The ride-hailing giant Uber has long circumvented labour regulations and commodified its drivers’ labour by existing at the conjuncture of multiple geographies – being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the places where it operates. In this commentary, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised Uber’s ‘conjunctural’ existence and forced the company to become more embedded in the locations where it operates, bringing about a – perhaps temporary – turn towards the decommodification of its drivers’ labour.
Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO. This article is also available in French, in Revue internationale du Travail 161 (3), and Spanish, in Revista Internacional del Trabajo 141 (3).
Drawing on a series of interviews with key actors including representatives of the main trade unions, this paper considers the response of unions in the UK to the emergence and growth of platform work. Comparing the partly different strategies adopted by traditional and alternative unions in respect of the representation of platform workers’ interests, it demonstrates that the unions’ choices have been shaped by the characteristics and resources of the unions themselves, by prevailing political conditions and, perhaps above all, by the restrictive legal framework that excludes many platform workers from the scope of employment legislation. Without recourse to either a legally protected freedom to take industrial action or the statutory recognition procedure, unions have only exceptionally been able to negotiate collective agreements on behalf of platform workers. Instead, traditional unions have focussed on broader political strategies to fight precariousness, including wielding an influence on policymaking, especially through their relations with the Labour Party. Alternative unions have channelled resources into organising and mobilising platform workers and supporting them in campaigning, protesting and bringing strategic litigation.
The Fairwork Project is an international action-research project that currently operates in over 20 countries. The project focuses on working conditions in the platform economy, in order to develop ‘fairness ratings’ for digital labour platforms. With respect to Germany, the project evaluated the working conditions offered by ten digital labour platforms, by scoring them against the Fairwork principles and producing a national league table. We found that even in a highly regulated labour market context like the German one, platform workers experience precarity and insecurity and have limited access to employment rights. A number of platform workers are classified as employees rather than self-employed, and this guarantees a number of employment rights, including entitlement to minimum wage, health and safety protection and social protection. However, the existence of an employment relationship does not necessarily ensure platform work to be fair as other factors, including the existence of complex networks of subcontracting, erode labour standards and deprive workers of basic employment rights.Practical Relevance: While there are tens of millions of digital platform workers around the world performing functions essential to society—as demonstrated drastically by the Covid-19 pandemic—by supplying food, care and passenger transportation services, many platform workers face low pay, precarity as well as poor and dangerous working conditions. Exposing fracture lines of inequalities affecting particularly women, migrants and minority-ethnic groups who form the core part of the gig workforce, the international Fairwork research project aims not just to understand the gig economy, but to change it.
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