Documents Graham, Mark 22 results

Online gig work is becoming increasingly important to workers living in low- and middle-income countries. Our multi-year and multi-method research project shows that online gig work brings about rewards such as potential higher incomes and increased worker autonomy, but also risks such as social isolation, lack of work–life balance, discrimination, and predatory intermediaries. We also note that online gig work platforms mostly operate outside regulatory and normative frameworks that could benefit workers.
This report summarises the ways in which observed risks materialise in the market, highlighting responses from a 456-respondent survey and stories from 152 interviews. The report's central question is whether online gig work has any development potentials at the world's economic margins.1 Its motive is to help platform operators to improve their positive impact, to help workers to take action to improve their situations, and to prompt policy makers and stakeholders interested in online gig work to revisit regulation as it applies to workers, clients, and platforms in their respective countries."

"For many people, internet access is an essential part of everyday economic, social, and political activities (c.f. Graham and Dutton 2014). Yet access to the internet is, and has always been, geographically concentrated (Graham, Hale, and Stephens 2012, 2011). As such, it is important to focus on the people and places that are largely left out of digital connectivity. This visualisation looks at these in terms of internet penetration (i.e. the share of their population that have “used the Internet (from any location) in the last 12 months” (source: UN 2015)). The map highlights all territories that either have internet penetration below 10%, or for which no data from the World Bank exists. A lack of data can exist for several reasons, for example: some of these territories are statistically grouped together with bigger entities, no data have been collected or inferred, or the territories lack widespread recognised statehood. The map ultimately highlights an archipelago of land whose population is mostly cut off from the internet. This Archipelago of Disconnection has its centre of gravity in Sub-Saharan Africa where 28 countries have internet penetration rates beneath the 10% threshold we applied. As the internet becomes ever more embedded into global economic flows (Malecki and Morisset 2011), to the inhabitation of urban spaces (Graham 2013), and to other facets of everyday life, those living in the Archipelago of Disconnection are largely barred from participating in the cultural, educational, political, and economic activities that it affords."

"‘Towards a Fairer Gig Economy' is a small collection of articles examining the social and economic problems associated with the ‘gig economy'. The gig economy includes a wide range of labour carried out by workers providing services as couriers, taxi drivers, online freelancers and more. Issues examined include an over-supply of labour, falling wages, long hours and poor working conditions. Each article makes suggestions for how these problems can be addressed and how a fairer gig economy can be built: including through regulation, collective bargaining and wider policy recommendations. The collection's contributors include cycle couriers, union organisers, academics and researchers."

"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. "

"This article evaluates the job quality of work in the remote gig economy. Such work consists of the remote provision of a wide variety of digital services mediated by online labour platforms. Focusing on workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the article draws on semi-structured interviews in six countries (N = 107) and a cross-regional survey (N = 679) to detail the manner in which remote gig work is shaped by platform-based algorithmic control. Despite varying country contexts and types of work, we show that algorithmic control is central to the operation of online labour platforms. Algorithmic management techniques tend to offer workers high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety and complexity. However, these mechanisms of control can also result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, sleep deprivation and exhaustion. "

"All of a sudden, everybody's talking about the gig economy. From taxi drivers to pizza deliverers to the unemployed, we are all aware of the huge changes that it is driving in our lives as workers, consumers and citizens.

This is the first comprehensive overview of this highly topical subject. Drawing upon years of research, stories from gig workers, and a review of the key trends and debates, Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham shed light on how the gig economy came to be, how it works and what it's like to work in it. They show that, although it has facilitated innovative new services and created jobs for millions, it is not without cost. It allows businesses and governments to generate value while passing significant risk and responsibility onto the workers that make it possible. This is not, however, an argument for turning back the clock. Instead, the authors outline four strategies that can produce a fairer platform economy that works for everyone. "