Abstract
Drawing on numerous case studies, the article examines the specific conditions for organising and managing the employment relationship on digital labour platforms. We show that these conditions are largely due to the disruptive nature of the process of digitising the employee–employer relationship. Digitisation replaces the employment contract of the standard employment relationship with a triangular “worker–platform–customer” relationship. In this model, the boundaries of the employment relationship become opaque and more uncertain: the bond of subordination disappears, labour law gives way to commercial law, and the figures of the employer and the employee lose institutional visibility. The article seeks to clarify the contours of this “in-between” model and proposes the notion of the “grey zone,” borrowed from geopolitics. This notion of the “employment grey zone” makes it possible to shift the researcher's perspective by focusing attention on practices and “intermediate spaces of regulation,” which are relatively autonomous and endowed with their own dynamics. This framework of analysis broadens the perspective and helps to better understand the impact on the employment relationship of new forms of governance in a context of a digital turning point. The article first returns to the notion of the “grey zone” and argues on the foundations and interest of mobilising this notion in the field of industrial relations studies. The links between digital platforms and grey zones are then examined. In particular, we show that digital governance is based on a confusion of powers between coordination and leadership. The reflection continues in a third phase with an examination of digital management practices in two areas: the control of the activity of connected workers, and the production and management of externalities resulting from the operation of platforms. The article concludes with a discussion on the heuristic value of the notion of grey zones of employment.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Daniele Di Nunzio, Fondazione Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Italy Carlos J
We propose to use the notion of the “grey zone,” a notion that comes from geopolitics and that, when imported into the field of industrial relations studies, offers the advantage of a better contextualisation of our research object and leads to new questions and new perspectives for analysis
We would like to return to the heuristic interest of the notion of the grey zone
Summary
To understand the close relationship between digital platforms and grey zones, it is worthwhile to first remind ourselves of Marx’s conception of the labour process, as developed in Volume 1 of Capital. All the more so because the way in which these components are organised and the way in which the products of labour are designed and distributed on the goods market mean that they are placed directly under its responsibility and control In this approach, the employment relationship is the hub of the capitalist business: it represents this specific moment when the worker’s labour power, negotiated and sold to “moneybags” for a given time, is consumed in a productive fashion before being remunerated; this relationship makes wages (and wage earners) the keystone of social relations of domination as well as being an essential condition to reproduce the workers’ living conditions (Lautier and Tortajada, 1978). The Notion of “Employment Grey Zone” as an Intermediate Space of Regulation: The
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