The context
Today, more and more people today find short-term work in the platform economy, where online platforms intermediate between workers and clients in a physical or online working environment.
As a central entity, platforms usually decide the rules of the game without consulting their workers or users, centralising a fragmented market and keeping the best information for themselves.
What can be done against this imbalance was the focus of ‘A Level Playing Field for Gig Workers’, WageIndicator’s seventh Gig Work webinar, on October 27, 2023.
Our speakers talked about creating a level playing field for gig workers and explored different strategies to give workers their negotiation power back. As WageIndicator, we also wanted to show good practices of initiatives or individuals worldwide who are achieving this purpose.
Uma Rani’s keynote speech: platforms are everywhere (and what this means for workers)
The starting point of the discussion was set by Uma Rani, Senior Economist at the Research Department of the International Labour Organization (ILO), who attended the webinar as the keynote speaker.
During her extensive career, she has researched the informal economy and gender inequality issues, working on digital transformations in the labour market for years.
The impact of platforms on the global economy was the focus of her speech.
She underlined the importance of recognizing that for years, platforms’ business model has been penetrating all the different sectors of the economy, including domestic work, healthcare, medical consultation, and generic personal services, not to mention the work done online or legal patent services, software development, programming, and data analytics.
“When you have such a high penetration of platforms in such different sectors, the debate is around whether they create employment opportunities or not,” Uma Rani pointed out.
Platforms penetrate the labour market but also disrupt it, especially when it comes to the developing economy: “Consumers start using these platforms because they pay very cheap rates to get the work done. So, as a result, many workers are forced to register on platforms.”
In this context, platforms change the way labour processes are undertaken and relationships are developed, and, as part of their essence, lead to workers’ income instability, lack of social protection, and opaque algorithmic management practices.
“The only sector where we can see a potential for new opportunities is within the area of micro-tasks, or jobs related to AI tools or web improvement through content moderation.”
Workers who invest in this are people who want to supplement their existing income because they are in precarious conditions and struggling with poor employment opportunities elsewhere or significant family responsibilities.
Uma Rani also shared the fact that, according to ILO’s research, “people who do these tasks are very highly educated and would normally be in the traditional labour market,” capitalising on their IT and professional skills.
It happens in developing countries, but it’s also the case in the most developed ones.
The challenges these workers face are well known: heavy competition within a global market, algorithms controlling them, and high work-related costs.
Returning to the webinar’s main topic, Uma Rani asked: “In such a context, how can we expect strategies to create a level playing field to be implemented?”
The answer is not as pessimistic as one might imagine.
Uma Rani explained that both in the global North and South, some extent of unionisation or associationism has brought out many workers’ cases to judicial bodies and pressured the governments to bring about legislative reforms.
There are some geographical differences: in the global North, which includes North Europe and the United States, the trend is to push for the platform workers’ employment status because it could ensure that workers benefit from labour and social protection.
In the global South, the focus is usually on data transparency and safety and health regulation, but largely in the Asian countries, the governments are also making an effort to bring platforms within specific sectors, so legislation of these sectors can be applied to them. “Taxi companies are registered as IT companies, but they are driven to follow the transport sector’s rules.”
According to Uma Rani, this is a great step ahead and a synonym for a fairer level playing field for many workers.
With regards to labour issues, algorithms, and data protection, “the ILO also had an expert meeting last year. One of the outcomes was about the need to do a normative gap analysis to see how existing conversations can address it. Based on that, we decided to prepare a convention that would be distributed among the social partners as well as 187 governments and have more discussions on decent working conditions in the platform economy in the next few years.”
The WageIndicator Gig Team has scheduled its next webinar on March 22, 2024. ‘Unpaid Labour in the Gig Economy’ will focus on the sensitive topic of unpaid labour in the platform work: how can it be defined? Does it mean the same thing for different categories of gig workers? Can it be quantified and mitigated?