| Popis: |
Over the course of the last decade, the impact of the platform economy has had profound impacts on the economic, cultural, and occupational landscapes as more and more workers rely on a mosaic of “gigs” to make ends meet. This dissertation uses in-depth interview data from 50 platform workers to investigate how workers cope with and respond to these changes. In Part I, I build upon the debate surrounding platform labor’s status as precarious work. While some argue that platform labor ought to be understood as a continuation of occupational trends towards precarious and commodified labor, others claim it represents an entirely new form of employment. I show that platform work is unequivocally precarious work, even for those who only rely on it as part-time or supplemental income. In Part II, I interrogate how control and power dynamics play out in the platform economy in order to account for how platform labor differs from other forms of precarious work. I advance a theory of hyper-commodification to account for the seemingly contradictory experiences of platform workers, who feel simultaneously autonomous and constrained in their labor process. I argue that platform labor represents an extreme iteration of precarious work and that the structure of platform labor exposes workers more sharply to both the freedoms and disciplines of the market, which accounts for respondents’ experiences of feeling simultaneously liberated and constrained in their work. Part III asks how workers’ consent to the conditions of production is secured by firms in the platform economy. I extend insights from the literature on labor process games to explore the strategic games that platform workers develop and play. By seeming to recast power dynamics, these games obscure workers’ consent to the terms of the labor process and help to construct for workers both a structured workday and a sense of themselves as autonomous and powerful. Macroeconomic processes and broad changes to the labor market shape the meanings of workers’ actions and routines, and I find that platform workers deploy “quota games” for material rewards as well as to construct a degree of stability and routine into a labor process which is marked by a lack of both. As workers seek to provide for themselves and their families, quota games are developed to help workers determine when working is worth the effort and, importantly, when it is not. Quota games emerge from the labor process and solve for workers the problem of effort expenditure, while simultaneously securing workers consent and solving for firms the problem of managing labor supply. Together, the papers shed new light on how workers strategize to make ends meet in an occupational landscape marked by flexibility and instability. |
