Sceptics or supporters? Consumers’ views of work in the gig economy

• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12157

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Consumers and work in the gig economy 1

New Technology, Work and Employment 35:1

ISSN 1468-005X

Sceptics or supporters? Consumers’ views of

work in the gig economy

Joshua Healy , Andreas Pekarek

and Ariadne Vromen

Labour-management practices and workers’ experiences in the

gig economy are topics of major interest for researchers, reg-

ulators and the general public. Platform companies project a

vision of gig workers as autonomous freelancers, but perva-

sive features of their own labour practices, along with workers’

traits, create new vulnerabilities and risks. Efforts to improve

gig workers’ conditions to date have made in-roads without

achieving a general shift in platforms’ practices or gig work-

ers’ conditions. In this paper, we explore how another, less-rec-

ognised stakeholder group—consumers—shapes the conditions

of gig work. Drawing on Australian public opinion data, we

study consumers’ views of the gig economy and ask whether

these will help or hinder pro-worker campaigns. While con-

sumers are sympathetic to gig workers’ nancial plight, they

also see benets in the work’s exibility and opportunities for

jobseekers. We explain how our ndings can inform advocacy

campaigns and further gig economy research.

Keywords: consumers, ethical consumption, future of work, gig

economy, labour standards, on-demand workforce, platform

capitalism.

Introduction

The proliferation of new and increasingly diverse digital labour platforms is one of the

major economic developments of recent years. By enabling consumers to nd and

transact with many producers at lower cost, platforms have given rise to an ‘on-de-

mand’ or ‘gig’ economy that is increasingly important in both physical (e.g. food deliv-

ery) and online (e.g. data entry) markets (De Stefano, 2016; Howcroft and

Bergvall-Kåreborn, 2019; Kuhn and Galloway, 2019; Wood et al., 2019). The leading

platforms—Uber, Deliveroo, and many others—are global brands that are quickly be-

coming corporate titans (Conger and de la Merced, 2019). As labour market intermedi-

aries, platforms account for 1–3 per cent of all paid work in advanced economies and

this share is ‘growing fast’ (Schwellnus et al., 2019: 8).

Various economic benets have been ascribed to this burgeoning platform economy,

mainly due to improved consumer choice and convenience (Minie and Wiltshire,

Joshua Healy (joshua.healy@unimelb.edu.au) Centre for Workplace Leadership, The University of

Melbourne, Australia.

Andreas Pekarek, Department of Management and Marketing, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Ariadne Vromen, Department of Government and International Relations, The University of Sydney,

Australia

2 New Technology, Work and Employment

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

2016; Pasquale, 2016). Assessments of platforms’ impact on working conditions, how-

ever, are often more critical. In contrast to a prevailing company rhetoric of choice and

entrepreneurship (Roberts and Zietsma, 2018; Ravenelle, 2019), gig work is seen as in-

secure and exploitative by many labour and organisational scholars (Stanford, 2017;

Van Doorn, 2017; Aroles et al., 2019). Flexibility for workers is constrained, in practice,

by performance surveillance and intense competition for the best-paid tasks (Scheiber,

2017; Lehdonvirta, 2018; Goods et al., 2019).

Debates about how to protect and advance working conditions in the gig econ-

omy are fractious. Worker-led campaigns seek improvements via an array of new

and old organising techniques, but platforms vigorously resist attempts to redene

their responsibilities as employers. Some platforms have modied their labour

practices at the edges in the face of pressure from workers and/or regulators—

such as by recommending (but not requiring) minimum wage compliance, or facili-

tating workers’ access to private insurance—but these concessions are overshadowed

by a larger ‘reclassication risk’ to platforms’ business model (AlphaBeta, 2019).

That is, the possibility that gig workers currently treated as contractors will be

deemed by regulators to be de facto employees, with correspondingly greater enti-

tlements (Cherry and Aloisi, 2017).

Legal determinations about this vexing classication issue, to date, are mixed; no

universal or consistent precedent has emerged. The future of the gig economy thus

remains unpredictable, with labour advocates and platforms often at odds over its

benets and drawbacks. Meanwhile, many governments are moving cautiously in de-

ciding how, or if, to impose new regulations on platforms. There are marked cross-na-

tional differences, for instance, in how governments have responded to Uber’s market

entry (Thelen, 2018).

Along with workers and governments, consumers are another critical stakeholder

group in the gig economy, although their inuence has until recently attracted less

academic interest. Thelen and colleagues have argued that platform companies seek to

acquire a new form of power, by cultivating the loyalty and, occasionally, more active

support, of consumers for whom platform services constitute ‘part of the infrastruc-

ture of their lives’ (Culpepper and Thelen, 2019: 8). If successfully nurtured, these

bonds of consumer dependency give platforms signicant leverage in political and

regulatory processes, allowing them to portray critics as hostile to ‘consumer choice’

(Rahman and Thelen, 2019). However, because people have multiple identities that are

cued by different issues—not only as consumers but also as citizens, taxpayers,

co-workers and so on—public support for platforms is neither inevitable nor uncondi-

tional (Thelen, 2018).

To understand whether consumers will become, and remain, platforms’ sceptics or sup-

porters, we need more nely grained evidence about their views. We contribute to this

endeavour, by exploring consumers’ views about one of the most contested issues in plat-

form capitalism: gig work. We argue that consumers’ support for change or, conversely,

their tolerance for the status quo is an important and understudied factor inuencing how

gig work develops. Prior research in different contexts suggests that, while consumers may

support labour-rights campaigns for ethical reasons, they can also be mobilised against

such actions, if these are seen to unfairly limit choice and convenience. The gig economy is

arguably the most important arena in which these tensions over consumer choice, working

conditions and business ethics are playing out.

In this paper, we present detailed empirical evidence about consumers’ engagement

with and views about work in a key section of the gig economy, drawing on a unique

Australian public opinion data set. We focus on locally delivered gig work, as distinct

from its remote and online varieties (Wood et al., 2019). Our approach is exploratory,

rather than hypothesis-driven, given the novelty of our study aims. We seek to answer

one central research question: Are consumers’ views likely to help or hinder efforts to ad-

vance working conditions in the gig economy?

As a foundation for our analysis, we draw from and link two disparate strands of

research, which are canvassed in the next two sections: one on platforms’ labour prac-

tices and gig work; the other on consumers and ‘ethical consumption’. To situate our