Embedded Fixers, Pragmatic Experimenters, Dedicated Activists: Evaluating Third‐Party Labour Market Actors’ Initiatives for Skilled Project‐Based Workers in the Gig Economy

Abstract

Non-standard career paths -in which workers jump from one employment arrangement to another according to the projects they work on -have become more frequent in modern labour markets. The traditional solutions for organizing and managing work relationships and job transitions have become less effective for such workers regarding the risks of precariousness and economic dependence they may experience. Envisioning ways forward requires an appreciation of what was achieved over the past century and an understanding of what is needed to replace and adapt these achievements. Emerging solutions for managing work relationships are provided by a growing range of third-party labour market actors, but the evaluation of their contributions in the literature remains limited. In this article, we build an original theoretical framework to evaluate such contributions according to the kind of services they provide and their respective engagement in institutional innovation. We give examples of solutions developed for skilled workers in two institutional contexts: the Netherlands and Belgium and show how our framework can help distinguish at least three groups of actors that contribute to labour market development in different ways.

Free agents seeking for career support: exploring the expectations of skilled contingent workers vis-à-vis labour market intermediaries

“…While several studies have focused on disadvantaged and low-skilled contingent workers, their career and their use of LMIs, studies on highly skilled contingent workers are slowly expanding (Rodrigues et al, 2015;Lo Presti et al, 2018;Jacobs et al, 2019;Koene and Pichault, 2020;Ayoobzadeh, 2021;Sulbout et al, 2021;van den Groenendaal et al, 2021). In this article, we focus on SCWs that are viewed as independent contractors or contract firm workers, who "differ from regular employees because they do not have explicit (i.e.…”

“…, 2015; Lo Presti et al ., 2018; Jacobs et al. , 2019; Koene and Pichault, 2020; Ayoobzadeh, 2021; Sulbout et al. , 2021; van den Groenendaal et al.…”

Commitment issues? Analysing the effect of preference deviation and social embeddedness on member commitment to worker cooperatives in the gig economy

“…In contrast to cooperatives of single occupational groups sharing an office (e.g. dentists, lawyers) or social cooperatives that help unemployed people engage in entrepreneurship, these cooperatives of gig workers respond to the challenges of non-standard employment faced by diverse project-based service providers (Koene and Pichault, 2020). Some examples of members' occupations include sound technicians, photographers, web developers and piano teachers.…”

“…A worker cooperative is defined as a business enterprise that is collectively owned and democratically governed by its worker-members to serve their mutual benefit (Vieta et al, 2016). Applied to gig work, cooperatives might provide protections against precarity and operate as a shared enterprise in which individual economic activities can be pursued (Koene and Pichault, 2020). In particular, these cooperatives may offer members salaried employment with associated labour rights, while practically letting them continue to do their work as autonomously as independent freelancers (Bajard, 2020).…”

“…How this works is that members obtain a non-permanent employment contract, which allows them to accept or decline gigs that clients request from the cooperative while also finding gigs outside of the cooperative. As such, these new worker cooperatives operate much like other labour market intermediaries but with the key difference being that collective ownership allows for organising protections against precarity and removing dependence on outside owners (Koene and Pichault, 2020).…”