The concept of precarity is increasingly used for an analysis of standard and non-standard (atypical) employment forms-yet among atypical employment forms, platform-driven work is rarely included. This paper aims to fill this gap and provide a refined analytical framework for an evaluation of precarity in employment arrangements applicable to on-demand platform work. The legitimacy of such an analytical framework is twofold. First, it allows identifying the dimensions of precarity in on-demand platform work. Second, it extends the understanding of how a general situation in the labor market connects to work precarity in on-demand platform work. The analytical framework is applied to evidence from two countries in Central and Eastern Europe-Hungary and Slovakia, where the rise of precarious employment went hand in hand with the rise of work via digital platforms. The central claim of the paper is that precarity in on-demand platform work is especially manifest in the dimensions of autonomy at work and of interest representation. Furthermore, digitalization enforces precarity, while at the same time, it mitigates labor market segmentation between standard and non-standard workers as distinct groups of workers.
Tracing the political and academic treatment of the notion of class, in this article I emphasize overlapping continuities and discontinuities from the socialist period. I argue that in Serbia, class preserved its policy relevance at least until the mid-1990s, since there was a peculiar melding of nation and class in public discourse. Key to these developments was the rise of Milošević as a reformed communist already in the late 1980s. Milošević’s agenda was heavily reliant on class-based appeals and the mobilization of workers for its legitimacy. Even though formal democratization began in 1990, with an accompanying mobilization of nationalism, the category of workers remained politically relevant, present in the patronizing rhetoric of most political sides. Only after 2000, with renewed democratization and neoliberal reforms, did public discourses begin to downplay class in the conventional sense, while young scholars took up issues of class in new, more critical ways.
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