Lessons from the Gig Economy for Transforming Public Services
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- Published on Friday, 18 September 2020 02:46
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2196 ... September 18, 2020
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Lessons from the Gig Economy for Transforming Public Services
Ursula Huws
Even before the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, major upheavals were taking place in the UK labour market. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of people working for online platforms such as Deliveroo and TaskRabbit doubled from 4.7% of the adult population to 9.6% – the equivalent of 5.5 million people. Lockdown caused these trends to escalate still more sharply as a housebound population switched en masse to ordering goods online.
For many, the growth of the platform economy is cause for concern. But I believe the principles of platform technology could be used by governments to transform the way public services are delivered, taking advantage of the way that they efficiently connect users with the services that they want. Under municipal control, or through public-private partnerships, platforms could transform service delivery to citizens.
Colleagues and I surveyed 28,000 people across Europe in our research on the platform economy. In the UK, we measured changes between 2016 and 2019 not just among... those working for platforms but also their customers. During that period those using online apps for taxi services rose from 15.6% to 30.6%, while those using online platforms for household services (such as cleaning, gardening or household repairs) went up from 23.8% to 31.4%.
One big surprise was the profile of these customers. Expecting to find a picture of the better-off having their needs supplied by poorer people, we actually found a much more universal distribution across income brackets. Although 44% of the richest quarter of the population used platforms, so did 30% of people with middling incomes and even 22% of the poorest quarter.
Furthermore, people working for online platforms were also very likely to be customers for them too. In 2019, while 31% of the population used app-based taxi services and 5.2% worked to provide these taxi services, no less than 4.8% of the population were both taxi users and drivers. Similarly, while 31% bought online household services and 5.5% worked to provide them, 4.9% were doing both.