'Sceptics or supporters? Consumers’ views of work in the gig economy' by Joshua Healy, Andreas Pekarek and Ariadne Vrome in (2020) 35(1)
New Technology, Work and Employment comments
Labour-management practices and workers’ experiences in the gig economy are topics of major interest for researchers, regulators and the general public. Platform companies project a vision of gig workers as autonomous freelancers, but pervasive features of their own labour practices, along with workers’ traits, create new vulnerabilities and risks. Efforts to improve gig workers’ conditions to date have made inroads without achieving a general shift in platforms’ practices or gig workers’ conditions. In this paper, we explore how another, less-recognised stakeholder group—consumers—shapes the conditions of gig work. Drawing on Australian public opinion data, we study consumers’ views of the gig economy and ask whether these will help or hinder pro-worker campaigns. While consumers are sympathetic to gig workers’ financial plight, they also see benefits in the work’s flexibility and opportunities for jobseekers. We explain how our findings can inform advocacy campaigns and further gig economy research.
The authors state
The proliferation of new and increasingly diverse digital labour platforms is one of the major economic developments of recent years. By enabling consumers to find and transact with many producers at lower cost, platforms have given rise to an ‘on-demand’ or ‘gig’ economy that is increasingly important in both physical (e.g. food delivery) and online (e.g. data entry) markets (De Stefano, 2016; Howcroft and Bergvall-Kåreborn, 2019; Kuhn and Galloway, 2019; Wood et al., 2019). The leading platforms—Uber, Deliveroo, and many others—are global brands that are quickly becoming corporate titans (Conger and de la Merced, 2019). As labour market intermediaries, platforms account for 1–3 per cent of all paid work in advanced economies and this share is ‘growing fast’ (Schwellnus et al., 2019: 8).
Various economic benefits have been ascribed to this burgeoning platform economy, mainly due to improved consumer choice and convenience (Minifie and Wiltshire, 2016; Pasquale, 2016). Assessments of platforms’ impact on working conditions, however, are often more critical. In contrast to a prevailing company rhetoric of choice and entrepreneurship (Roberts and Zietsma, 2018; Ravenelle, 2019), gig work is seen as insecure and exploitative by many labour and organisational scholars (Stanford, 2017; Van Doorn, 2017; Aroles et al., 2019). Flexibility for workers is constrained, in practice, by performance surveillance and intense competition for the best-paid tasks (Scheiber, 2017; Lehdonvirta, 2018; Goods et al., 2019).
Debates about how to protect and advance working conditions in the gig economy are fractious. Worker-led campaigns seek improvements via an array of new and old organising techniques, but platforms vigorously resist attempts to redefine their responsibilities as employers. Some platforms have modified their labour practices at the edges in the face of pressure from workers and/or regulators—such as by recommending (but not requiring) minimum wage compliance, or facilitating workers’ access to private insurance—but these concessions are overshadowed by a larger ‘reclassification risk’ to platforms’ business model (AlphaBeta, 2019). That is, the possibility that gig workers currently treated as contractors will be deemed by regulators to be de facto employees, with correspondingly greater entitlements (Cherry and Aloisi, 2017).
Legal determinations about this vexing classification issue, to date, are mixed; no universal or consistent precedent has emerged. The future of the gig economy thus remains unpredictable, with labour advocates and platforms often at odds over its benefits and drawbacks. Meanwhile, many governments are moving cautiously in deciding how, or if, to impose new regulations on platforms. There are marked cross-national differences, for instance, in how governments have responded to Uber’s market entry (Thelen, 2018).
Along with workers and governments, consumers are another critical stakeholder group in the gig economy, although their influence has until recently attracted less academic interest. Thelen and colleagues have argued that platform companies seek to acquire a new form of power, by cultivating the loyalty and, occasionally, more active support, of consumers for whom platform services constitute ‘part of the infrastructure of their lives’ (Culpepper and Thelen, 2019: 8). If successfully nurtured, these bonds of consumer dependency give platforms significant leverage in political and regulatory processes, allowing them to portray critics as hostile to ‘consumer choice’ (Rahman and Thelen, 2019). However, because people have multiple identities that are cued by different issues—not only as consumers but also as citizens, taxpayers, co-workers and so on—public support for platforms is neither inevitable nor unconditional (Thelen, 2018).
To understand whether consumers will become, and remain, platforms’ sceptics or supporters, we need more finely grained evidence about their views. We contribute to this endeavour, by exploring consumers’ views about one of the most contested issues in platform capitalism: gig work. We argue that consumers’ support for change or, conversely, their tolerance for the status quo is an important and understudied factor influencing how gig work develops. Prior research in different contexts suggests that, while consumers may support labour-rights campaigns for ethical reasons, they can also be mobilised against such actions, if these are seen to unfairly limit choice and convenience. The gig economy is arguably the most important arena in which these tensions over consumer choice, working conditions and business ethics are playing out.
In this paper, we present detailed empirical evidence about consumers’ engagement with and views about work in a key section of the gig economy, drawing on a unique Australian public opinion data set. We focus on locally delivered gig work, as distinct from its remote and online varieties (Wood et al., 2019). Our approach is exploratory, rather than hypothesis-driven, given the novelty of our study aims. We seek to answer one central research question: Are consumers’ views likely to help or hinder efforts to advance working conditions in the gig economy?
As a foundation for our analysis, we draw from and link two disparate strands of research, which are canvassed in the next two sections: one on platforms’ labour practices and gig work; the other on consumers and ‘ethical consumption’.
