Offline contexts of online jobs: Platform drivers, decent work, and informality in Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract

Motivation:The Sustainable Development Goals targets include decent work for all by 2030 but progress in sub-Saharan Africa has been slow. Over the past five years, the platform work sector (e-hailing platforms in particular) has expanded considerably on the continent, providing work opportunities to the growing urban populations. The quality of this work, however, is heavily contested. Purpose: We deepen and extend our understanding of the gig economy in sub-Saharan Africa and assess its potential for creating decent work. Our unique contribution lies in looking at the gig economy in comparison to the local threshold (the informal economy) as opposed to wage employment. Methods and approach:We first review the literature on the gig economy, the informal sector, and decent work in low-and lower-middleincome countries. We then draw on a case study of e-hailing in Lagos, Nigeria, to assess the sector's potential to create decent work. We discuss our findings against the four pillars of the International Labour Organization's Decent Work Agenda: productive employment, labour standards, social protection, and social dialogue. Findings: We find that e-hailing platforms may offer certain gains compared to regular taxiing in the informal sector but these are context-and platform-specific. Examples include access to insurance, credit, and cash transfers. Gig work remains embedded in the informal economy: it is unregulated and does not abide by labour standards nor offer social protections. We also find evidence of well-organized labour movements. Policy implications: E-hailing may be productive work, as platform intermediation facilitates outreach and matching, translating into increased wages. This happens with the added cost of longer working hours in the absence of labour standards. We propose exploring the role of digital records kept by platforms (e.g. income volume and regularity, or customer ratings data) to facilitate the progressive transition of transport workers towards formality. We also recommend fostering industry standards (such as fair work certification) to protect workers' rights.

Socio‐technical issues in the platform‐mediated gig economy: A systematic literature review: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…It can take the form of controlling the competition among workers for jobs or tasks, controlling how the work is done, placing barriers between the gig worker and the client, and contractually enforcing the removal of some rights from the gig worker (Spitko, 2020). Platform design and operation, pervasive monitoring and surveillance, the rating and evaluation systems, the tendency to value the client over the worker (Chan, 2022), and the distributed nature of gig work make it difficult for workers to gain any type of significant bargaining power and when they do, it is characterized by power asymmetry tilted in favor of the platform (Cieslik et al, 2022; Zhu & Marjanovic, 2021). Fleitoukh and Toyama (2020) provide a clear summary of the core issue “[t]he bargaining power of the worker is truncated when operating through a digital tool” (p. 3).…”

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“…According to the authors of this article, a very important observed research area is the issue of decent work. In this area, scientific inquiries aimed at analyzing the potential of the gig economy for the creation of decent work are discernible (Cieslik et al, 2022), or the issue of decent working conditions for non-standard workers is raised (Loganathan, 2022). It should be emphasized at this point that one of the extremely important elements determining decent work and raised by researchers is the issue of decent working time (Rodrigues et al, 2021).…”

Platform labour in contexts of high informality: Any improvement for workers? A critical assessment based on the case of Argentina

“…Therefore, platforms are usually seen as replacing the full‐time stable employment of the postwar era with new low‐quality and vulnerable jobs, especially in the Global North (De Stefano, 2016; Munck et al, 2020). Furthermore, as a global trend, platform work is found exacerbating the already vulnerable labour conditions of informal workers, and even promoting the movement of formal workers into informal arrangements (Cieslik et al, 2021; ILO, 2021; World Bank, 2020).…”