Precarious Work and Intermittent Life Trajectories in a Portuguese Gig Economy

Abstract

Rapid advances in technology brought dramatic changes into the labour market, regarding precarious, flexible and informal work. The gig economy has enabled new forms of labour exploitation, social exclusion, intermittent and vulnerable professional trajectories. Not having fully recovered from the Great Recession, the Portuguese society is crossing a Covid-19 global pandemic which has accelerated the digitalisation and platformisation of work fecting not only the value chains, but the labour market dynamics in a heterogenous way. Between 2019 and 2020, 53 in-depth interviews were conducted with precarious workers in Portugal, comprising a focus on 15 life trajectories from digital platform workers. Through their voices, it was concluded that job insecurity is deeply intertwined with the global supply chain management operated by algorithmic control. Most of platform companies threaten established employment relationships, atomising workers who live in the present time without any future aspirations.

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“…In many parts of the world, women have increasingly been drawn into the labour force, often in low‐skilled work, while both men and women have been pushed into precarious forms of labour due to changing patterns of work, and the erosion of measures for job and income security (Standing, 2012). Job precarity is not at all limited to low‐ and middle‐income countries and the informalization of labour arrangements is rapidly expanding across high‐income countries, with the gig and platform economies giving new impetus to dynamics of precarity (Breman & van der Linden, 2014; Cook et al, 2021; Roque et al, 2022).…”