GIG WORK AND THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: CONCEPTUAL AND REGULATORY CHALLENGES.

Authorde Ruyter, Alex

The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Future of Work

The notion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) was coined by Prof. Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum. He stated that:

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing. (1) New technologies thus have the potential to transform work and workplaces, displace jobs, create new jobs, and impact living conditions. An optimistic scenario suggests that gig work can increase savings, productivity, and flexibility. (2) A pessimistic scenario suggests major job losses, increased insecurity in employment, de-skilling, and growing inequalities; indeed, many of the "new" forms of work are seen as variations of old forms of day labor and irregular employment. (3) In turn there are many predictions that set out the sectors, industries, and jobs that are most affected by the technological developments associated with 4IR. For example, a report by McKinsey & Company suggested that automation will "... accelerate the shift in required job skills that we have seen over the past 15 years... the strongest growth in demand will be for technological skills, the smallest category today which will rise by 55 percent and by 2030 will represent 17 percent of hours worked, up from 11 percent in 2016." In contrast, "basic cognitive skills, which include basic data input and processing, will decline by 15 percent, falling to 14 percent of hours worked, from 18 percent." (4)

In a literature review of three emerging technologies the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development suggested that there was very little systematic evidence that detailed the impact of the technologies on work and workplaces.i In addition, it found that much of the research was based on anecdote and speculation and that the available evidence suggested that "technology is augmenting what people are doing and enabling some degree of role expansion for employees." (5)

Such predictions are very dependent on access to and the application of technology; the industrial structure of the economies being examined; the policies surrounding employment, investment, and research; and the infrastructure available to support the new technologies. The many predictions and scenarios are based on the characteristics of an advanced economy; it is doubtful that the impact of such labor market and living standards are as significant in developing economies. Into these futuristic discussions, gig work has emerged as an issue that manifests many of the features of 4IR: platform-based; driven by mobile and digital technology; containing conditions of easy entry for providers and workers; and from daily observation, appearing to be extensive in urban environments as large numbers of delivery agents pedal and ride across cities delivering their cargoes of pre-prepared food. Gig work is a suitable starting point to examine the "new" economy in action and to consider its growth, operations, and consequences.

Hence, the purpose of the paper is to explain the nature of gig work. In so doing we wish to examine how widespread it is and who carries it out. We also critically examine what is "new" about gig work. As such, we discuss the discourse about it in terms of two polar views, namely gig work as self-employed and flexible employment versus gig work as a return to on-call labor found in previous industrial epochs. Finally, we consider some of the implications of gig work from taxation and welfare to employment regulation and health.

Gig Work and its Development

Gig work, as a form of self-employment, strictly speaking is a contemporary labor market phenomenon analogous to the current century. However, it does have a lengthy series of historical antecedents that can trace their emergence to the pre-capitalist period in Europe. (6) During the 1980s and 1990s, non-standard and contingent forms of work, of which we include gig working as an example, began to increase as a share of total employment in industrialized economies. (7) The causes underpinning this growth were a mixture of supply-side and demand-side factors. Essentially these were the feminization of the workforce--particularly with the growth of part-time employment and service sector jobs--combined with regulatory developments in labor and product markets that emphasized market-led regulation, lower trade barriers, and the privatization of state assets. (8)

Gig work can be found across a range of sectors that involve personal services delivered through a web-based platform. (9) The owners of the platforms intermediate between service providers and agents who deliver the services. Typically, it involves food delivery, delivery from retail stores, accommodation, and travel services. The platform providers are agents who charge or receive a commission from the service provider and the consumer. Within the process, the "gig worker" is responsible for delivering the service to the consumer. In this process, the web-based platform intermediates between producer and consumer, between gig worker and producer, and between gig worker and consumer. The platform brings all of the parties together. In turn, the section of the mosaic that the gig worker occupies may be further complicated by whether the gig worker is self-employed or employed by an agency that is contracted to deliver services. From this, it follows that the position of the gig worker in terms of their status, statutory entitlements, and conditions of employment are ambiguous. (10) The gig worker could, depending upon the organization and configuration of the service delivery process, be a self-employed contractor, an agency worker, or an on-call employee.

Of course, gig work is only novel in the sense that labor supply is matched to labor demand by an online platform, and that each engagement of work is considered as a separate contract. It has been suggested that such a definition of gig work is too narrow, and that other forms of non-standard work such as temporary agency work or zero-hours contracts could also be mediated in such a fashion." De Stefano, for example, defines gig work as being either "crowd-work," in which a number of firms and workers are connected via an online platform, or "on-demand work," whereby a single-user firm engages an online platform to match workers to demand for services. (12) It is clear that this latter category definition of gig work could also be coterminous with agency work. However, temporary work--or contingent work as it is often referred to in the United States--has a longer historical pedigree, while online platform work has only really emerged as a subject of academic inquiry in the last five years. (13) Thus, it is to this particular form of work that we devote the remainder of this article.

How Widespread is Gig Work?

The labor force framework that underpins labor market statistics is linked to an epoch in which full-time jobs were the norm and labor-market activity required only that one was involved in an active job search or employed a certain number of hours. In addition, the estimates were produced at discrete intervals: monthly, quarterly, or annually. The focus was toward macroeconomics, tracking the state of the economy in terms of jobs, labor-market activity, and unemployment.

In contrast, measurement of the gig economy generally is problematic due to difficulties in operationalizing this type of work in terms of conventional labor-force survey nomenclatures. In addition, labor-force surveys tend to ask...

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