On-demand Labor Research Articles

The Gig Economy and Labour Market Dynamics

The gig economy, which is defined as transient and adaptable work arrangements facilitated by digital platforms, has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years, profoundly altering labor market dynamics. This profound transformation has introduced a multitude of repercussions for workers, simultaneously offering both opportunities and challenges. In one aspect, it entails providing individuals with heightened autonomy, the opportunity to cultivate multiple income streams, and an improved balance between work and personal life, thereby enabling them to autonomously shape their career paths. Conversely, increasing concerns on job security, workers rights and protection, and employment benefits arouse discussions of economic welfare of gig workers. For businesses, the gig economy represents a transformative force, promoting cost-effective, on-demand labor while necessitating responsive strategies to manage a decentralized and flexible workforce. As a signal of a new era in labour market dynamics, gig economy has significant impacts on the broader labour force and traditional employment patterns. Grappling with of crucial task, policymakers are in urgent need of finding a balance that preserves the rights and finance security of the labour force without mitigating enthusiasm of development and economic prosperity. Comprehending the multifaceted influences of the gig economy is paramount in formulating policies, thereby building a labor market that embraces opportunities and challenges arising from this transformative change and ultimately facilitating a future work of greater equity and adaptability.

Toward a More Inclusive Gig Economy: Risks and Opportunities for Workers with Disabilities

Little is known about whether and how workers with disabilities participate in the many on-demand labor platforms that make up the growing gig economy. Understanding disabled gig workers' experiences is a vital step toward developing inclusive and equitable labor platforms. Through interviews with 24 disabled gig workers and observational fieldwork, we present a rich, in-depth picture of the opportunities and challenges presented by four main types of gig work (ridesharing, delivery, crowdwork, and freelancing) for workers with a wide range of disabilities. We identify a key tension: gig work can be a vital source of needed income for workers who have been excluded from traditional workplaces, but at the same time, the structure of gig platforms present workers with a host of new disability-related challenges, including around algorithmic control and performance evaluation. We discuss how this tension plays out in terms of how workers engage in gig work and protect themselves from risk. We also call attention to how many workers can face complicated, intersectional challenges based on multiple marginalized identities in addition to disability, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Our work contributes to research on the gig economy by centering the perspectives of workers who are marginalized based on disability and other identities. We show how workers face several penalties based on disability, including shouldering extensive invisible labor to mitigate the challenges they face. Based on our interviews, we suggest several ways that on-demand labor platforms can be designed to be more inclusive of disability, including how to improve the accessibility of various tasks while mitigating the discrimination and negative interactions faced by disabled workers.

Who Bears the Burden of a Pandemic? COVID-19 and the Transfer of Risk to Digital Platform Workers

In this paper, we analyze the recessionary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital platform workers. The crisis has been described as a great work-from-home experiment, with platform ecosystems presenting as its most advanced form. Our analysis differentiates the direct (health) and indirect (economic) risks incurred by workers in order to critically assess the portrayal of platforms as buffers against crisis-induced layoffs. We submit that platform-mediated labor may eventually increase precarity, without necessarily reducing health risks for workers. Our argument is based on a comparison of the three main categories of platform work—“on-demand labor” (gigs such as delivery and transportation), “online labor” (tasks performed remotely, such as data annotation), and “social networking labor” (content generation and moderation). We discuss the strategies that platforms deploy to transfer risk from clients onto workers, thus deepening existing power imbalances between them. These results question the problematic equivalence between work-from-home and platform labor. Instead of attaining the advantages of the former in terms of direct and indirect risk mitigation, an increasing number of platformized jobs drift toward high economic and insuppressible health risks.

Splintered structures and workers without a workplace: How should safety science address the fragmentation of organizations?

Organizational fragmentation presents a challenge to prominent safety perspectives hinged upon the traditional concept of the organization. The continuing disjunction in the workplace has reached new heights in the recent phenomenon of platform-mediated work (PMW), where workers engage in on-demand labor mediated by platforms. In this paper, the explanatory power of some influential organizational perspectives in safety science is explored in relation to PMW.Neoteric business models combined with platform technology introduce alterations in accountability, goal conflicts, and social relations. These changes necessitate adjustments in our perspectives to address the safety challenges of a fissured, contemporary work-life.This qualitative study based on interviews with 37 delivery platform workers and managers in the Nordic region and observations of two online courier communities reveals features that diverge from traditional work settings. Sociotechnical systems thinking is applied in examining goal conflicts arising from work contexts where the traditional employer-employee relationships are becoming transformed into two-sided marketplaces for clients and platform workers selling labor. The long tradition for addressing culture in safety science is then considered in analyzing its applicability to PMW. Finally, we reflect on how the safety research community can address the fragmentation of the organization.

Being a Deliveroo Rider: Practices of Platform Labor in Nijmegen and Berlin

On-demand delivery platforms have become a common feature of urban economies across the globe. Noted for their hyper-outsourced, “lean” business models and reliance on independent contractors, these companies evade traditional employer obligations while still controlling workers through complex algorithmic management techniques. Using food delivery platform Deliveroo as a case-study, this paper investigates the diverse array of practices that on-demand workers carry out in order to enact this new platform labor arrangement in different spatial contexts. One of us conducted an auto-ethnographic project, working as a Deliveroo Rider in Nijmegen and Berlin for a period of nine months. Additionally, we interviewed 13 fellow platform workers. The findings reveal the motley, contingent, and conditional ways in which on-demand labor comes together on the ground. The paper concludes with discussing the uneven distribution of these practices across locations and social groups, and the sometimes contradictory impacts they have on the structure of platform labor.

More Than Money: Correlation among Worker Demographics, Motivations, and Participation in Online Labor Market

Most prior research about online labor markets examines the dynamics of a single work platform and either worker demographics or motivations associated with that site. How demographics and motives correlate with each other, and with engagement across multiple platforms, remains understudied. To bridge this gap, we analyze survey responses from 1700 people working across four different online labor platforms to understand: What motivates people to participate in online labor markets and how do individual motives correspond to larger demographic patterns and structural dynamics that more broadly shape traditional employment opportunities? Our results show that age, gender, education, and number of income sources help explain who does ondemand work, when they do it, and why. Even more striking, these broader social dimensions of work correlate with when and why individuals work across multiple on-demand platform companies. Together, these factors structure ondemand labor markets more than individual choice or the presumed “flexibility” of on-demand work alone.

The Rating Game: The Discipline of Uber’s User-Generated Ratings

On-demand labor platforms are built around user-generated rating systems that entail consumers’ monitoring of workers as a tool for algorithmic labor management. The user-generated ratings can directly determine workers’ employability. Workers are thus under pressure to score well, though they may lack knowledge about the performance metrics. Using in-depth interviews with Uber drivers, this article examines how Uber’s rating system as an engine of anxiety shapes drivers’ work practices through processes of surveillance and normalization. Specifically, drivers are prompted to play the rating game, a game that pressures them toward the normalization of platform surveillance and self-discipline for maximizing their ratings. The internalization of ratings is channeled through drivers’ reactive practices in the rating game—that is, drivers’ modification of their behavior in response to being evaluated and monitored. This article considers the socio-technical conditions under which drivers are subject to the platform surveillance and disciplinary power.

Platform learning and on-demand labor: sociotechnical projections on the future of education and work

ABSTRACTPlatform learning harnesses the operating capabilities and logics of digital platforms such as Uber and Amazon to imagine synergies between on-demand labor and on-demand learning, transforming living into learning, and learning into labor. This paper seeks to make three original contributions to critical analysis of platform learning. First, as an analytical foundation, it brings together two distinct strands of scholarship on the evolving relationship between learning and late capitalism, and the digitalization of education policy and governance, synthesizing them in relation to questions concerning labor and work in the emergent on-demand economy. Second, it draws on these ideas to engage the learning and work projections of two strategic forecasting organizations, Institute for the Future and Knowledge Works, as case studies of platform learning. Third, the last section of the paper builds on the sociotechnical projections of these organizations as the basis for a critique of the political economy of platform learning, highlighting four areas requiring further inquiry: (1) value extraction; (2) exploitation of labor; (3) efficacy and inequality; (4) imagination.

Trusted strangers: Carework platforms’ cultural entrepreneurship in the on-demand economy

On-demand labor platforms offer many in-person services, from ride-hailing to childcare. However, scholars have focused on ride-hailing, leading to a model of “Uberization” that entails the informalization of work. We argue that online carework platforms that match nannies and babysitters to families show the limits of this narrative. Based on a discourse analysis of carework platforms and interviews with workers using them, we illustrate that these platforms seek to formalize employment relationships through technologies that increase visibility. We argue that carework platforms are “cultural entrepreneurs” that create and maintain cultural distinctions between populations of workers, and institutionalize those distinctions into platform features. Ultimately, the visibility created by platforms does not realize the formalization of employment relationships, but does serve the interests of platform companies and clients and exacerbate existing inequalities for workers. As one of the first analyses of carework platforms, this study also points to gendered bias in the scholarly literature about the on-demand economy.

Monopsony in Online Labor Markets

Despite the seemingly low switching and search costs of on-demand labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find substantial monopsony power, as measured by the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer). We isolate plausibly exogenous variation in rewards using a double machine learning estimator applied to a large dataset of scraped MTurk tasks. We also reanalyze data from five MTurk experiments that randomized payments to obtain corresponding experimental estimates. Both approaches yield uniformly low labor supply elasticities, around 0.1, with little heterogeneity. Our results suggest monopsony might also be present even in putatively “thick” labor markets. (JEL C44, J22, J23, J42)

A 10-Month-Long Deployment Study of On-Demand Recruiting for Low-Latency Crowdsourcing

A number of interactive crowd-powered systems have been developed to solve difficult problems out of reach for automated solutions. To work interactively, such systems need access to on-demand labor. To meet this demand, workers can be (i) recruited when needed directly from the crowd marketplace, or (ii) recruited in advance and asked to wait in a retainer pool until they are needed. Most of the evaluations of these systems have been over a short time period, even though we know that marketplaces change and adapt over time. In this paper, we present the results of a 10-month deployment of a crowd-powered system that uses a hybrid approach to fast recruitment of workers that we call Ignition. We describe the Ignition approach and the observed times required to recruit workers from the marketplace and retainer over this long period of time. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to recruit workers with low latency even over long periods, and suggest a number of opportunities for future work for recruitment strategies and modeling that may further improve on-demand recruitment for deployed systems.

Maximizing the Benefits of an On-Demand Workforce: Fill Rate-Based Allocation and Coordination Mechanisms

The rapid growth of the on-demand economy offers unprecedented convenience for customers and companies, by transforming the traditional approach to labor management from permanent employees to on-demand employees. At the same time, this shift presents new challenges for the management of an on-demand labor force.In this paper, we study this new phenomenon and its impact on labor market efficiency. We consider employers with uncertain and possibly time-varying demands and a platform operator who provides on-demand staffing services. We first characterize system-wise optimal staffing strategies from the perspective of a central planner, then propose a novel fill rate-based allocation policy that enables the on-demand workforce to be shared efficiency among individual employers. Next, we propose a type of incentive contracts based on fill-rate guarantees, and show that our contracts can induce system-wise optimality in decentralized systems. Our result provides a win-win-win solution to the sharing economy: Individual employers and the platform operator share the benefits of on-demand staffing, while workers are able to set their own hours.

Labor epidural analgesia and intrapartum maternal hyperthermia

OBJECTIVE: To determine if women receiving continuous epidural analgesia are more likely to develop intrapartum fever and related neonatal effects. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis of nulliparous women with term gestations in spontaneous labor delivered during a 12-month period immediately before the availability of on-demand labor epidural analgesia (Before group) and a similar group of nulliparas delivered after labor epidural analgesia was available on request (After group). RESULTS: The frequency of epidural increased from 1% before the availability of on-request epidural analgesia to 83% after epidural analgesia was available on request. A maximal temperature of at least 100.4F was detected in three of 498 (0.6%) women in the Before group, and in 63 of 572 women (11.0%) in the After group (relative risk [RR] = 18.3, 95% confidence interval [CI] 5.8, 57.8, P < .01). Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that on-request labor epidural analgesia was associated with an intrapartum temperature of at least 99.5F (RR = 3.0, 95% CI 2.3, 3.6, P < .001) and intrapartum temperature of at least 100.4F (RR = 20.2, 95% CI 7.0, 86.0, P < .001). There were statistically significant increases in the proportion of newborns who had complete blood counts (24% versus 13.5%, RR = 1.5, 95% CI 1.3, 1.8, P < .01) and blood cultures (30.7% versus 8.6%, RR = 1.7, 95% CI 1.2, 2.4, P < .05) in the After period compared with the Before group; however, there was no statistically significant difference in the proportion of infants who received antibiotic therapy for presumed sepsis between the After and Before periods (5.8% versus 4.6%, RR = 1.15, 95% CI 0.8, 1.6, P = .38). No infants in either group had culture-proven sepsis. CONCLUSION: The use of labor epidural analgesia is associated with a clinically significant increase in the incidence of intrapartum fever.

Epidural Analgesia and Fetal Head Malposition at Vaginal Delivery

In Brief Objective To determine if nulliparas who delivered with on-demand epidural analgesia are more likely to have malpositioning of the fetal vertex at delivery than women delivered during a period of restricted epidural use. Methods A retrospective cohort of nulliparous women with spontaneous labor delivered during a 12-month period immediately before the availability of on-demand labor epidural analgesia was compared with a similar group of nulliparas delivered after labor epidural analgesia was available on request. The primary outcome variable was a non-occiput anterior position or malpositioned fetal head at vaginal delivery. Results The frequency of epidural use increased from 0.9% before epidural analgesia became available on demand to 82.9% afterward. Fetal head malpositioning at vaginal delivery occurred in 26 of 434 (6.0%) women delivered in the before period compared with 29 of 511 (5.7%) in the after period (relative risk 0.95, 95% confidence interval 0.6, 1.6). No statistically significant difference in the incidence of fetal head malpositioning was present after patients were stratified by mode of delivery (Mantel–Haenszel weighted relative risk 0.94, 95% confidence interval 0.6, 1.4). The study sample size provided 85% power to detect a two-fold increase in the incidence of fetal malpositioning from a baseline rate of 6% associated with on-demand epidural use. Conclusion Providing on-request labor epidural analgesia to nulliparas in spontaneous labor did not result in a clinically significant increase in the frequency of fetal head malpositioning at vaginal delivery. Providing on-request labor epidural analgesia with combined local anesthestic-narcotic to nulliparas in spontaneous labor is not associated with increased frequency of fetal head malpositioning at vaginal delivery.

Epidural analgesia and fetal head malposition at vaginal delivery

Objective: To determine if nulliparas who delivered with on-demand epidural analgesia are more likely to have malpositioning of the fetal vertex at delivery than women delivered during a period of restricted epidural use. Methods: A retrospective cohort of nulliparous women with spontaneous labor delivered during a 12-month period immediately before the availability of on-demand labor epidural analgesia was compared with a similar group of nulliparas delivered after labor epidural analgesia was available on request. The primary outcome variable was a non-occiput anterior position or malpositioned fetal head at vaginal delivery. Results: The frequency of epidural use increased from 0.9% before epidural analgesia became available on demand to 82.9% afterward. Fetal head malpositioning at vaginal delivery occurred in 26 of 434 (6.0%) women delivered in the before period compared with 29 of 511 (5.7%) in the after period (relative risk 0.95, 95% confidence interval 0.6, 1.6). No statistically significant difference in the incidence of fetal head malpositioning was present after patients were stratified by mode of delivery (Mantel–Haenszel weighted relative risk 0.94, 95% confidence interval 0.6, 1.4). The study sample size provided 85% power to detect a two-fold increase in the incidence of fetal malpositioning from a baseline rate of 6% associated with on-demand epidural use. Conclusion: Providing on-request labor epidural analgesia to nulliparas in spontaneous labor did not result in a clinically significant increase in the frequency of fetal head malpositioning at vaginal delivery. (Obstet Gynecol 2001;97:608–12.)

Observations on labor epidural analgesia and operative delivery rates

Objective: Our purpose was to compare operative vaginal and abdominal delivery rates in a large population before and after on-demand labor epidural analgesia became available. Study Design: We retrospectively compared patients who gave birth during a 20-month period immediately before the introduction of an on-demand labor epidural analgesia service with those who gave birth during a 20-month period after the epidural usage rate had reached a plateau at approximately 60%. Operative vaginal and cesarean delivery rates were stratified according to parity and history of prior cesarean delivery. Results: A total of 4859 women gave birth during the study period when on-demand epidural analgesia was available, and 4778 women gave birth in the study period before the availability of on-demand epidural analgesia. Comparisons between the women with and those without on-demand availability of epidural analgesia demonstrated no statistically significant differences in the rate of spontaneous vaginal delivery (69.5% vs 68.3%), the overall cesarean delivery rate (19.0% vs 19.4%), the primary cesarean delivery rate (13.2% vs 13.4%), or the operative vaginal delivery rate (11.1% vs 11.9%) between the 2 periods. There were no statistically significant differences in mean gestational age at the time of delivery between the 2 groups, whereas there were statistically significant increases in the proportion of nulliparous women and in mean birth weight during the on-demand epidural period. Analysis after substratification of the study groups according to parity also revealed no statistically significant differences in the primary cesarean delivery rate or the proportion of women undergoing vaginal delivery. The sample size was adequate to exclude a 2% increase in the primary cesarean delivery rate between the 2 periods with 80% power. Subgroup analysis of the population of women who gave birth while epidural analgesia was available on request demonstrated that nulliparous parturient women who requested epidural analgesia were almost twice as likely to require operative vaginal or cesarean delivery as women who did not request epidural analgesia, a finding suggesting that women who request labor epidural analgesia have an inherent propensity toward operative delivery. Conclusion: The introduction of an on-demand labor epidural analgesia service does not increase the rate of cesarean delivery or operative vaginal delivery. (Am J Obstet Gynecol 1999;180:353-9.)

Effect of Labor Epidural Analgesia on Rates of Cesarean Section and Vacuum Delivery

Background: This study was done to compare vacuum delivery and cesarean section rates in a large population before and after on-demand labor epidural analgesia became available. Methods: We retrospectively investigated the overall sets of delivery modes in patients who gave birth during a 12-month period before the introduction of on-demand labor epidural analgesia, and those giving birth after labor epidural analgesia became available. Additionally, we compared the rates of cesarean section or vacuum delivery in patients delivering before and after the availability of on-demand labor epidural. Results: Included were 3905 patients who delivered before, and 4318 patients who delivered after epidural analgesia became available. Labor epidural rates were 0.3% vs 14.7% for the before and after groups. The rates of cesarean delivery for dystocia in primary cesarean operation did not change (10% vs 10.5%), and vacuum delivery rates in the total vaginal delivery patients were not changed (15.1% vs 14.7%) for the before and after group. Conclusions: Increased epidural analgesia did not change the overall cesarean delivery rates for dystocia and vacuum - assisted delivery rates. (Korean J Anesthesiol 1999; 37: 52∼56)

Epidural Labor Analgesia and the Incidence of Cesarean Delivery for Dystocia

We performed this retrospective study to examine the changes in cesarean delivery rates associated with the establishment of a labor epidural service.In April 1993, St. Louis Regional Medical Center established an on-demand labor epidural service. We obtained demographic data for all patients and reviewed the operative records of all patients undergoing cesarean section who delivered 12 mo before and 16 mo after the start of the labor epidural service. We compared labor epidural rates and total and nulliparous dystocia cesarean delivery rates before and after the epidural service started and among patients who did and did not receive labor epidural analgesia when it was available. Included were 3195 patients who delivered before and 3733 patients who delivered after epidural analgesia became available. Labor epidural rates were 1.2% vs 29.4% for the Before group versus the After group (P < 0.001). Total (9.1% vs 9.7%) and nulliparous dystocia (5.7% vs 6.4%) cesarean delivery rates did not significantly change with the availability of epidural analgesia. However, the total (11.6% vs 8.8%; P = 0.009) and dystocia (8.0% vs 1.0%; P = 0.001) cesarean delivery rates were higher among patients who received epidural analgesia when it was available. We conclude that epidural labor analgesia is associated with, but does not cause, cesarean delivery for dystocia. Implications: Increased epidural analgesia use did not change the overall dystocia cesarean delivery rate, although dystocia was more common among women who chose an epidural analgesia. Consequently, limiting epidural availability will not affect cesarean delivery rates. The evidence does not support advising patients that epidural labor analgesia increases the risk of cesarean delivery. (Anesth Analg 1998;87:119-23)