Why Work? Seeking Meaningfulness in Platform Economy

Meaningful work has become an important subject of interest for organization scholars but also philosophers interested in understanding how it is a fundamental human need and a right. Despite the interdisciplinary interest, most of this research draws upon standard employment with autonomy and flexibility as focus points. Furthermore, what counts as meaningful work is based on research on native workers in the Global North, thereby creating a large research gap on what constitutes as meaningful work for workers in the Global South and minoritized population such as migrant workers. The paper here approaches the theme of 'Justice in the modern world of work' through a sociological inquiry of meaningful work in low wage service work in the platform economy. This includes on one hand, migrant crowdworkers in Germany who have moved from standard employment to crowdwork platforms in search for meaningfulness, and on the other, content moderators in India who work in psychologically distressing work of cleaning global social media platforms. Across both these sites, four dimensions of meaningful work are generated, namely autonomy, self actualization, social value, and safe and inclusive working conditions. These subjective perceptions are based in objective conditions including border policies in European Union and racial segmentation of labor market on one hand, and management control and labor agency in the labor process on the other. The analysis here goes on to show that experiences of meaningfulness undergo temporal shifts and are met with precarious nature of platform labor. At the same time, these experiences inform workers’ current and future strategies of creating ideal work scenarios. Data informing this research is based on 66 semi-structured interviews with content moderators and platform management from India and 15 semistructured interviews including narrative elements with non-EU migrant crowdworkers in Germany.