On March 21 of this year, I participated in the seminar organized by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA – European Agency for Safety and Health at Work) along with experts and policy makers from EU member states and EU institutions. EU-OSHA presented a recently completed study on policies and practices related to digital platform work and its impact on occupational safety and health. It covers different types of employment platforms, both those where services are provided at a specific location (for example, food delivery platforms like Bolt and Wolt or platforms where you can hire a specialist to do various jobs, like Getapro), and those where the work is carried out remotely ( for example crowdsourcing service sites like MTurk or sites where you can hire a programmer or designer for a specific task like UpWork). Experts from other European agencies and research institutes shared their observations on the employment of platforms, their legal regulation, the risks associated with it and the political initiatives that try to mitigate these risks. At the end of the seminar, all participants, including me, had an opportunity to share their experiences and observations about the work of the platforms and the risks and problems associated with it, as well as express their proposals on how to solve these problems.
The most important conclusions from the seminar are several:
First, digital platforms and platform employment is a hot and understudied topic. It is expected that its relevance at the European level will only increase. There is a lack of data on the number of people employed on the platforms and the understanding of how various platforms function and how platform work is carried out is very vague. Policy makers and NGOs are concerned that this unavailability of data makes it difficult to protect the rights of employees on the platforms at a collective level. Therefore, any research that sheds light on the scope, nature, and experience of platform workers is valuable.
Secondly, one of the most pressing issues from the point of view of labor policy makers is the status of those employed through platforms. Most of the people employed on the platforms are currently self-employed, so they take risks for their own health and social security. At the same time, it is clear that many of those employed by the platforms, including food delivery couriers, do not actually meet the status of self-employed in its traditional sense, because the platforms determine when and how they receive an order, how exactly it is executed and what payment they receive for it. As a result, those employed on the platforms bear all the risks associated with self-employment, but enjoy very little of the freedom associated with this status.
Thirdly, one of the most important features of platform work is the so-called algorithmic management that directly affects those working through platforms. Research shows that algorithmic management it is closely related to the asymmetry of information and control and the non-transparency of the decisions made by the platform that in turn limits autonomy of the platform employees and inhibits their opportunities to defend their interests on an individual or collective level. One of the solutions is the requirement for platforms to ensure transparency of information and algorithms, but there are no concrete tools to implement this yet. At the moment, the most revolutionary solution is the “Riders Law” introduced in Spain, which obliges platforms to inform their employees and their legal representatives about algorithms that directly affect their work.
Finally, and fourthly, many of the proposals expressed by the seminar participants included closer monitoring of platform workers, as well as initiatives aimed at informing platform workers of their rights, based on the assumption that state, municipal and non-governmental institutions represent and protect interests of the workers. At the same time, judging by the interviews conducted in our research, trust in state institutions and trade unions is very low in Latvia, as in many places in Eastern Europe. Consequently, it is very likely that initiatives directed at closer supervision of employees would not gain response among the couriers themselves and would be ineffective. Instead, we should think about initiatives aimed not at closer monitoring of employees, but at the openness, transparency and responsibility of the platforms, enabling the employees themselves and supporting their collective initiatives, e.g. workers’ own initiatives aimed at cooperation and reducing the asymmetry of information and control between the workers on the platforms and the platforms themselves, such as Turkopticon, which is a website where the workers on the MTurk platform share information about dishonest customers.
I am happy to conclude that in our research we are looking at a topic that is very relevant and whose relevance will only increase both in Europe and around the world. Since platforms are a new phenomenon, there is a lack of understanding about it not only in Latvia, but also in other parts of the world, including a cultural-sociological understanding of how this work is perceived and practiced by those employed on platforms and how the meaning of work and the attitude towards work in general change in the context of digitization. Such an understanding is necessary not only to understand today’s social reality more clearly, but also to understand how to change the institutional framework so that it meets the needs of today’s society, not even of the future.