Digital labor platforms are transforming work by enabling widespread use of piecework and on-demand labor (also known as gig-work). Estimates show that 11% of the European workforce is already engaged in platform work (Brancati et al., 2020), and that the sector is seeing a 10% annual growth (Stephany et al., 2021). This has raised concerns about consequences for job quality and workers’ well-being. But while platform work has become subject to significant research interest, there has been no systematic study on how welfare institutions shape the quantity and quality of platform work. This project fills this gap through a comparative study across European countries.
Platform-mediated work is an umbrella term for a heterogeneous set of jobs organized through digital interfaces that connect labor buyers and sellers (Vallas & Schor, 2020). Platforms have brought an explosive growth of atypical employment, leading researchers to warn about the spread of precarious jobs (Gandini, 2019; Rahman & Thelen, 2019). Other studies have nuanced these warnings, suggesting that while concerns are justified, the quality of platform work varies substantially across platforms and countries, ranging from well-paid and flexible to precarious and exploitative (Dunn, 2020; Findlay et al., 2013; Ravenelle, 2019).
There are strong reasons to believe that the cross-country differences in platform labor are the result of welfare state conditions. Welfare states determine the availability of platform workers willing to accept low-quality labor, for instance, as such work for instance can constitute a last resort for unprotected individuals (Ravenelle et al., 2021). Institutions furthermore influence public perception of labor platforms, which determines both consumer demand and the political support from which platforms can draw (Culpepper and Thelen 2020). Recent work has therefore called for additional attention to the question of how platform labor is shaped by national institutional contexts (Funke & Picot, 2021; Picot, 2022; Vallas & Schor, 2020).
However, the platform economy literature has made no systematic attempt to explain the substantial cross-country differences (see Wood et al., 2019). This project aims to fill this research gap by taking a comparative case design approach to study (WP1) how labor market and welfare institutions shape the quantity and quality of labor platforms, and how these effects are mediated by (WP2) public attitudes toward labor platforms, (WP3) supply of workers seeking to engage in platform labor, (WP4) and their motivations for doing so. We use three data sources: aggregated country-level data on platform labor, individual-level survey data on the public in six European countries, and individual-level survey data on platform workers.
Through its innovative and multi-pronged approach, the project will generate new data and insights, and lay the groundwork for a field of study on how institutional contexts in shape platform work. By doing so, it will bring actionable insights to policymakers on why workers and consumers engage with platforms, and support them in adapting welfare institutions to provide well-being and high-quality work in the era of digital capitalism.
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