The exploding gig economy

The gig economy used to be made up of artists, musicians, actors dipping in and out of work, or people picking up those jobs you see advertised on supermarket noticeboards.
Now it’s expanding, pushed by rapidly developing technology.
Not only are apps such as Uber, Airbnb and DoorDash increasingly becoming a part of our lives, but white-collar workers such as designers, architects and accountants are using platforms such as Fiverr to pick up jobs from around the world.
Statistics on the size of the gig economy here are thin, regulation is virtually non-existent, and employment courts are still dealing with industrial relations issues.
Today on The Detail we look at the potential hooks in using such platforms, the advantages of them, and the issues we haven’t really thought about yet.
Dr Nadia Dabee, senior lecturer of commercial law at Auckland University’s business school, will deliver a talk on the subject at the end of the month as part of the university’s ‘Raising the Bar’ series. The title is ‘Why gig work doesn’t live up to the hype – and what New Zealand can do about it’.
“I’m interested particularly in gig workers who are working under what we call the ‘algorithmic boss’, because they have very little control over what this algorithmic boss does, which is why I think we need to pay special attention to that,” she says.
“I don’t think the data captures exactly how many people are doing AI-mediated platform work. [First Union] estimated that [there are] 7000 Uber drivers in New Zealand so it’s not huge, but we don’t know how many of them exactly rely on Uber as their main source of income, and we don’t know how many more gig workers there are out there.”
She says the sector isn’t even properly defined, which makes it hard to capture data.
But Dabee says having a significant number of workers working in really difficult conditions affects society as a whole.
“The more workers you have who are not stable, the more unstable society itself becomes. The more people we have relying on gig work, whether it’s full-time or part-time, the more of a problem it’s going to become.
“It’s going to have an effect on our social fabric.
“It’s changing the way we do work, the very nature of work, the way we think about work.”
For another perspective on the gig economy, The Detail also speaks to BNZ’s general manager of growth strategy, Brandon Jackson.
He says in New Zealand the numbers of people participating in the gig economy are small, certainly much smaller than in places such as the US and Japan, but we don’t actually have any real figures on it.
He goes through the pros and cons of these new developments, including the ability of businesses to cut costs by accessing cheaper specialist services and the convenience of using apps such as Uber.
Jackson says the gig economy is not right or wrong … it just is. He says the regulators are watching it, and the electronic nature of the transactions conducted means it’s easier to track income streams and to tax them.
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