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This article explores the relationship between migration and the gig economy, specifically focusing on the experiences of migrant workers in urban gig work. The authors argue that while gig economy platforms can offer opportunities for migrants to improve their livelihoods, they often lead to poor working conditions. The article emphasizes the complex factors that shape migrant gig work, including institutional barriers, personal and professional trajectories, and labor market governance. The authors call for a more comprehensive understanding of the role of migration in the gig economy in order to improve the conditions for this diverse workforce. The text also examines the role of platform companies in defining and prioritizing the work of migrant workers, as well as the behaviors and networks that migrant workers engage in to maintain their distinct status. It explores the experiences and agency of individual migrant workers in platform work, as well as the challenges they face in terms of career pathways and workplace identity. The article concludes by discussing the future of the gig economy and the need for regulatory interventions to enhance the working conditions of migrant gig workers. [Extracted from the article]

In urban gig economies around the world, platform labour is predominantly migrant labour, yet research on the intersection of the gig economy and labour migration remains scant. Our experience with two action research projects, spanning six cities on four continents, has taught us how platform work impacts the structural vulnerability of migrant workers. This leads us to two claims that should recalibrate the gig economy research agenda. First, we argue that platform labour simultaneously degrades working conditions while offering migrants much-needed opportunities to improve their livelihoods. Second, we contend that the reclassification of gig workers as employees is by itself not sufficient to counter the precarisation of migrant gig work. Instead, we need ambitious policies at the intersection of immigration, social welfare, and employment regulation that push back against the digitally mediated commodification of migrant labour worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies insights from global value chains (GVC)/global production networks (GPN) frameworks to explore the economic geographies brought into being by digital labour platforms. In particular, these perspectives facilitate analyses of power imbalances and value extraction across territories—an under‐theorized aspect within platform studies. We theorize this dynamic by introducing the descriptor 'digital value network' (DVN): a digitally mediated nexus of platform operations that produce and distribute value between territories, on the basis of labour transactions. Empirically, we draw on a multi‐year action research project, assessing the operations of platforms and the experiences of platform workers in 54 countries. Our analysis highlights that platforms as lead firms extend GVC/GPN logics of coordination and drivenness in DVN to (i) optimize production capabilities while externalizing ownership and costs, (ii) accumulate both monetary and non‐monetary forms of value, and (iii) concentrate power at the global scale in both existing and new sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital labour platforms have been widely promoted as a solution to the unemployment crisis sparked by the COVID‐19 pandemic. However, the pandemic has also highlighted the vulnerability of gig workers when cast as essential workers. This article examines the COVID‐19 policies of 191 platforms in 43 countries to understand how the crisis has shifted the conventions of the gig economy. Using a typology of "fair platform work", the authors identify areas of progress in worker protection but also significant shortfalls, including the entrenchment of precarious work as platforms leverage the opportunities arising from the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical research into the gig economy frequently relies on using platform interfaces, platform mobile applications or websites, as intermediaries to contact and recruit participants. Yet, these methods are accompanied by significant ethical implications that are rarely considered. In this article, we look at the organisational features of platform interfaces for research and explore the ways in which, through their intensive knowledge about their users, they present additional challenges to researchers' abilities to (a) conduct independent research – for example by influencing the participant recruitment process and (b) establish and maintain respondent anonymity and researcher transparency. Our analysis is based on an international study of platform workers which investigates working conditions and fairness in the gig economy in both geographically tethered gig work and cloudwork. We argue that the ethical boundaries of doing research through platform interfaces are shaped not only by researchers, but also by the platforms whose interfaces researchers use. Establishing and protecting the anonymity of research participants provides an acute example of this, as platforms have the potential to scrutinise the activities of researchers on their interfaces, and capture information shared between researchers and participants. The question of anonymity arises also in the reverse order: when platforms share personal information on workers, at a level not required by researchers. After building our argument, we propose a set of suggestions for promoting ethical research in the study of gig economy platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growth of gig work – short-term tasks organized and mediated by digital labor platforms such as Uber and Upwork – is the focus for an increasing body of research. Yet there has been a lack of systematic frameworks that could evaluate this type of labor against decent work standards, and inform consumers and others about relative adherence to those standards across platforms and sectors. In this article we report the development of the "Fairwork framework", based on five decent work principles of fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation. The framework and its associated methodology were first field-tested in South Africa and we report on its use to rate seven gig economy platforms. A league table of platforms was widely publicized and one platform was persuaded to improve working conditions. We reflect on the use and content of the framework, and its role in future action research on decent gig work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital labour platforms do not attempt to build trust between worker, client, and platform on the basis of strong and durable ties. Instead, platforms utilize a double articulation of algorithmic power to govern spatially dispersed workforces in both material and discursive ways. However, algorithms do not have hegemonic outcomes, and they do not entirely strip away agency from platform workers. Through manipulation, subversion, and disruption, workers bring fissures in algorithmic power into being. Fissures in algorithmic power are moments in which algorithms do not govern as intended. While these moments do not simply result in positive outcomes for workers, they show that algorithmic power is inherently only ever partial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital labour platforms do not attempt to build trust between worker, client, and platform on the basis of strong and durable ties. Instead, platforms utilise a double articulation of algorithmic power to govern spatially dispersed workforces in both material and discursive ways. However, algorithms do not have hegemonic outcomes, and they do not entirely strip away agency from platform workers. Through manipulation, subversion, and disruption, workers bring fissures in algorithmic power into being. Fissures in algorithmic power are moments in which algorithms do not govern as intended. While these moments do not simply result in positive outcomes for workers, they show that algorithmic power is inherently only ever partial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world of work is changing. Communications technologies and digital platforms have enabled some types of work to be delivered from anywhere in the world by anyone with a computer and an internet connection. This digitally-mediated work brings jobs to parts of the world traditionally characterized by low incomes and high unemployment rates. As such, it has been touted by governments, third-sector organizations, and the private sector as a novel strategy of economic development. Drawing on a four-year study with 65 workers in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda, we examine the development implications of the gig economy on labour in Africa. We offer four analytical development dimensions through which platform-based remote work impacts the lives and livelihoods of African workers, i.e. freedom, flexibility, precarity and vulnerablity. We argue that these dimensions should be understood in a continuum to better explain the working conditions and lives of workers in the gig economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine how remote gig workers in Africa exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods in the gig economy. In addition to the rewards reaped by gig workers, they also face significant risks, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic workplace monitoring, thus constraining workers' autonomy and bargaining power. Gig workers, as a result, are expected to have fewer 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. Instead, we demonstrate how remote workers in Africa manage various constraints on one of the world's biggest gig economy platforms through their diverse everyday resilience, reworking and resistance practices (after Katz, 2004). Drawing from a rich labour geography tradition, which considers workers to 'actively produce economic spaces and scales', our main theoretical contribution is to offer a reformulation of Katz's notions of 'resistance', 'resilience' and 'reworking' as everyday practices of gig workers best understood as 'hidden transcripts' of the gig economy (Scott, 1990). The article draws on in-depth interviews (N=65) conducted with remote workers during the fieldwork in five selected African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Fairwork project in South Africa, in which lawyers and social scientists work to create labour standards for digital platform workers. Also cited are the proposed public ranking system to enhance the working conditions of said workers, the growing popularity of gig economy, and the employment rights of said employees like fair pay, fair contract, and fair management.

This paper introduces the Fairwork Foundation, a research initiative that is also developing an intervention around the quality of work on digital labour platforms. Lacking the ability to collectively bargain, many platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers. As a result of this new, digitally-managed market for work, many workers have jobs characterised by long and irregular hours, low income, and high stress. Fairwork's field research across India and South Africa finds challenges for workers across a range of issues which form the basis for a set of decent work principles on: pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation. The results of the field research are being used to rank and compare platforms against these principles as a means to encourage decent, and discourage 'un-decent' platform work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the (dis)embeddedness of digital labour within the remote gig economy. We use interview and survey data to highlight how platform workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are normatively disembedded from social protections through a process of commodification. Normative disembeddedness leaves workers exposed to the vagaries of the external labour market due to an absence of labour regulations and rights. It also endangers social reproduction by limiting access to healthcare and requiring workers to engage in significant unpaid 'work-for-labour'. However, we show that these workers are also simultaneously embedded within interpersonal networks of trust, which enable the work to be completed despite the low-trust nature of the gig economy. In bringing together the concepts of normative and network embeddedness, we reconnect the two sides of Polanyi's thinking and demonstrate the value of an integrated understanding of Polanyi's approach to embeddedness for understanding contemporary economic transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 semistructured 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle‐income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa, we find that the specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of organisation, in which social media groups play a central role in structuring communication and unions are absent. Previous research is limited to either conventional freelancers or ‘microworkers’ who do relatively low‐skilled tasks via online labour platforms. This study uses 107 interviews and a survey of 658 freelancers who obtain work via a variety of online platforms to highlight that Internet‐based communities play a vital role in their work experiences. Internet‐based communities enable workers to support each other and share information. This, in turn, increases their security and protection. However, these communities are fragmented by nationality, occupation and platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are witnessing the emergence of a 'planetary labour market' for digital work. Building on a five-year study of digital work in some of the world's economic margins, we show a planetary labour market does not do away with geography, it rather exists to take advantage of it. Digital technologies have been deployed in order to bring into being a labour market that can operate at a planetary scale, and has particular affordances and limitations that rarely bolster both the structural and associational power of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Institutional voids – weakness in the institutional functions required by markets – particularly hamper developing countries. • Ride-hailing digital platforms can fill these voids and make markets more efficient, effective, complete and formalised. • Platform companies also maintain, expand and create institutional voids, and they make markets more unequal. • Platform companies create inequality by internalising previously-distributed market functions and power. • Ongoing institutional voids need to be filled by informational, state regulatory or worker collectivisation interventions. Institutional voids – shortcomings in the institutional functions required by markets – have particularly hampered developing countries. Filling those voids has been widely identified as a strategy for businesses and in this paper we analyse the institutional actions of digital platform companies. Specifically and through primary research, we analyse the impact of e-hailing platforms (Uber, Bolt and EasyTaxi) in Colombia and South Africa on ride-hailing markets characterised by institutional voids. Alongside the void-filling discussed in the literature, we identify three other institutional strategies of these businesses: they also maintain and expand and create institutional voids. The platform companies' institutional work has formed a market that is more efficient, effective, complete and formalised. At the same time, though, they have institutionalised problematic behaviours and significant inequalities. They have done this by internally institutionalising – within the digital platform and in their broader business model – previously-distributed market functions and power. We suggest some practical actions to address the downsides of platformisation through the filling of ongoing voids, and we identify some research priorities for future studies of institutional voids and platforms in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]