Flexibility or employment? Comparing independent platform work to employed shift work in Europe
By Anthony Cozart, Applied Scientist
For years, an overwhelming majority of Uber drivers and couriers have told us they choose platform work because of the flexibility it offers.¹
Drivers and couriers on Uber’s platform have real-time control over when, where, if and how they work. They can go online or sign out of the app at any time, without prior notice or needing to seek approval. There are no shifts, no minimum hours, and no consequences for not working, and drivers and couriers can and often do work across multiple apps.
This distinctive flexibility is lost when drivers and couriers become employees. We’ve shared our perspective on the ways that drivers’ day to day experience would change, and have written about Geneva, where couriers lost flexibility and autonomy after they were reclassified from self-employed independent contractors to employees in 2020. Despite this, many people continue to believe that if Uber were to adopt an employment model, drivers and couriers would benefit from the same level of flexibility provided by the self-employment model today.
Uber’s data provides a unique opportunity to add to this conversation by comparing the working patterns of drivers under employment and self-employment models. That’s possible because while drivers and couriers are independent contractors in most of Uber’s global markets, in several countries they are employed by fleet operators due to local regulations. These fleets are separate businesses that hire and manage drivers, and their drivers’ activity on the Uber platform offers a view into the differences between employment and independent work.²
In this post, we’ll use our data to show that, in practice, employed platform workers lack the flexibility:
- To choose to work a few hours at a time, which is very common among independent drivers and couriers;
- To decide to work a few hours more or less, which makes it possible for drivers to balance their other needs, like caretaking, school, or other work;
- And to control when they work across hours, days, weeks, and months — especially in the irregular patterns that are common to independent work.
Fleets and employed shift work
First, let’s briefly define the scope of this post. We’ll consider ridesharing drivers employed by the largest fleets in Spain.³ The scale and highly professionalized operations of these “mega” fleets — with hundreds, if not thousands of drivers — make them the best example of what shift employment of platform workers would look like in markets where drivers could be reclassified. These fleets schedule their drivers in advance, define working areas, monitor performance issues like the time a driver is stationary, and try to balance their needs for drivers against expected demand. They also own and maintain a fleet of vehicles, hence their name.
We’ll compare these fleet employees to non-employee drivers in the United Kingdom and France. Note that UK drivers have been “Workers” since early 2021, which is a third employment status that provides additional benefits and retains all of the flexibility that drivers want.
To drivers in Spain, working for these fleets is employed shift work. They receive the same social protections as any other employee, earn a monthly salary, and avoid the costs and risks of running a business. In return, their employment is less flexible than if they were independent, and they have less autonomy. This includes selecting or receiving shifts in advance and being monitored by their fleet employer. Academics, including Kathryn Shaw and Oliver Hart, have explained the economic rationales for why employed shift work is less flexible. There are also simple, practical explanations. For example, if a fleet assigns two drivers to a vehicle each day, both of these employees can’t use it without notice, or for a little longer, without restricting each other’s opportunities to work.⁴
Flexibility to work a few hours at a time
Without shifts, prior notice, or the need for approval, independent drivers often use Uber for a few hours at a time.⁵
Looking at drivers who are not employees in both the UK and France, the distribution of the time a driver was online varies considerably, from just a few minutes to more than 8 hours. The median duration was roughly 75 minutes, and when including all intervening offline time less than 60 minutes, the median was 3 hours.⁶ All drivers in these markets — from the least to the most active — have the flexibility to work without notice and for a few hours at a time.
This stands in contrast to employment: While 77% and 71% of online periods for drivers in the UK and France were less than 6 hours long, the same statistic is just 21% for employee drivers of a mega fleet in Spain. Moreover, these employee drivers predominantly work a single, full day shift: 68% of online periods were between 6 and 10 hours long.⁷
Flexibility to work more or less
Another aspect of truly flexible work is the ability to work more or less, and to do so without approval, penalties, or termination.
The stats above demonstrate the prevalence of independent drivers using Uber for a few hours at a time, but do not speak to the flexibility that drivers have to work more or less on a given day. To show this dimension of flexibility, we compare a driver’s daily hours to their average hours, and plot this measure of daily variation with histograms.
In France, we see a relatively flat distribution, meaning that it is common for independent drivers to flex their daily hours significantly away from their daily average. Half of all working days show a divergence from the average of at least 1.5 hours. In Spain, we see a distribution that is much more concentrated around zero, meaning that drivers are not changing their daily hours significantly.
This matters because being able to work — and earn — more or less is an important facet of autonomy, and is one way that independent drivers have the flexibility to balance platform work with other commitments across days, weeks, and months. (In fact, in a recent pan-European survey of more than 16,000 couriers, 26% of respondents said that they would not be able to work at all under a fixed schedule.)
Flexibility to work irregularly
While the stats and chart above demonstrate two aspects of flexibility, and in doing so reveal some differences between employment and independent work, they only begin to show why flexibility is meaningful to independent drivers. Flexibility isn’t an average preference or single choice. It means different things to a single driver or courier, depending on the time, place, earnings opportunities, and personal circumstances. And that makes measuring flexibility challenging.
To show a richer picture of the distinctive flexibility enjoyed by non-employee drivers, we’ve created calendars showing the days and times drivers were online in March 2024. The figure below presents this data for a self-employed driver in France on the left, and for an employee driver in Spain on the right. Both drivers averaged 30–40 hours online per week in Q1.
We immediately see that although these two drivers spend a similar number of hours online each week, the way they fit those hours into the calendar looks very different. And to show that the flexibility enjoyed by independent, non-employee drivers looks different depending on the driver, we’ve created animated versions of these calendars that visualize each driver’s activity on the Uber app across the month. Each animation shows the activity for 50 randomly selected drivers who averaged 30–40 online hours per week in Q1 in France, the UK, and Spain.
In the animations above for non-employee drivers in France and the UK, we see a wide variety of daily, hourly, and weekly times — from consistent to irregular to even patternless working schedules.⁸ In contrast, the animation below for employed drivers in Spain shows the predictable patterns common to shift employment. Employed drivers start working at similar times each day, and work similar days each week. Most drivers work five shifts per week that are roughly 8 hours long, and some take a single, short break during each shift.
Summary
In this post, we’ve used data to compare the working patterns for drivers in France and the UK to employee drivers in Spain. We’ve shown that independent platform work looks very different from employment — and far more flexible, which we hope to study further.
[1] See page 14 of Uber’s 2024 ESG report for an overview of surveys. Other research includes: In Mexico, 96% of earners have said flexibility was a major reason for joining platform work. In Canada, 91% of earners said that flexibility and control of their schedule are extremely or very important. In France, 72% of delivery couriers said flexibility and independence are some of the most important aspects of their work with Uber Eats.
[2] In other markets, the term “fleet” is also used to refer to vehicle suppliers that rent vehicles and do not employ drivers.
[3] Note that Spain has a mix of drivers employed by fleets, taxis, and (a small share of) independent operator-drivers. Aspects of this model are unique to the regulatory conditions in the country and Uber’s business choices over the years.
[4] Consider another scenario: An employee driver might be unexpectedly free for a couple hours and want to work. Even if a vehicle is available, that driver would have to commute to and from their fleet’s office. That inconvenience makes it more difficult for drivers to work without notice and for short periods of time. This would be less of a consideration if fleet employees used their own vehicles, but to our knowledge, such a business model doesn’t exist at scale in global ridesharing today.
[5] Research by Chen et al. explains that this reflect drivers’ preferences (affecting labor supplied) and riders’ needs (affecting labor demanded), and that many drivers chose not to drive at hours when earnings are highest.
[6] For this statistic and the histogram in the following section, “online periods” are times a driver is: (1) “open” and eligible to receive a dispatch; (2) en-route to pickup a passenger; (3) on-trip; or (4) offline for fewer than 60 minutes in between periods of (1), (2), or (3). For example, if a driver is online between 9 and 10am, goes offline between 10 and 10:30am, and returns to spend 10:30 to 11am online, the duration is 2 hours, which includes the 30 minute “break” between 10 and 10:30am. We include (1) and (4) in the duration for comparison purposes only. Including (1) helps us to avoid drawing false conclusions due to country-level differences in utilization. Including both (1) and (4) also addresses skew due to (a) the many short periods of offline time taken by independent drivers, and (b) independent drivers using and/or being engaged by another platform while remaining online, both of which may be less common among employed drivers.
[7] This contrast remains when we aggregate the data to a daily level. Unlike employee drivers, independent drivers commonly spend a few hours online on any given day, and this is true even for the most active drivers.
[8] This mirrors research on Uber drivers and on DoorDash couriers.
