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The gig economy is going global, bringing with it benefits but also dangers, a new report has revealed. Among workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, gig labour offers flexibility and increased income, but also downward pressure on pay, long hours, discrimination and lack of social contact.
Read more: Gig economy workers should get holiday and sick pay, Taylor Review recommends
The three-year Oxford Internet Institute study shows how the growth of the internet has changed the nature of labour. No longer unavoidably place-based, workers are instead located across the planet: translating in Nairobi; transcribing in Vietnam; writing SEO text in the Philippines.
To its advocates, this “virtual migration” holds significant benefits, especially in emerging economies. If anyone can work from anywhere, the theory – described in more detail in an associated academic paper - holds that this can bring good jobs to areas of the world where work is hard to come by. But, after 125 interviews and an online survey of 456 workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, the researchers found the reality was more complicated – thanks, in large part to the role of global digital platforms.
Platforms are what make gig labour different to traditional outsourcing. Gone are the difficulties of “business process outsourcing”. Firms can now use platforms such as Freelancer, Fiverr and Upwork to hire workers based anywhere.
These platforms can be an important source of income: 68 per cent of survey respondents to the survey said the gig economy makes a significant difference to their household income. But the way they function also isolates workers, both socially and in terms of labour protections.
With no choice but to work from home, employees feel detached: 74 per cent told the researchers they "rarely or never" communicate face-to-face with other people who use platforms. Ninety-four per cent said they were not involved in any sort of labour union or worker association.
“At the moment many workers feel (and are made to feel) quite atomised,” says Mark Graham, professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, and lead author of the study. “They are made to feel that if they don't take a job and accept its conditions, many other workers from around the world will quickly take their place.”
One effect of this atomisation is discrimination. “In principle,” the researchers write, “platforms welcome any qualified worker regardless of gender, origin or other attributes. However, in practice, workers at the global margins often feel they are being discriminated against because of their countries of origin – sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.”
Quantitative analyses of a month of anonymous transactions – 61,447 completed projects – provided by one major platform showed evidence of “statistical discrimination”, with clients (who come almost exclusively from high-income countries) assuming workers (from low- and middle-income countries) supplied less valuable labour than the richer counterparts. This could be corrected by a strong rating – all the platforms have Uber-like reputational feedback systems. But what might seem, at face value, to encourage good work, actually created a set of middlemen who used their existing high scores to take tasks, then re-outsource them to other gig workers.
The researchers describe the story of Maya, a 26-year-old Malaysian woman studying for her Master’s degree, who specialises in writing. "She applied for an SEO writing task, suggesting a price of $25 rather than the listed suggestion of $50, but the job went to another contractor (who had a higher positive feedback rating) and who had requested a price of $75. This contractor offered the job to Maya for just $7.50, an amount below her minimum wage.” Feeling justly hard done by, Maya felt forced to accept the job. The situation left her with no choice.
What makes this kind of practice possible is the size of the pool of potential workers online – what economists call “oversupply.” The researchers found an oversupply of 1,576,600 workers on one major platform. Put simply, there are more workers than jobs, and, as Graham notes, this is likely to get worse than better.
“My biggest worry is about what happens as the next few billion come online,” Graham tells WIRED. “The vast majority of them will be joining the internet from low- and middle-income countries, and many of them will be looking for online work. Unless there is a simultaneous massive growth in the supply of digital jobs, we're going to see a huge oversupply of labour. This will put downwards pressure on both wages and benefits.”
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What can governments, platforms, workers, and consumers do to bring about a fairer world of digital work? The researchers suggest a variety of solutions, including data sharing to let workers move more easily from one platform to another and regulation by governments to limit online gig work monopolies. They also propose the creation of an online labour equivalent of the Fairtrade Foundation: the “Fairwork Foundation”.
“Fairtrade showed that enough people can be made to care about working conditions upstream in the production networks of the coffee they drink or the chocolate they eat,” says Graham. “There is no reason why we shouldn't move that model across.”
Read more about the Taylor Review on Modern Employment Practices
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
