The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. In Europe and around the world, many people are delivering fast food on bicycles or acting as taxi drivers in their own cars, not quite employees and not quite self-employed. While gig economy platforms might be behaving in accordance with their legal contracts, many workers appear to feel that they are not being treated fairly.
All the signs suggest continued growth in the gig economy β paid work in short spells with no or limited commitment from either worker or company. This work frequently involves driving and delivering but can also cover other platform-mediated, short-term work, such as data coding. This youth profile allows proponents of gig work to justify the limited level of security, providing access to work for people with limited professional experience.
Furthermore, having another activity, such as being a student, makes the flexibility and autonomy attractive. Yet such on-demand service work leads to a rise in precariousness more generally, and may increase difficulties for finding secure, full-time work. Here we can see parallels with other forms of precarious work , such as temporary and zero-hour contracts, that are similarly prevalent among young people.
Across various platforms of the gig economy, workers are agitating for more. There is evidence of Uber drivers wanting the right to unionise and some Foodora riders want their platform to pay operational costs , such as bike maintenance and mobile data fees. Workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk have petitioned to be treated like humans, not algorithms. Many focus their complaints around a desire to be treated as employees. They claim to have the obligations of employees but not the benefits.
Yet gig platforms are clear that they do not recognise this employee status nor the obligations that would come with such a relationship. Human resource management theorists have developed this concept to describe the various unwritten agreements, both explicit and implicit, that workers and employers believe they have with one another.
