Summary contributed by Anne Boily, a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Université de Montréal. She works on the ethics of AI for policymakers in the context of political dialogue.
*Author & link to original paper at the bottom.
Mini-summary: Authors Bieber and Moggia examine the issue of the gig economy from a political philosophy perspective. It is the notion of “risk shifting” that is central to their analysis, and which is relatively unexplored in the discipline with respect to labour research. The gig economy refers to the phenomenon of hiring workers for concrete and temporary tasks: the supply of labour therefore depends on the demand. The central thesis of the article is that the authors are rather critical of the deleterious effects of the gig economy on workers, as the risk is shifted to workers and becomes a personal one.
They propose a policy framework to policymakers, the “Principle of Inverse Coverage (PIC)”, that would allow them to reduce the risks and compensate for the disadvantages caused to workers and, by extension, to society, without entirely prohibiting the way in which the gig economy operates, which is not entirely detrimental, but whose harmful sides are never entirely erased. This policy would stabilize the working conditions of the gig workers and allow them to project themselves into the future, by giving them back this agility. Compared to the “UBI”, the “PIC” does not generalize the risks of the firms to the whole population but compensates all the same for the risks to which the workers are exposed.
Full summary:
Authors Bieber and Moggia examine the issue of the gig economy from a political philosophy perspective. It is the notion of “risk shifting” that is central to their analysis, and which is relatively unexplored in the discipline with respect to labour research. It is also from the point of view of workers themselves (especially low-skill workers) that the article is written, rather than from the point of view of the interests of firms and employers.
The gig economy refers to the phenomenon of hiring workers for concrete and temporary tasks: the supply of labour, therefore, depends on the demand: think of companies like Lyft, Uber, or even Google (pp.1-2). The central thesis of the article is that the authors are rather critical of the deleterious effects of the gig economy on workers. They propose a policy framework to policymakers that would allow them to reduce the risks and compensate for the disadvantages caused to workers and, by extension, to society, without entirely prohibiting the way in which the gig economy operates, which is not entirely detrimental, but whose harmful sides are never entirely erased (pp.7, 15-16).
Biber and Moggia present their argument in three sections:
1) Their diagnosis of the situation of the gig economy and its “risk shift”. This “risk shift” is expressed in the fact that the firms are abandoning the risk and placing it on the workers, for whom such a risk (overly flexible and therefore precarious working conditions, no guaranteed income, difficulty in making long-term plans, the impossibility of finding time for further training, high levels of stress) becomes personal (pp.3-5, 7-9). Moreover, disparities are aggravated in the population, which can make social solidarity more difficult to achieve (pp.12-15). Firms “externalize their risk” to third parties through 5 strategies, and encourage each other to remain competitive in the market (pp.5-6):
- 1. Short-term contracts
- 2. Flexible number of hours
- 3. Flexible remuneration
- 4. A flexible schedule
- 5. Less insurance coverage
2) The normative analysis of these “risk shifts”, which weaken the workers themselves and open them up to situations of domination and exploitation. Workers seem to be free to make their own choices, but as the market changes, they are in reality less and less so. They depend too much on the supply side to be able to position themselves with freedom (pp.3, 10-12).
3) A proposal to policymakers, the “Principle of Inverse Coverage (PIC)”, which contains two key aspects (pp.18-20):
- 1. “A contribution side”: introduction of a Pigou tax (following the same principle as a carbon tax), which forces employers to financially compensate for the deleterious effects of their mode of operation.
- 2. “An expenditure side”: the profits from the Pigou tax could be used to finance social insurance for gig workers, to ensure a more stable income stream without discouraging them from working. If their total working hours decrease, the insurance income will also decrease.
This policy would stabilize the working conditions of the gig workers and allow them to project themselves into the future, by giving them back this agility. Compared to the “UBI”, the “PIC” does not generalize the risks of the firms to the whole population but compensates all the same for the risks to which the workers are exposed.
Original paper by Bieber, Friedemann & Jakob Moggia: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12233