The app-ification of work
My takeaway has just been delivered. The person who delivered it is one of 5 million people working in the gig economy in the UK. He works for a company where he doesn’t know any of his colleagues but they compete with him for work, will never meet a manager or understand why they make the decisions they do. He interacts with his employer solely through an app on his phone.
Technology has always shaped the way we work. In the eighteenth century, the introduction of the factory and the manufacturing of interchangeable parts moved workers from lots of smaller places to fewer bigger places. In the nineteenth century, the electrification of workplaces promised greater productivity. In the twentieth century, office work was changed by computers running regular routine jobs previously done manually. Today, how we work is highly mediated by technology.
Technology changes the dynamics of the relationship between employer and employee. And it changes the power the employee has to change those dynamics.
When, in 1880, Karl Marx conducted a survey of workers it was with the intention of identifying where workers had leverage within the workplace that could enable them to organise successfully against exploitation and advance their own interests. This has long been the power play between company and employee. With traditional employment, because of how work is organised and located, workers have an inherent coordination power. Workers work with each other, they see how many other people work for the company, they talk to their colleagues, share stories of their treatment, and join unions. Unions are intent on improving the working conditions of employers through collective coordinated influence. Where one person can’t influence how a company treats them, a union can.
The app-ification of work changes all this. Where technology mediates the relationship between employer and employee, it removes the coordination power of the workers. It separates them from each other so they do not know each other, can’t talk about their treatment, can’t organise in response to their treatment. It forces them to drive down their own wages, accepting the lowest offer because if they don’t someone else will.
Interestingly, how gig workers feel about gig work depends on whether it is their only source of income or a bit extra in addition to other work. Those for whom gig work is the only job feel unease about the uncertainty of their income. Those who do some gig work in addition to having other, more stable income, appreciate the flexibility it gives them. But referring to those who do this work as gig workers focuses on the piecemeal nature of the work and misses the shift in power that comes with it.
More and more work is being app-ified. Not only delivery drivers but warehouse pickers, care workers, taxi drivers, dog walkers, waiters, maintenance and repair workers. As this happens, the power shifts in favour of the platform provider. Benjamin Sachs, professor of labour and industry at Harvard Law School, says “History shows that if workers don’t have an institution, organisation or mechanism to translate their market power into some kind of sustained form of collective voices, then signs of optimism from employee activism soon fade”. The power of the platforms to prevent activism by ensuring workers never coordinate and have no choice but to compete with each other, means no mechanisms can arise from those workers themselves. That leaves the only power in the hands of law-makers, and the gig economy has proved hard to regulate and platform providers quick to find ways around laws.
Technology mediates so much of the relationship between employees and employers, and it will do so more and more in the future. How workers create a sustained collective voice in the face of the app-ification of work is a significant challenge for the coming decades.