Weekly Dwell #14
Over the past three years, I have been working on a research project exploring activism within online communities for gig economy workers. While I knew online spaces were important, I didn't realize nearly all the affordances they offer for gig workers, who are often left to their own devices (literally) for learning more about their work environment and how to strategically operate within the app. I mainly focused on food delivery drivers, who have the unique feature of being out in the world constantly moving around, but often don't have any genuine relationships or even interactions with others throughout their entire shift. This can leave them with questions about features on the app without anyone to really turn to learn more. The online space serve as substantial open-source educational and human resource spaces, where workers and customers alike can come and go with their stories and tips, as well as generate activism and solidarity. There are efforts for traditional strikes and protests, and also efforts to align in their practices of how to make the app better for everyone involved. It's really well coordinated across a very diverse and diffuse set of folks across the country.
While there are amazing successes, these apps also inherently pit different each stakeholder group against each other, asking each to fill in some gap that the platform has left behind. Customers are supposed to give tips to workers who are stiffed by the low order prices by the app; restaurants have to raise their prices or deal with cuts due to huge fees and lack of tips provided by the platform; and workers have to deal with ratings given by customers who they barely interact with but that hold the key to whether or not they have the opportunity to work on the platform.
Activism is tough when at each angle, it looks like others are pushing against you, as well as the platform being a quiet intermediary that is actually holding all the cards. On this topic, I recently published a Harvard Business Review article on the topic. Please give it a read and let me know your thoughts!
https://hbr.org/2024/04/how-gig-work-pits-customers-against-workers