Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods

By Mark Graham, Isis Amelie Hjorth, Vili Lehdonvirta. Transfer, 2017

948 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east Asia, this article highlights four key concerns for workers: bargaining power, economic inclusion, intermediated value chains, and upgrading. The article shows that although there are important and tangible benefits for a range of workers, there are also a range of risks and costs that unduly affect the livelihoods of digital workers. Building on those concerns, it then concludes with a reflection on four broad strategies – certification schemes, organising digital workers, regulatory strategies and democratic control of online labour platforms – that could be employed to improve conditions and livelihoods for digital workers.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad1ab4b1f4e4e595300f33372abb1b9f55ff7cf9

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Citations in the corpus

Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy (2018, positive): “In particular, it was marked by high levels of inter-worker competition with few labour protections and a global oversupply of labour relative to demand (Graham et al., 2017a; Graham and Anwar, in press).”
Flexibility capital and flexibility justice in smart energy systems (2019, background): “This process has unfolded already in the labour domain as has been widely researched (see Berg, 2016; Graham et al., 2017) but not clarified through the lenses of flexibility capital or flexibility justice.”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, background): “When an algorithm, instead of a person, is on the other side of a managerial relationship, it can create an additional obstacle for workers to question or challenge the directions they are given or have a say in the labor process (Graham et al., 2017; Silberman, Irani, & Ross, 2010).”
Regulating work in the gig economy: What are the options? (2017, background): “As Graham et al. (2017) point out, at the conclusion of their study of digital workers in sub-Saharan Africa and South-east Asia, The bargaining power of workers is undermined by the size and scope of the global market for labour; the anonymity that the digital medium affords is a double-edged…”
Labour process theory and the gig economy (2018, methodology): “As a result of the great level of variation that characterises these platforms and the kind of work involved, a plurality of sometimes conflicting terms have been used to identify this context (Howcroft and Bergvall-Kareborn, 2018), such as ‘crowd work’ (Huws and Joyce, 2016) and ‘online labour mark”
Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers (2019, background): “…opportunities to exert their agency – particularly so for workers in Africa, where the high proportion of informal economy and a lack of employment opportunities in local labour markets already constrain workers’ ability to earn livelihoods (Anwar and Graham, Forthcoming; Graham et al., 2017).”