Gig Work and the Pandemic: Looking for Good Pay from Bad Jobs During the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

COVID-19 led to work hour reductions and layoffs for many Americans with wage/salary jobs. Some gig work, however, which is usually considered precarious, remained available. We examine whether people doing gig microtasks right before the pandemic increased their microtask hours during COVID-19 and whether those changes helped them financially. Using data from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform from February, March, and April of 2020, we find that roughly one third of existing workers increased their microtask hours. Increases were larger for people who lost household income or wage/salary hours. Spending more time on microtasks, however, did little to help workers financially. Furthermore, the people most reliant on microtasks before the pandemic had worse financial outcomes than others. In short, even though microtask work might seem like a good way for people to recoup lost income during the pandemic, it was of limited utility even for the experienced workers in our sample.

The gender pay platform gap during the COVID‐19 pandemic and the role of platform gender segregation in Australia

“…Being a parent was associated with higher earnings before ($$\beta $$ = 0.48, $$\rho $$ < 0.001) and during ($$\beta $$ = 0.53, $$\rho $$ < 0.001) the pandemic. This is an interesting finding and counter to some previous research which has found that being a parent or experiencing work‐family conflict is associated with lower earnings on microwork platforms like Amazon MTurk (Adams, 2020; Reynolds & Kincaid, 2023). Gender and parenthood explained only 5% of the variance in logged average weekly earnings both before and during the pandemic.…”

“…Dunn et al (2021) found significant gender differences in their small panel study of online freelancers, noting that women were more likely to report increased variability in earnings and decreased hours during the pandemic. Reynolds and Kincaid (2023) found that work‐life‐family conflict during the pandemic led to decreased work hours and pay but they do not unpack these findings by gender.…”

“…The decline was sharpest amongst platform work that specialised in creative, multimedia, sales, and marketing work (Stephany et al, 2020). Longitudinal research from Reynolds and Kincaid (2023) that a third of Amazon MTurk workers increased their hours during the pandemic in response to decreases in household income and work time.…”

“…Parenthood is expected to explain some of the gender gap in earnings across all platforms as some previous research has found (Adams, 2020), but it is expected that parenthood will be a more salient factor during the early days of the COVID‐19 pandemic (2020) because parents, in particular mothers, experienced significant increases in time spent caregiving and domestic labour during lockdowns (Craig & Churchill, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c), which may have impacted their ability to undertake paid work in the platform economy. There is some international evidence that Reynolds and Kincaid (2023) found that parents experienced decreases in work hours and pay. Dunn et al (2021) found significant gender differences in their small panel study of online freelancers noting that women were more likely to report increased variability in earnings and decreased hours during the pandemic.…”

Precarious Employment and Well-Being: Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Part II includes three quantitative and two mixed-method papers tackling the theme of “The Experience and Perception of Employment Precarity” and is scheduled for publication in the May 2023 issue of Work and Occupations . Part I begins with Alon's challenge to the conceptualization and operationalization of precarious work (Alon Forthcoming), followed by two articles on job quality ( Reynolds and Kincaid Forthcoming , Rho et al Forthcoming ) and one article on workplace politics ( Woods et al Forthcoming ). As Alon points out, while being useful and popular for its simultaneous consideration of employment instability and employment-contingent outcomes, a comprehensive definition of precarious work limits research to only employed individuals.…”