![]() ![]() This power asymmetry underpins pervasive instances of overwork, and wage theft for completed tasks deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ by clients (for example, Felstiner, 2011). Platform workers are instead designated as self-employed ‘independent contractors’, despite their terms and conditions of work being defined by extensive platform user agreements skewed heavily in favour of requesters and platforms. 12) (see also Aloisi, 2015 Schwab, 2017 OECD, 2017).Ĭritical digital labour studies research has, however, critiqued these claims as ‘utopian’, documenting instead the precarity of online gig workers for whom platforms eschew any legal responsibility as ‘employers’. In short, ‘crowdworkers’ can perform work ‘from anywhere and at any time’ ( Rani and Furrer, 2020: 2) – or what Kessler (2018) (quoting Uber’s advertising campaign) summarises as ‘no shifts, no boss, no limits’ (p. ![]() Whatever the label, multiple commentators have celebrated digital labour platforms for giving workers access to an international client base with minimal barriers to entry, the ability to generate income quickly, and to set their own work schedules more readily balanced with childcare, family, other work, study or leisure. Platforms route out work tasks for execution, mediate invoicing and payment, set minimum terms of service, and rank worker performance through multiple performance metrics based on requester (client) feedback.Īlternative monikers include the gig economy, on-demand economy, and platform economy – these supplanting earlier enthusiastic terminology around the ‘sharing’ economy ( Heeks, 2017 Schor, 2021). Gig workers are paid on a project, piece rate, or hourly basis and must supply and maintain their own capital equipment ( Stanford, 2017). ![]() Work executed through platforms is relabelled ‘tasks’, ‘gigs’, ‘HITs’, ‘services’, ‘rides’ ( De Stefano, 2016) and ranges from: on-demand urban service delivery (food, personal transport, courier services) to remote crowdsourced microtasks (often menial and monotonous, requiring some sort of judgement beyond AI capability, such as image categorisation, tagging, content moderation, information finding) to remote crowdsourcing of more complex white-collar tasks, or ‘cloudworking’ (for example, web and software development, sales and marketing, HR, legal, social media management, graphic design, writing and translation, clerical and data entry, and accounting ( ILO, 2016)). Platforms act as intermediaries, matching time-starved consumers with a large supply of job-starved workers ( The Economist, 2014), whose labour is sold on a one-off, as-needed basis. Recent OII estimates suggest that over 163 million people worldwide secure income from paid work through digital labour platforms ( Kässi et al, 2021), a five-fold increase over the last decade ( ILO, 2021). Underpinning these transformations, internet technologies are used to unbundle production from formal employment, and algorithms to broker, manage and motivate work carried out beyond the spatial and temporal confines of ‘typical’ workplaces by ‘independent contractors’ ( Huws et al, 2016). In the wake of the Great Recession, labour scholars have explored a series of dramatic, digital transformations of work and labour relations accompanying the extraordinary growth of the ‘platform economy’. Little is known about the gender dimensions of platform-facilitated labor. Third, in response to these new insights, and based on calls from women gig workers themselves, it sets out a series of new directions for extending this urgent multidisciplinary research agenda. Second, in contrast to widespread celebratory claims that platforms disrupt stubborn gender labour market inequalities, the analysis identifies significant gendered constraints on women’s algorithmic visibilities and abilities to compete for gig work online, alongside multiple health and safety issues among women gig workers undocumented in previous research. First, it widens the analytical focus of the digital labour research agenda to recognise the role of workers’ gender identities and uneven household gender divisions of care in shaping the operation and outcomes of digital labour platforms, in ways that remain ‘hidden in the cloud’. The article makes three original contributions. The analysis is built from original interviews with 49 women in the UK using a range of popular remote crowdwork platforms (including PeoplePerHour, Upwork, TaskRabbit, Freelancer) to access desk-based, white-collar gig work from home. Millions of women worldwide find work through digital labour platforms, yet remain largely invisible within the expansive digital labour research agenda. This article explores the gendered dynamics of labouring on digital labour platforms and gives voice to women gig workers. ![]()
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