Racialised Labour Markets, the Work-Citizenship Nexus, and Platform Work: Comparing Job Quality and Worker Organising in the United States and South Africa

Much has been written already about job quality in the platform economy (e.g., ILO, 2021; Anwar and Graham, 2021; Wood et al., 2019). But far less has been written about how social biases are reproduced in the labour markets through the platform economy. Digital labour platforms and clients/employers exert control over workers and labour process through the mechanisms of ratings, feedback, payment methods, and user profile registrations, also known as the algorithmic management (Rosenblat 2018; Gandini, 2019). This raises concerns about the job quality impacts of platforms, particularly among those that are already marginalised such as women workers, people with disability, people of colour, migrants, and refugees. These groups represent not only a vast majority of the poor, unemployed and those in the low-paid informal work in both countries, they are also increasingly represented in platform work (ILO, 2021). Exploring two socio-political contexts, the United States and South Africa, both of which have a history of structural racism in their labour markets, this study explores issues of job quality and worker resistance among platform workers. Utilizing innovative social media survey methodology this study employes targeted Facebook Ads to survey platform workers in both countries about their racialised experience with platform work. The study seeks to uncover the experiences of marginalised populations undertaking gig work within these countries to understand the similarities and differences in cross country context. We seek to uncover the experiences of economically marginalised in the platform economy to understand how digital transformation is perpetuating and embedding structural racism into the future of work and how workers are resisting these systems.