‘My Life Is More Valuable Than This’: Understanding Risk among On-Demand Food Couriers in Edinburgh

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Abstract

Drawing from the social study of the gig economy and platform labour and from the sociology of risk, this article explores how on-demand food couriers in Edinburgh, Scotland, construct and represent work-related risks. By taking the gig economy’s contested and contentious status of ‘self-employment’ as a starting point, this article positions couriers as experts of their own work process and draws on in-depth interviews with 25 couriers to illustrate how platformed labour creates a range of risks, including physical risk and bodily harm, financial risks and epistemic risks. To negotiate these risks, couriers use a range of strategies, including privatising, normalising and minimising risks and by forging new communities of support. While some risks can be negotiated by recourse to the private, entrepreneurial, or ‘choosing’ self, interview data illustrate how algorithmically managed work creates uncertainty and confounds the issue of choice by obscuring the work process and associated risk probabilities.

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Is Open Access

Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy

Alex Wood, Mark Graham, Vili Lehdonvirta … (2018)

This article evaluates the job quality of work in the remote gig economy. Such work consists of the remote provision of a wide variety of digital services mediated by online labour platforms. Focusing on workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the article draws on semi-structured interviews in six countries (N = 107) and a cross-regional survey (N = 679) to detail the manner in which remote gig work is shaped by platform-based algorithmic control. Despite varying country contexts and types of work, we show that algorithmic control is central to the operation of online labour platforms. Algorithmic management techniques tend to offer workers high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety and complexity. However, these mechanisms of control can also result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, sleep deprivation and exhaustion.