Gig2Gether: Empowering, Unifying, and Collectivizing Gig Work Through Data

Overview
The widespread adoption of platformized gig work has produced major disruptions to labor patterns and mobility. Underpinning transformative technology are workers, who face challenges to well-being in their labor, including a lack of data transparency, social isolation, and inadequate protections. In this talk, I present Gig2Gether, a prototype data-sharing system evaluated within the context of workers' everyday labor to explore the possibilities of fostering solidarity, financial reflection, and policy influence across participants of different platforms. I discuss the results of a 7-day field study with 16 active workers spanning three work domains, which reveal existing and envisioned affordances of cross-platform data-sharing for collectivism and policy impact. Workers leveraged shared data to provide mutual support, improve financial planning, and envision new forms of collectivism and policy advocacy around issues like safety and pay. These findings highlight both the potential and the challenges of data-sharing for the gig work ecosystem. We discuss how data-sharing tools can complement existing structures to enhance worker empowerment and drive meaningful policy change.
About the speaker

Jane is a final year software engineering PhD at Carnegie Mellon. Her research seeks to empower and collectivize platform-based laborers by bridging information asymmetries and gaps between worker communities. Specifically, she works with large-scale data and multiple stakeholder groups to (1) draw insights and design interventions to improve the gig work condition and (2) subsequently leverage such design guidelines to build systems that digitally support platform-based laborers in their work. She also engages with regulators and policy experts to inform relevant policymaking.

Host or Publisher BostonCHI