Organising Precarity and Inequality in the Gig Economy

The focus of this session is the Gig economy as a form of organization and how it organizes and reorganize connections and relationships between companies, workers, and consumers. Gig work is often portrayed as the ‘future of work,’ promoting ideals of flexibility and efficiency made possible by digital technology. Gig work creates opportunities for but also threats to individuals’ wellbeing, safety, and social mobility. We are therefore looking for insights into how digital and corporate strategies and the gig workforce’s experience of precarity and inequality together define the gig economy as a form of organization. More specifically, we hope to deepen our understanding of those experiences at the intersection of employment, migration status, gender, class, race and more. Equally, we are interested in strategies with which workers organize resistance to, for example, algorithmic surveillance. Overall, we hope to contribute to a global understanding of workers’ hopes and struggles, their social and employment reality within the gig economy.