The world of work is changing. Communications technologies and digital platforms have enabled some types of work to be delivered from anywhere in the world by anyone with a computer and an internet connection. This digitally-mediated work brings jobs to parts of the world traditionally characterized by low incomes and high unemployment rates. As such, it has been touted by governments, third-sector organizations, and the private sector as a novel strategy of economic development. Drawing on a four-year study with 65 workers in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda, we examine the development implications of the gig economy on labour in Africa. We offer four analytical development dimensions through which platform-based remote work impacts the lives and livelihoods of African workers, i.e. freedom, flexibility, precarity and vulnerablity. We argue that these dimensions should be understood in a continuum to better explain the working conditions and lives of workers in the gig economy.

In this article, we examine how remote gig workers in Africa exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods in the gig economy. In addition to the rewards reaped by gig workers, they also face significant risks, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic workplace monitoring, thus constraining workers’ autonomy and bargaining power. Gig workers, as a result, are expected to have fewer opportunities to exert their agency – particularly so for workers in Africa, where the high proportion of informal economy and a lack of employment opportunities in local labour markets already constrain workers’ ability to earn livelihoods. Instead, we demonstrate how remote workers in Africa manage various constraints on one of the world’s biggest gig economy platforms through their diverse everyday resilience, reworking and resistance practices (after Katz, 2004 ). Drawing from a rich labour geography tradition, which considers workers to ‘actively produce economic spaces and scales’, our main theoretical contribution is to offer a reformulation of Katz’s notions of ‘resistance’, ‘resilience’ and ‘reworking’ as everyday practices of gig workers best understood as ‘hidden transcripts’ of the gig economy ( Scott, 1990 ). The article draws on in-depth interviews (N=65) conducted with remote workers during the fieldwork in five selected African countries.

We are witnessing the emergence of a ‘planetary labour market’ for digital work. Building on a five-year study of digital work in some of the world’s economic margins, we show a planetary labour market does not do away with geography, it rather exists to take advantage of it. Digital technologies have been deployed in order to bring into being a labour market that can operate at a planetary scale, and has particular affordances and limitations that rarely bolster both the structural and associational power of workers.