Kibria Shah
OSH Practitioner
Email: kibriashah@yahoo.com
What do Uber, AirBnB, Foodpanda, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit and Lyft have in common? The answer is they are all part of the gig economy. They are doing business in the ‘access economy’ see themselves not as employers, but as conduits between those who need jobs done on-demand and those who can and will do work on an ad hoc basis.
Being facilitated by rapid technological progress i.e. the digitalisation of society and the economy, the future of work is changing dramatically. The rise of technology, cheap labor and the entrepreneurial spirit is birthing something new – the gig economy. Gig work, a new and unprecedented way of working in the world economy, undeniably different than traditional employment. And it’s challenging everything we know about business and laws protecting workers.
Call it what you will; the gig economy, the sharing, the freelance economy – the trend of using online platforms. Gig work can consist in almost purely physical work, purely digital work or mixtures of the two. The actual work provided can be digital or manual, in-house or outsourced, high- or low-skilled, on or off-site, large- or small-scale, permanent or temporary, all depending on the specific situation.
In the new global economy, the growth of gig economy has been profound. It is difficult to estimate how many people are employed by the gig economy as a whole. Many work for more than one platform, patching together a living via multiple gigs, and others perform gig work in addition to holding a traditional-economy job. A recent survey found there are estimated 50% of millennial workers already freelancing in the USA and in the Great Britain the total number of gig worker is 1.1 million. By 2020, experts expect some 40 per cent of the workforce in the United States to be independent workers or freelancers, up from about 20 per cent to 30 per cent today. This is a global trend likely to be reflected across the world, they note. Increasingly Fortune 500 and global giants are adopting online freelancing platform. For example, Upwork, a global freelancing platform, currently works with 20% of Fortune 500 companies.
OSH Implication:
With the global ongoing rise in the digital tech entrepreneur and in the era of gig economy, managing OSH within this new form of economy – whereas more and more large organization is leaning to the new forms of work – will challenge conventional approaches to managing occupational safety and health.
Meanwhile, the gig economy promising benefits of flexibility but it’s also raising the considerable critical attention in Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) implications. In most jurisdictions, OSH law and regulation applies where an ‘employment relationship’ exists. Traditional employment laws are based on a nineteenth century concept that no longer holds the same relevance in the twenty-first century. For example, the debates – whether gig workers are classified as an employee or independent contractors – are yet to settle in the court room in many countries. Hence, regulatory framework for prevention does not apply in the absence of an employment relationship.
Unlike the traditional standard form of employment, evaluation of occupational health risk and regulation opportunities of online platform workers are obscure. Online platform work poses a range of both pre-existing and new OSH risks, both physical and psycho-social. The fact that online platform workers have many similarities to both temporary workers and agency workers means that they are probably exposed to the same OSH risks. Younger age is a well-known independent risk factor for occupational injury.
All online platform work can induce stress through continuous evaluation and rating of performance, competitive mechanisms for allocating work, uncertain payment and blurring of work–life boundaries. Chronic job insecurity, known to contribute to poor overall health among contingent workers, may be as salient among gig workers.
Apart from the above mentioned potential OSH risks poses to online platform workers, there are a number of concerns remain unsettled regarding how to apply general employment rights to gig work e.g. right to (prompt) payment for work, OSH training, (self)-risk assessment, working hours, safe and healthy working conditions, preventive occupational health care, identify the place of work, guarantee workers’ safety when working while travelling, guarantee necessary skills levels on the case of online platform work, etc.
In sum, occupational safety and health – and the control of risks to workers – is a multidimensional and highly contextual challenge. With globalization and a surge in technology, the gig economy isn’t going anywhere. This is something is coming, this is here. Everyone better get onboard but the whole notion is do we do it legally, do we do it ethically or do we do it fairly to protect worker’s right of decent working conditions? The answer relies on the extent and quality of collaborative and interdisciplinary research and intervention effort.