Platform Labour and Gig Work Futures: Uncovering Women’s Hidden Digital Labour

James, A

Platform Labour and Gig Work Futures: Uncovering Women’s Hidden Digital Labour

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Al James ORCiD

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Abstract

This chapter explores the series of dramatic, digital transformations of work and labour relations that have accompanied the exponential growth of the ‘platform economy’ over the last two decades. Over 163 million people worldwide now find paid work through digital labour platforms, whose instant availability is pitched to clients 24/7, and who are managed remotely by online algorithms through apps on their smartphones. The chapter offers a critical introduction to three key areas of this expansive cross-disciplinary research agenda, as part growing feminist research on platform labour. First, it outlines the distinctive growth dynamic, uneven geographies, and sectoral composition of digital labour platforms; their rootedness in earlier employment practices of outsourcing, flexibilisation, and intermediation; and the growing presence of women as hidden platform labour. Second, it juxtaposes widespread celebratory claims around these ‘emancipatory work futures’ with multiple precarities, hardships and exclusions experienced by women platform workers, which were brought into even greater relief during COVID-19. Third, it identifies some innovative coping tactics and resistance strategies that platform workers have developed individually and collectively to reduce their vulnerabilities and to reimagine and redesign platforms, user agreements, algorithmic systems of control, and platform policy governance, in ways which would make their everyday work-lives easier. These include worker-led organising strategies to recapture and operationalise some of the myriad data that platform workers themselves create through their everyday work practices; alongside platform ranking initiatives designed to name and shame platforms with poor worker support and to encourage progressive change through showcasing best practice. In seeking to enrol the next generation of students and scholars in taking these debates forward, the chapter identifies important research questions that might usefully motivate undergraduate and postgraduate independent research projects to contribute to the advancement of understanding and knowledge in this field, through much-needed (and highly feasible) engagements with women platform workers.