The Rise of the 'Just-in-Time Workforce': On-Demand Work, Crowd Work and Labour Protection in the 'Gig-Economy'

Nordic labour markets and the sharing economy

“…Other umbrella terms, such as collaborative consumption (Botsman 2013), collaborative economy (EU Commission, 2016), intermediary economy (Jesnes & Nesheim 2015a) the gig economy, platform economy, crowd-based capitalism (Sundararajan 2016) and ondemand economy (Stefano 2016), are also used to conceptualize it. Various actors, especially the trade unions, have been critical to the term sharing economy because of its unequivocally positive connotations, the great diversity of companies referred to as sharing economy platforms, and many also argue that it is not about sharing at all.…”

“…For our purpose, an important distinction is between platforms intermediating some form of labour, and those mainly facilitating sharing or renting of assets such as homes and cars (Andreassen 2016). The platforms that involve labour can again be divided into platforms whereby the product can be submitted online, sometimes referred to as crowdsourcing, and platforms that involve manual and local labour, sometimes referred to as on-demand work (Stefano 2016). Another way to differentiate between platforms is by looking at what actors are involved on the customer and the provider side (individuals or companies).…”

“…In contrast to ordinary jobs where there are institutionalized procedures for resolution of grievances and disputes, the self-employed have not access to such mechanisms. To the extent that the protections and rights associated with ordinary employment apply, the dispersed and fragmented situation of the individual workers is likely to make it difficult to raise issues with the counterpart, be it the digital platform or the customer, or to represent their interests and demands in collective ways (Stefano 2016, Berg 2016.…”

“…and the platforms' anonymous, unilateral mechanisms for control and supervision, imply that working in the sharing economy can often prove less seductive and attractive than at first sight (see f.ex Berg 2016, Stefano 2016, Jesnes et al 2016a. While the innovative forms of collaboration and matching of complementary skills and needs clearly can unleash productive synergy effects and open up interesting opportunities for actors with attractive skills and market power, the routinization, standardization, and strict control of the parcelled, digitalized micro-tasks where skill requirements are modest and the supply of (global) bidders in principle boundless entail obvious potential for degradation and polarization of work.…”

The Status of Uber Drivers: A Purposive Approach

“…The "on demand" economy may be revolutionary in some respects (Lobel, 2016) but in the current context the challenges it creates are not unlike those we have already been struggling with for many years (Finkin, 2016;De Stefano, 2016). These challenges certainly require discussion, and justify debates regarding the best way to address the new problems, but there is no reason to see them as paradigm-shifting.…”