Flexible, Self-Determined… and Unhealthy? An Empirical Study on Somatic Health Among Crowdworkers

Abstract

Crowdwork is a new form of digitally enabled work in which organizations assign tasks to an anonymous group of workers via platform intermediaries. For crowdworkers, crowdwork offers both opportunities and risks. On the one side, crowdworkers enjoy high flexibility on when, where, and how much to work. On the other side, risks comparable to other forms of atypical employment arise: no labor regulation, unstable income, and uncertainty about whether enough tasks are available. Regulation of working hours lies within the crowdworkers’ own authority. Also, crowdwork in industrialized nations is often conducted during leisure times as a side-job to some other kind of employment. In accordance with Conservation of Resources Theory, we state that when leisure time gets used up with crowdwork, regeneration cannot occur and health declines. On a sample of N=748 German crowdworkers recruited from four different platform types, we analyzed whether participation in crowdwork is linked to increased somatic symptoms compared to regularly employed personnel. We found that crowdworkers show significantly increased somatic symptoms as compared to a German norm sample, that are stable across different kinds of tasks and platforms, gender, and age groups, and that is statistically due to the extent of participation in crowdwork. Specifically, we found that total work hours per week were not associated with an increase in somatic symptoms, but we did find associations with strain-based work–family conflict and the primary motivation to do crowdwork being to earn money. Consequences for research and labor regulations are discussed.

Flexibilisierung von Personaleinsätzen - Auswirkungen auf die Arbeitsgestaltung und Arbeitseinstellungen der Beschäftigten in starren und flexiblen Schichtsystemen

“…Zur Ausrichtung von Arbeitsbedingungen an den Bedürfnissen der Beschäftigten nutzen Unternehmen im Zuge der digitalen Transformation unterschiedliche Technologien (Foullois et al, 2020). So werden durch die Nutzung dieser Technologien vollkommen neue Arbeitsformen ermöglich, wie zum Beispiel Crowd Work, indem eine zeitliche und örtliche Flexibilisierung ermöglicht wird (Schlicher et al, 2021) (Gabriel et al, 2022). Insbesondere diejenigen Prozesse, bei denen ein hohes Ausmaß an komplexer Datenstruktur berücksichtigt werden muss sowie die aktuellen Prozesse auf Basis zahlreicher Datenbrüche noch von Menschen bearbeitet werden müssen, bieten einen vielversprechenden Anwendungsfall für die Unterstützung durch KI (Burggräf et al, 2018).…”