INTRODUCTION

The UK's Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) says the gig economy is, ‘the trend of using online platforms to find small jobs, sometimes completed immediately after request (essentially, on-demand) … Workers in the gig economy are sourcing one job at a time, but by logging into an app or clicking through to a website’ (Balaram et al. 2017: 10). In this respect, gig work is the archetypal form of digital labour, which we defined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 as labour controlled and mediated by digital platforms. Naturally, there are many different varieties of gig work. Lehdonvirta (2017) makes a useful distinction between local and remote types of gig work. Local types of gig work might involve working for the delivery service, Deliveroo, whereas remote types of gig work involve being employed online for a certain period on projects via digital platforms. Remote gig work will also often require specific skills set such as programming skills. From July 2016 to June 2017, software development and technology remote gig work was the biggest category, which increased by 37 per cent during this time, with creative and multi-media the next largest category, followed by clerical and data entry work (Lehdonvirta 2017).

Gig work brings with it many positive employment opportunities, with flexibility in work being frequently touted. But many negative qualities of gig work are also apparent. According to the New York Times, the number of US jobs performed by part-time freelancers and part-time contractors – the sort of jobs found in the gig economy – grew from 20 million in 2001 to about 32 million by 2014. Interestingly, and unlike some other major media outlets, the New York Times argues that this rise has been engendered, in part, by the lean restructuring of major US businesses and the contracting out many of their activities in order to focus on their ‘core competencies’. Through outsourcing, private contractors have picked up these activities and jobs, often paying contract workers and freelancers per task rather than a regular hourly rate (Scheiber 2015). These new work conditions not only have negative consequences for the working class, but also create adverse work situations for the middle class.