What Are the Features of Unpaid Labour in the Platform Economy? Lessons for Workers’ Representation and Collective Bargaining among Delivery Riders, Carers, and Freelancers

by Valeria Pulignano, Professor of Sociology of Work and Industrial Relations, KU Leuven*

*This blog is based on a lecture delivered as part of Reshaping Work’s Multistakeholder Dialogue Project.

The UK Supreme Court decision (issued on February 19, 2021) found that Uber drivers are workers, not independent contractors. This is an important step in terms of revising the classification of workers to enhance their rights in the platform economy. Another important aspect of the UK decision is working time. The Court issued a statement to determine when drivers working for Uber are entitled to wages and benefits. The Court stipulated that drivers are working whenever they are logged onto the Uber application and available to accept the ride requests. This is noteworthy because working time is still disputable and as such, remains an important source of unpaid labour within platform work.

Although the UK Supreme Court decision may be considered a good example of regulation within ride hailing, the platform economy still remain a contested field. Discussions are still ongoing about the employment status, which is seen as one of the main existing loopholes that platforms use. Scientific studies, complemented by recent court decisions across Europe, have emphasised the need for legislation to close the loophole in the employment status by providing universal workers’ rights. In particular, what is being argued is the need of streamline employment classifications, to create a single status of worker, which is not separate, but integrated into the employment relationship, so that all workers enjoy the same rights. Yet platforms still consider workers as self-employed. Platforms retain self-employment status which they legitimise by the ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ which are usually associated to the self-employed as someone who can freely decide ‘when’ to work. The idea of freedom is attached to weigh why certain changes are not needed, particularly regarding the employment status.

My intention is to deconstruct the myth of freedom associated to platform workers by claiming that these workers lack control over the conduct of their work, including wages. This is because these conditions and wages are determined by the platform at first. Under such circumstances, the freedom argument becomes an ‘empty shell’. There is a necessity, from the perspective of the workers, to exercise control over the conditions which affect their work. This means to have capacity of discretion (and autonomy) to influence the conduct of their work. Currently, this capacity is reduced by the algorithm which mediates gig work. Therefore, there is the need to rethink ways to allow workers to regain capacity of discretion in order to influence the conduct of their work (including the conditions set by the algorithm) as the only way to exercise their rights. This is at the core of establishing participation and democracy at work.

I ground my argument upon two existing and parallel projects I am running as a Principal Investigator at Sociology at KU Leuven. One is an Advanced Research Grant supported by the European Research Council (ERC) — ResPecTME and the second is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). My team and I looked at different platforms in sectors of delivery, care, and crowdwork/freelancing in the EU member states (e.g., Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Italy, Poland). We completed more than 150 narrative interviews with workers and freelancers, but also semi-structured interviews with managers, trade unions and experts, and we kept working diaries with workers to map forms of unpaid labour. We were particularly interested in unpaid labour as it is directly link to power imbalances at work and intended to answer the following: (a) what “work” is platform work, (b) which rights do platform workers need to thrive in this new economy.

The results show that unpaid labour is a feature of platform work. Employment status is one of the causes of this, but not the determinant and only one. Other factors influencing unpiad labour within the platform economy are payment (piece rate) systems; no guaranteed (minimum) working hours and shifts, especially in the case for food delivery. These factors reduce workers’ discretion and autonomy over their own pay and working conditions.

For crowdworkers/freelancers, the situation is different because their employment status in not questionable. Freelancers want to be freelancers and they search for opportunity to compete fairly within the market. However, we found many of them being ‘hooked on’ or ‘looked in’ a single platform because of lack of portability of their reputation and rating systems to other platforms (including the traditional labour market) as well as the sanctions imposed by the platform. Such systems do not allow freelancers to develop freely their own (comprehensive) portfolio across different platforms, and also within and outside the digital labour market. Thus, they undermine the capacity by freelancers to set desirable prices and strengthen their position on the market.

When it comes to care workers, the sector has always been domestic invisible work; but the emergence of platforms, this type of work and workers position are gaining visibility. However, the work carries on being invisible. Conditions of the job market can affect and unevenly harm workers, easily reducing discretion again. This is particularly related to those workers who want to self-regulate pay and the condition at work. Although the employment status may be considered a secondary issue due to care workers providing services via platforms have usually interest in establishing relationships with clients — therefore they can decide upon how to be hired, the pay and the working conditions — problems emerge, however, due to a clash between ‘casual’ care work and ‘professional’ care work, and the social implications it yields. For example, it is not uncommon that cases of ‘domestic accidents’ and ‘harassment’ are reported by care workers working on platforms. Thus, being a causal care worker can translate in less capacity of discretion and control over the conduct of their work.

Moreover, the research overall showed that unpaid labour in the platform economy is a feature of algorithmic mediated gig work that affects access, allocation, and matching of this work. Along with employment status, algorithms create power imbalances, in particular information asymmetries. I use a wider definition of information that incorporates details such as personal data, ratings, tasks, customers’ location, shifts allocation, waiting times.

Platforms reduce market failure by introducing algorithmic mediated forms of gig work. By doing so, they standardise consumers’ and workers’ experiences. At the same time, algorithmic mediation produces negative consequences for workers and appears to be one of the underpinning conditions of unpaid labour. Our research revealed that unpaid labour, in that sense, is not only related to time but also non-time-based issues.

Non-time-based unpaid labour is associated with workers investments in doing their own work and having good ratings and good statistics, but that is not proportionally compensated and matched with in-returns gains. I want to emphasise this because in the short-medium term the outcome can be precarity in terms of insecurity and instability for workers and their families. It is important to pay attention to these issues.

In the case of food delivery platforms, time-based aspects of unpaid labour are mainly related to travel time (to and from work), search time (in case of errors, e.g., wrong addresses, closed restaurants), wait time to access orders (but also to collect meals at restaurants’ premises and waiting at clients’ doors) as well as waiting time for problem-solution due to platforms inefficient/automated support system. When it comes to non-time-based unpaid labour, it is mainly related to aspects that platforms may not consider essential to productivity, although, in reality, they are and include bike maintenance and paying for work gear and equipment.

Zooming into crowdwork/freelancing platforms, the results showed the prevalence of unpaid labour both in time-based and non-time-based forms. Among time-based forms, unpaid labour appears in the form of profile creation, communication with (potential) clients, job search and applications, as well as preparing and sharing workers’ portfolios. When it comes to non-time-based unpaid labour, there are investments in staying competitive either through rating systems or through new training opportunities.

In care platforms, we see quite a substantial and equal amount of unpaid labour in both time and non-time-based forms. Time-based forms include profile creation, job searching and applications, time invested to meet and communicate with potential clients, time to travel from one client to the other. The payment of fees for ID identification and access to work on the platform as well as monetary investment in gears and products, especially for domestic work are examples of non-time-based forms of unpaid labour. Moreover, it is important to mention that another important form of non-time-based unpaid labour is the non-entitlement to social security protection, especially when the employment relation is not registered in accordance to national regulation.

While the research projects continue until 2024/5, my team and I have already drawn some preliminary lessons for workers’ representation and collective bargaining efforts to mitigate unpaid labour in platform economy as follows:

• Clarification of the employment status of platform workers and demand for reclassification when subordination is clear
• Introduction of minimum guaranteed pay, working time/hours
• Ensuring workers’ voice to increase discretion on pay and working conditions to counter-face the effect of algorithm in the allocation/access to work
• Ensuring transparency of information in compliance to GDPR
• Ensuring portability of portfolios across and outside of platforms to overcome current ‘lock-in’ effects and secure competitive capacity of crowdworkers/freelancers
• Responsibility to stipulate employment contracts through the platforms and between matching parties (e.g., clients and workers) in accordance with national regulations
• Adjustment of Competition Law’s scope and application so that protection should be extended to different categories of labour, thereby making it possible to improve working conditions through collective agreements
• A renewal of institutional and material conditions of freedom of association (consideration of adequacy of current collective bargaining agreements in the context of new diverse (non-standard) forms of employment in the platform economy.