The advent of the ‘gig economy’, enabling the hiring of service workers through online platforms, is considered to be amongst the most significant economic changes of the past decade. A broad variety of services are transacted on these online labour markets, including jobs to be completed on-site – for example taxi services (via Uber), handicraft services (via TaskRabbit), cleaning jobs (via Helpling), or food delivery (e.g. via Deliveroo). But also a broad range of jobs to be completed online are increasingly transacted via platforms, such as image tagging (e.g. via Amazon Mechanical Turk) or programming, translations and design tasks (via Upwork).
The socio-economic consequences are massive, ranging from increased work autonomy to the possible erosion of labour standards. The latter is particularly acute, because gig work is not covered by traditional employment legislation. Given the wide-spread expectation that the gig economy will grow substantially over the years to come, the question of whether the gig economy endangers labour rights is salient to scholars, policy-makers, and the public alike. To enable a meaningful regulation, research about the gig economy is urgently needed – yet hardly existent. The project takes up this challenge by asking how national labour-market institutions influence (1) the participation of national workforces in the gig economy and (2) its regulation.