The gig economy, platform work, and social policy

This event is co-hosted by Manchester Met’s Decent Work and Productivity Research Centre and the UK Social Policy Association’s Employment Policy Group

Speaker:

Dr Tat Chor Au-Yeung, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Tat Chor Au-Yeung obtained his PhD in social policy from the University of Sheffield. Before joining the academia, he used to be a community organiser combating working poverty. His main research interests include social security, labour market policies, and precarious work. Currently, he is researching on the gig economy and platform work. He has published in Journal of Social Policy, Social Policy & Administration, Economic and Labour Relations Review, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, etc. He also extensively collaborates with NGOs and is an international member of the Fairwork network promoting labour rights of platform workers.

Digital technologies pose many new challenges to work and employment relations, in which the platformisation and gigification of work fundamentally reshape labour market institutions. Based on a qualitative study on food delivery and platform-mediated care workers in Hong Kong, this paper unpacks how varying platform infrastructures redefine the process, competition, and quality of work. While the food delivery work strongly relies on algorithms to automate hiring and co-monitor workers’ performance with customers’ ratings, care platforms use communication apps to maximise the pool of manpower that boosts the fungibility of care services for clients’ immediate needs. The findings reveal that platform works are differently embedded in particular technological settings, service sectors, and policy contexts, despite their similarly deprived occupational welfare. The platform-mediated care work demonstrates more complicated tensions between platforms, workers, clients, and the state, calling for attention to platform-worker power asymmetries and regulatory dynamics in the state-subsidised care market. 

Host or Publisher Faculty of Business & Law