- Title
- Work and wages in the gig economy: Can there be a high road?
- Creator
- Healy, Joshua; Pekarek, Andreas
- Relation
- The Future of Work and Employment p. 156-173
- Relation
- https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/the-future-of-work-and-employment-9781786438249.html
- Publisher
- Edward Elgar Publishing
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- The rise of digital platforms and the ‘gig economy’ is a central topic in debates about the future of work. As new platform companies have emerged in a range of markets, including transport, food delivery, and home and personal services, established business models and employment arrangements have come under increasing pressure. The hallmark of ‘gig work’ is precarity; platform companies rely on contract workers and subject them to new forms of algorithmic management and control (Goods et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2018). The contract-based nature of gig work is an enduring source of controversy and a basis for recurring legal challenges to platform companies around the world. While the line between contractors and employees is yet to be definitively drawn in the gig economy, efforts to improve workers’ wages and conditions can also be advanced in other ways that have heretofore received less attention. In this chapter, we discuss three avenues for accomplishing this improvement that do not hinge on how gig work is legally classified: workers organising, consumer behaviours, and changing labour market conditions. Building on Osterman’s (2018) aspirational model of the ‘High Road’, we consider how these three levers might be used to achieve better outcomes for workers in the evolving gig economy.
- Subject
- gig economy; work; wages; workers
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1482460
- Identifier
- uon:50936
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781786438249
- Language
- eng
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