, as well as how it could be transformed in future.

The focus of this book is on the precarious and fractured forms of work that have become known as ‘gigs’ (that is casual, piecemeal work) within the so-called ‘gig economy’. These include things like delivery, taxis and domestic work. We also focus specifically on platform work, in which gigs are mediated digitally via platforms like Uber and Deliveroo. While ‘gigs’ have always existed across many sectors of the economy, the gig economy enabled by digital platforms is growing rapidly, and increasingly replacing non-platform gig work. By focusing on the platform, we can begin to understand how other kinds of precarious work are being reshaped, but also how this has already begun to affect the rest of the economy. In other words, we are in an important historical moment: one in which we are witnessing an unprecedented normalization of the platform-based labour model. It is therefore crucial to not just describe it, but also to shape it so that it can become more just and fair.

What do we mean by the gig economy?

The ‘gig’ in the term ‘gig economy’ refers back to the short-term arrangements typical of a musical event. An aspiring musician might celebrate getting a gig, or tell a friend that they have got a gig in the back room of a pub or other venue. This is of course no guarantee that they will get to perform regularly. There might be the chance of a repeat performance if they play particularly well, or are particularly popular – or it may just be a one-off. They might get paid – either a fixed fee, a share of the ticket price, or payment in kind (some free drinks perhaps). Their expenses might get covered. But also, they might not.

There are clearly some parallels here with the work we have already discussed. The tasks that underpin the gig economy are also typically short, temporary, precarious and unpredictable, and gaining access to more of them depends on good performance and reputation. However, work in the gig economy, as we will show, is very different to musical gigs. With much gig work, there is little possibility of career advancement – particularly if you are stuck doing endless tasks rather than ‘a job’. What the term ‘gig economy’ captures is an economic transformation in which work in many sectors is becoming temporary, unstable and patchworked. It entails workers spending less time at one job, a risk of time spent without income, workers undertaking more jobs (possibly at the same time), and unpaid time spent searching for tasks or gigs.

In this book, we use the term ‘gig economy’ to refer to labour markets that are characterized by independent contracting that happens through, via, and on digital platforms. The kind of work that is offered is contingent: casual and non-permanent work. It may have variable hours and little job security, involve payment on a piece-work basis, and lack any options for career development. This relationship is sometimes termed ‘independent contracting’, ‘freelancing’ or ‘temporary work’ (‘temp’ for short). While the term has traditionally been used to refer to a broader range of activities that happen in both digitally mediated and non-mediated ways (such as bike messengers and cab drivers), we focus in this book on digital platforms because of the scale they involve. The platform is the digital base upon which the gig firm is built. It provides ‘tools to bring together the supply of, and demand for, labour’ (Graham and Woodcock, 2018: 242), including the app, digital infrastructure and algorithms for managing the work. As Nick Srnicek (2017: 48) has argued:

Platforms, in sum, are a new type of firm; they are characterized by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-subsidization to draw in different user groups, and by having designed a core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities.

Platforms have become central to our social activities. They bring together users, capture and monetize data, as well as needing to scale to be effective. Indeed, they are now starting to mediate just about every imaginable economic activity, and they tend to do so through gig economy models. Many digital platforms have a low entry requirement and deliberately recruit as many workers as possible, often to create an oversupply of labour power, and therefore guarantee a steady supply of workers on demand to those who need them. In a world where people are talking about ‘Uber’ as a verb: ‘the Uber for dog walking’, ‘the Uber for doctors’, and even ‘the Uber for drugs’, it is important to understand both the histories and futures of this emerging – and increasingly normalized – model of work. The gig economy naturally has immediate effects on gig workers, but as it develops it will affect work more broadly in profound ways.

The rise of the ‘gig economy’ has become symbolic of the way that work is changing. The term refers to the increase in short-term contracts rather than permanent or stable jobs. It has been touted by many as offering much greater flexibility for workers, employers and customers, rather than the stifling nature of some traditional employment contracts. Employers can choose when and how they want to hire workers. And clients and customers can reap the benefits of this flexibility: getting food delivered quickly, hiring a web developer and ordering a taxi on demand has never been easier. Workers can supposedly choose what to do, how, when, where and for whom. Many are able to find jobs and income previously hard to obtain.

The gig economy, however, also has a dark side. Emerging evidence is pointing towards a range of negative outcomes for workers: low pay, precarity, stressful and dangerous working conditions, one-sided contracts and a lack of employment protection (Wood et al., 2019b). This can result in ‘a raw deal’ for workers, which in the US context can also be seen as an attempt to ‘replace the New Deal’ (Hill, 2017: 4). Some platforms have replaced previous kinds of work – for example, minicabs being replaced by Uber – whereas others are creating new kinds of jobs – the training of machine learning systems by image tagging and data entry, for instance. In all cases, existing working practices are being transformed. The so-called ‘standard employment relationship’ is being undermined through fragmented work and increased casualization. Activities that were previously considered to be a formal or standard job can be mediated through platforms to try and bypass rules, standards and traditions that have protected working standards. One example of this is the new platform being proposed for the UK’s National Health Service that would have nurses bid for shifts under the guise of offering flexibility rather than being provided with more stable contracts.1

We focus on two kinds of work in this book. The first is what we refer to as ‘geographically tethered work’. You may have used an app to order takeaway food, a taxi, or even someone to clean your house. This kind of work existed before digital platforms, and requires a worker to be in a particular place to complete the work – the pizza delivery person needs to transport a pizza from a particular kitchen to a particular house. What is new here is that the work process can now be organized over the internet, usually through an app. All over the world there are now delivery riders, taxi drivers, cleaners and care workers finding their work in this way. In some cases, these workers are highly visible, if we think of the brightly coloured uniforms of food delivery riders or the stickers on Uber drivers’ windows. In other cases – such as home cleaning services – this is work that continues to be invisible to many, hidden behind the closed doors of the household. The second kind of work we focus on is ‘cloudwork’. This refers to online freelancing, as well as shorter digital tasks called microwork. Online freelancing involves work that can be completed remotely, like web development, graphic design and writing that happen on platforms like UpWork or Freelancer. Microwork, on the other hand, involves much shorter tasks like image recognition and transcription that are typical on platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. Both forms of work are organized digitally over the internet, with workers completing tasks remotely for the requesting organizations or individuals. Workers live all over the world, doing work that can come from anywhere.

The use of digital tools in gig work also makes many jobs increasingly invisible. While some platforms bring workers into contact with customers, others are obscured behind apps and websites. In many cases, this means we know little about the new experiences and challenges faced by gig economy workers. These issues are compounded in many industries and places by a huge oversupply of labour in the market. As a result of this oversupply, individual workers have very little power to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers. It is this lack of power that workers have relative to their employers that is one of the reasons why workers in many industries have traditionally grouped together in trade unions. A group of workers is much better equipped to collectively negotiate with their employer, or other powerful actors in the value chains of work, than a single one is. Yet, in most countries, the existing trade union movement lacks effective strategies to organize gig workers.

As there are an increasing number of workers finding employment through platforms, the relative lack of collective voice for platform workers poses important questions about their ability to collectively organize and bargain with platforms and employers. There are exciting examples of new forms of worker organizing on platforms that offer geographically tethered work – for example, the Deliveroo struggles taking place across multiple European countries, or the attempts by platform delivery drivers across Africa and Asia to collectively demand better working conditions. The location-specific nature of this sort of work offers the opportunity for workers to come together, organize and collectively withdraw their labour. But it is worth remembering that much of what is done in the gig economy has very little co-presence in either time or space. Online freelancing jobs can just as easily be done next door or on the other side of the world. It is therefore less clear what forms organizing can take in those contexts.

This book considers some of the key social, economic and political implications of these transformations of work – providing an account of the development, debates and operation of the gig economy. These themes are then further explored by looking at the experience of gig workers themselves, as well as considering emerging forms of resistance and pathways towards less exploitative forms of work.

Why did we write this book?

Both authors have studied work, and workers, in the gig economy in various ways since the gig economy took off, including extended periods of on-the-ground research in the UK, the Philippines, Vietnam, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and India.2 In addition to our qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, we have carried out large-scale surveys, and mapped quantitative datasets that reveal global-scale patterns of trade in work through gig economy platforms. However, what has struck us most in our research on the gig economy are the stories from the workers themselves. These stories should be at the centre of any discussion about the transformation of work. We would like to start with two that have particularly stuck with us.

Jamie has been doing research with Deliveroo riders in London since June 2016: observing, interviewing and using forms of coresearch in collaboration with workers. Delivering food is an example of ‘geographically tethered’ work. One of the riders, who had been a participant in Jamie’s research since the beginning, told a particularly revealing story about the experience of working for Deliveroo. At the end of an interview, Jamie asked the driver what he thought the most challenging part of the work was. Expecting the driver to mention the low pay, insecure contracts or threat of accidents, he was instead told the following story. The driver worked at two other jobs in addition to Deliveroo. In the morning he would wake up and go to the first job, trying to eat breakfast before he left. Over lunch he worked a shift for Deliveroo, making sure to grab something quick to eat on the way. In the afternoon he worked at the third job, before starting the evening shift at Deliveroo. The most challenging aspect of the work was making sure he ate enough food once he got home to ensure he had the energy to get up and repeat the process the next day. Deliveroo is marketed as a service for delivering food to stylish young professionals, but the reality is that many of his deliveries were to people too exhausted from working to make their own dinner. This is especially ironic given how Deliveroo brands itself. His story is therefore a damning indictment of the realities of gig work in London: a worker struggling to eat enough calories to deliver food to people who are too tired from work to make their own.

Mark has been studying and speaking with cloudworkers in Sub-Saharan Africa since 2009. In 2017, he and his colleague Amir Anwar spoke to an online freelancer in Takoradi, a mediumsized city in Western Ghana, who primarily sourced work through Upwork.com.3 The worker, a university graduate with a family to support, previously worked at a local firm in Takoradi. After doing some freelancing on Upwork at nights and weekends, he decided to take the plunge and quit his job in the local economy. He now completes a variety of tasks (including app testing, data entry, technical writing and search engine optimization). While these tasks are fairly varied, they have two things in common. First, they pay better than his previous job in Ghana. Second, he is rarely told what they are for, or why he is doing them. He knows, for instance, that he needs to write a short article on gardening. But isn’t told why the client needs it or how they create value from it. While the pay is good, the pressures to deliver are extremely high. In the online freelancing world, reputation is everything and workers are terrified of not receiving a five-star review from clients. Reviews from people the worker does not know have become an important part of management in the gig economy. Compounding this issue is the sporadic nature of work. When contracts are obtained by workers, they often need to be carried out very quickly. As such, the worker we spoke to ended up working extremely long shifts. He described multiple 48-hour marathon working sessions without sleep, simply in order to not disappoint his clients. Despite these gruelling work conditions, he maintained a positive outlook on his work: optimistically recalling that the other job options in Takoradi are also not perfect. His story highlights some of the key tensions in the global gig economy. Workers try to make a living in a hyper-competitive planetary labour market; clients and platforms take zero responsibility for their working conditions; and yet workers are often relatively satisfied with that state of affairs because of the lack of other good options.

What will the book cover?

These short accounts do not tell the whole story of the gig economy, but they are an important starting point for understanding what is at stake. These two positions, one of a significant erosion of working conditions, the other of hard work, but new opportunities, capture the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the phenomenon. The gig economy is full of other such stories: stories of hope, success, desperation, exploitation and everything in between. In this book, we draw on a combination of these accounts – from our own research as well as that of others – to tell the story of how digital technology is changing the nature of work. Our assumption is that workers’ own experiences can be a powerful tool to explain broader changes in society (Woodcock, 2014a).

In chapter 1, we discuss where the gig economy came from. This starts by looking at other forms of work that came before it, exploring how precarious work has a much longer history, including on the docks and in factories. We then introduce the political economy, technological and social preconditions that have facilitated the rise of the gig economy. In chapter 2, we explore how the gig economy works by examining the platforms that organize this work. This involves first exploring how work platforms serve as intermediaries, then using Uber as an example to illustrate the key dynamics of this kind of operation. We explain the geographically tethered and cloudwork models. The focus shifts in chapter 3 as we move on to explore what it is like to work in the gig economy. This draws on the voices of workers, across both kinds of gig work. We present stories and experiences of workers we have met through our research, showing the complex relationship that workers have to this new kind of working arrangement. In chapter 4, we continue the focus on workers to outline how they are resisting and reshaping the gig economy, tracing emerging forms and trends. In the final chapter of the book, we summarize and reiterate the arguments we have made about the gig economy and platform work into four alternative futures, involving transparency, accountability, worker power and democratic ownership – as well as what you can do.

Notes

  1. 1. Armstrong, S. (2017) The NHS is going to trial a gig economy app for nurses. Wired, 3 October. Available at: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-app-nurses-flexible-working-jeremy-hunt-gig-economy
  2. 2. For examples of some of our research on this topic, see Graham and Shaw (2017), Graham et al. (2017a, 2017b), Waters and Woodcock (2017), Graham and Anwar (2018, 2019), Graham and Woodcock (2018), Wood et al. (2018, 2019a, 2019b) and Woodcock (forthcoming).
  3. 3. For more on the research project, see Graham et al. (2017c) and Graham and Anwar (2018).