Abstract
Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth. (Zola, 1885: 364)
It has now been almost 10 years since platform capitalism and the digital gig economy have become central topics of interest in labour-related academic research. Almost every journal issue or conference programme in labour law, organisation studies, labour sociology, or political economy contains at least one contribution on labour platforms, algorithmic management, or digital work. Today, we are entering a new phase in this research programme. On the one hand, studies are increasingly moving away from ‘platform capitalism’ as a general category, opting instead for more fine-grained approaches that respect the heterogeneity among platforms and workers. The labour conditions of online crowdworkers in Kenya are different from the problems of Uber drivers in the United States or Korean tech freelancers on UpWork. On the other hand, students of the gig economy are increasingly focussing on worker resistance and collective action. Some critically evaluate the opportunity structures for self-organised or union-led action (Della Porta et al., 2023; Yasih, 2023), whereas others debate the merits of alternatives to private platform companies, like platform cooperatives (Christiaens, 2023; Sandoval, 2019; Scholz, 2017).
The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy delivers a striking status quaestionis of current research on the digital gig economy. The focus is on labour sociology, industrial relations theory, and organisation studies, but students of labour law and political economy will definitely be impressed by the broad range and quality of the research collected in this handbook. Particularly remarkable is the book’s comprehensiveness with 34 contributions on a diverse array of topics. Some of these chapters are devoted to giving general overviews of a particular issue in recent literature. The feminist perspective on trade-unionism articulated by Rebecca Zahn and Nicole Busby (chapter 10) or Kurt Van Daele’s overview of protests among food delivery couriers (chapter 14) are noteworthy. Other chapters go into depth with specific case studies. Highlights here are, for instance, the critique of the language of labour market inclusion by Patrizia Zanoni and Frederick Harry Pitts (chapter 3), Niels Van Doorn’s interview-based study of migrant experiences in the Global North (chapter 11), or the study of Japanese gig workers’ complacency with precarity by Saori Shibata (chapter 28).
Part 1 focuses on the main conceptual frameworks recurrent in studies of labour platforms coming from labour sociology, organisation studies, and human resource management. The chapters discuss key terms like ‘labour precarity’ and ‘algorithmic surveillance’, but also highlight some less obvious conceptual dimensions, like the role of financial capital in the emergence of platform companies. Part 2 highlights the heterogenous composition of gig workers. The chapters address not only the global dispersion of people working for online labour platforms, but also the intersections labour precarity with other forms of subordination, like patriarchy and migration status. Part 3 subsequently moves to the possibilities of collective action. The chapters mainly document how worker-activists in the gig economy relate to the broader labour movement. Often, they act through self-organised networks, but recently gig workers have found contact with both indie unions and established labour representatives. Unfortunately, missing from these reflections are initiatives that move beyond collective resistance against established labour platforms towards the construction of alternative imaginaries. Platform cooperativism, for instance, is only mentioned sporadically throughout the handbook. Parts 4 and 5 are, finally, the most extensive sections, taking up approximately half of the handbook. They offer case studies of the gig economy in particular regions or countries in both the Global North and South. They consequently not only explain well-known local issues, like the Proposition 22 Campaign in California or regulatory attempts in the European Union, but also underrepresented local affairs, such as cloudwork in the Philippines or techno-nationalist government interventions in India.
Many topics are covered and yet the variation between overviews and case studies avoids the feeling of reading a bland list of relevant facts and theories about the gig economy. A red thread binding these contributions together is how the book offers tools for decentring a few stereotypical images of platform-mediated labour and gig workers. Etymologically, the term ‘stereotype’ derives from 18th-century French printing presses, where ‘stéréotype’ designated a permanently fixed printing plate. Rather than manually setting the printing plates for each page of a famous book with every new printed edition, publishers could invest in permanent ‘stereotypes’ to be reused with each new printing of the same book. Only later did the word start designating fixed psychological prejudices. People impose pre-existing images unto new situations as if they have permanent printing plates in their heads with which they keep reading their environment as if the letters never change.
Research on the gig economy has, in the meantime, also produced its own stereotypes. When people think about gig workers, they often imagine a male Uber driver in the Global North. This person is supposedly too isolated for political struggle and his workplace experience can be summed up as that of lacking a standardised job in formal employment. This framing starts from the traditional white working-class male and subsequently describes his downfall in the precarity and isolation of the gig economy. The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy helps decentring this stereotype by (a) displacing the dominant focus on Uber, (b) focusing on the Global South and migrant workers, (c) highlighting the presence of women, and (d) moving the workplace experience away from one-sided narratives of frustration in the face of insurmountable injustice:
(a) Juliet Schor et al. (2020) have highlighted the issue of ‘Uber-centricity’ of research about the digital gig economy (p. 834). Given Uber’s astounding and well-documented ruthlessness in worker surveillance, this focus is understandable, yet it risks hiding characteristics of other labour platforms.
(b) While signifiers like ‘working class’ usually evoke images of white men in industrial occupations, workers in the gig economy are often migrants. Most gig work is also conducted not in the Global North but in the South, where informal labour markets have been the norm for centuries. Furthermore, even in the Global North, some parts of the gig economy, like food delivery or ride hailing, are often populated by migrant workers. They compare their predicament not to the status of the traditional working class but to the labour conditions in their own country of origin. Resisting platform companies is then not only a matter of expressing workplace grievances, but also of negotiating risks of, for instance, unemployment and deportation.
(c) While most workers in food delivery or ride hailing are male, other sectors of the gig economy have a stronger female presence, like online crowdwork and domestic labour platforms. These workers sometimes have other demands and aspirations than their male peers. Traditional 9-to-5 employment contracts might, for example, not be a desirable goal for female gig workers with familial care duties. If labour activists or unions wish to expand their base beyond the male workforce, they should reorient their stereotypical assumptions about what gig workers want.
(d) Gig workers are not passive victims of one-way oppression without escape. They have successfully resisted platform companies both individually and collectively. Individuals often engage in ‘algorithm hacking’ to increase their incomes, while groups have been known to form their own unions or online communities. These forms of direct self-organisation have often formed the basis of collective action and political victories.
In sum, The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy facilitates a more fine-grained approach to the gig economy than many other introductions. The book is aware of the internal heterogeneity of the sector and its workers, and highlights the internal differences through a mosaic of contributions on diverse subtopics.