Radical responsibilization or shared burdens: Can cooperative work-platforms reduce precarious work and create stability for gig-workers?

This project is about precarious gig work, and how it may be counteracted.

Gig work has received much attention because of the risks involved for those that work in the gig-economy, in which risks are transferred from those that used to be recognized as employers to the working individual. The debate has however almost exclusively addressed less qualified work such as Foodora food couriers and Uber drivers.

What is less know is that the number of gig-workers doing more qualified and high skilled work also increases, making them subject to what has been called “radical responsibilization” (Fleming, 2017); i.e. they become responsible as individuals for such things as work shortage, competence development, work environment, and social and economic security.As a response to the growth of precarious gig-work, however, new and innovative forms of organizing gig-work are emerging as solutions that may reduce the uncertainty, instability and insecurity for these workers.

The work-platforms are central to these solutions by acting as intermediaries that in various ways connect sellers and buyers of work.

The main problem identified in previous research is that these platforms often govern work in a fashion that is detrimental to the workers, at the same time as they renounce responsibility for the workers’ social and economic security.

However, there is budding hope that work platforms that are controlled by the workers themselves may be one solution to the problem of precarious gig-work. The relevance of this project is that it focuses specifically on those cooperative work-platforms.

The project will create knowledge about if, and if so how, cooperative work platforms may reduce precarious work and create stability and empowerment for gig-workers.

As digital technologies create unprecedented possibilities for new forms of organizing work through platforms, this project will add important insight into how the future of gig-work may be improved for a large group of people.