One of the defining characteristics of the gig economy is its challenge to established notions of employer and employee. Indeed, it is what makes platform-brokered work lucrative for business who seek to avoid responsibilities for workers. But it is also what makes it attractive for predominantly young workers as they are enthusiastic about irregular forms of work organization that promise more freedom than conventional 9 to 5 jobs. However, the “status question” is fundamental for the labour market, and basically all regulation is connected to the definitions of employer and employees. What is more, challenges to the status of workers relate to their status as citizens.

In a German case study on the challenges of the gig economy for social partnership, we found the status question to be relevant for, among other issues, labour protection regulations, the applicability of the national minimum wage, the sustainability of the welfare state, and price competition for regular businesses. Since platforms typically refuse to adopt their Fürsorgepflicht (duty of care), i.e., the duty to ensure that workers wear protective equipment and keep within working hours, the increase of solo-self-employment through platform-brokered work may lead to increased hazard risks in traffic or on construction sites. This is simply because gig workers in this scenario are pushed to take risks to get a certain job, to make (more) money, or simply because they have to pay their bills. Similarly, because the national minimum wage in Germany does not apply to freelancers, the status of many gig workers results in undercutting said minimum. Because platforms do not consider themselves employers, they do not contribute the usual social insurance dues. Even for some of the employer associations this is a problem because it results in old age poverty that the state has to compensate for with taxpayer-financed social aid. Also related to the avoidance of social security dues is price competition between regular businesses with regular employees and service-brokering platforms with gig workers. The latter will always be able to work cheaper given that they skimp on social security. All in all, the status precarisation of labour that characterizes large segments of the gig economy results in a number of problems for individual workers, but also the welfare state and economy at large.

From a long tradition of political theory and empirical research we know that experiences at the workplace translate to the political sphere. This “democratic spillover” (Carole Pateman) has been used as an argument by trade unions and their political allies to strengthen workplace democracy and economic democracy. Already Thomas H. Marshall famously insisted that democracy needs to build not only on equal civil and political, but also on social and economic rights. The precarisation and individualization associated with gig work, which usually is organized against any collective rights and denies even the status as regular worker, clearly affects these social and economic rights. What is more, economic deprivation is associated with lower rates of political participation which, as predicted by Marshall, further increases inequalities. In our case study, trade union organizers repeatedly described how economic pressures, individualization, spatial dissolution of work, the anonymity of social media, and a depoliticized workforce are the principal obstacles for organizing. Hence, the gig economy contributes to and could even accelerate general tendencies in modern democracies. The specific organisation of work through platforms contributes to disabling citizens and, thereby, destabilising democracy which relies on a vivid civic culture.

Johannes Kiess is Deputy Director at the Else Frenkel Brunswik Institut of the University of Leipzig and a Research Associate at the Chair of Comparative Cultural Sociology and Political Sociology of Europe at the University of Siegen.

This article has been written for the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy’s series of commentaries on the need to redesign the platform economy on a more democratic and sustainable basis.

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