THE GIG ECONOMY
T hink of the last time you took an Uber. How much thought did you give to the rating you provided at the end of the trip? Whether it was a one or five-star rating, you carried out a critical role in exercising control over your driver. The control of work and workers features heavily in management research because it plays a central role in ensuring workers’ behaviour is consistent with organisational objectives. Organisations seeking to realise their goals and objectives require a strategy and associated practices to coordinate and control employees in ways that facilitate organisational functionality. Most often, this will involve two parties – a manager acting on behalf of an organisation who enacts control mechanisms and the workers who experience these systems of control. Extensive research examining employee control within traditional work arrangements has already been carried out, but the emergence of new forms of work, particularly those in the gig economy, challenges how we think about control and creates new perspectives on how this is carried out. A growing sphere The gig economy uses online platforms to connect workers, or individual service providers, with consumers digitally. It has become synonymous with work that is mediated by online labour platforms, such as the
ride-hailing (or taxi-style) company, Uber and the food delivery organisation, Deliveroo. During the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for gig workers surged in many sectors, with people opting for the ease and convenience of swift takeaway food and other services. The gig economy is a rapidly growing sphere of activity, with its global value reaching $455 billion in 2023. Uber Eats, for instance, is now the world’s most popular food delivery service, with 88 million users. It generated $10.9 billion in revenue in 2022, representing a 31 per cent year-on-year increase. In addition, Uber made $14 billion in revenue from its ride-hailing service in 2022. Deliveroo, meanwhile, reported a 110 per cent increase in food orders for the first half of 2021 across the UK and Ireland, compared with the first half of 2020, and announced that its service would now o ers takeaways from more UK restaurants and food merchants than any other. The number of people who are directly employed by these online platforms tends to be a fraction of those who provide services for them. For example, Deliveroo directly employs just 10 people in Ireland, yet it is estimated that more than 1,000 workers – classified as self-employed – deliver food on behalf of the platform. In the ride-hailing sector, Uber reportedly had more than 5.4 million drivers worldwide in 2022, with at least one million drivers in the US alone. Comparatively, the total number of Uber employees globally was 32,000 in 2022. Working conditions In the gig economy, workers are generally not hired as permanent employees. Their working conditions often do not provide legal minimum wage levels, nor do they o er prospects for training and development
Ambition NOVEMBER 2023 | 15
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