The winners and the losers of the platform economy: who participates?

ABSTRACT

The platform economy is rapidly transforming the dynamics of the labor market. Optimists argue platform work functions as a social equalizer, opening opportunities for additional earnings for those who need it most. Pessimists suggest that the platform economy widens earning disparities by providing additional income to people who already have good jobs. We contribute to this debate by examining who participates in the platform economy and their motivation for participation, using a US nationally representative sample. Our findings offer support for both perspectives. Those who participated in labor-exchange platforms were more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds. By contrast, those who participated in online selling platforms were more likely to come from more affluent backgrounds. When we further examined different types of platform work, we found that different types of platform work were performed by different demographic and social groups. In addition, participation in some platform work, such as rideshare driving and house/laundry cleaning, is motivated out of necessity, while other platform work, such as selling used goods and performing online tasks, is generally used to supplement incomes. Distinct occupations tend to benefit different social groups in different ways and, taken together, disadvantaged groups are less likely to perform types of platform work that would improve their economic position and reduce income disparities. This tends to offer more support for the pessimist’s perspective. We conclude that the platform economy is strongly segregated by occupation and it should be examined as a set of distinct occupations rather than a homogenous industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Platform economy
• digital labor
• work
• internet

Acknowledgements

Pew Research Center bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations of the data presented here. The opinions expressed herein, including any implications for policy, are those of the authors and not of Pew Research Center.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Lyn Hoang (MA, University of Western Ontario) is currently completing her Ph.D at the University of Western Ontario. Her scholarly interests are digital sociology, new ways of working in the platform economy, and social inequality.

Grant Blank (Ph.D University of Chicago) is the Survey Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Senior Research Fellow of Harris Manchester College, both part of University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He is a sociologist specializing in the social and cultural impact of the Internet, the digital divide, statistical and qualitative methods, and cultural sociology. He is currently working on analyses of the 2019 wave of the Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS). In 2015 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Communication, Information Technology and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. He can be reached at [email protected]; see http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/blank/.

Anabel Quan-Haase is Professor of Information and Media Studies and Sociology at Western University and director of the SocioDigital Media Lab. Her work focuses on social change, social media, and social networks. She engages in interdisciplinarity, knowledge transfer, and public outreach. She is the coeditor of the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods with Luke Sloan (Sage, 2017), coauthor of Real-Life Sociology with Lorne Tepperman (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the author of Technology and Society (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2020). Through her policy work she has cooperated with the Benton Foundation, Partnership for Progress on the Digital Divide, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Canada’s Digital Policy Forum. Dr. Quan-Haase is chair of CITAMS for 2019–2020 and the past president of the Canadian Association for Information Science.

ORCID

Lyn Hoang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2854-9447

Grant Blank http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6821-0958

Anabel Quan-Haase http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2560-6709

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Research Council of Norway: [grant number 275347]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [grant number R3603A20].