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Platforms and Shared Economy: Precarity of Work or Building Agency?

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Abstract

The emergence of platforms and the associated idea of the shared economy have fostered a lot of research relating to the future of work. The question that arises is: does the advent of platform work enhance precarity of work as contracts become increasingly informal or does it build agency as the barriers to work participation decline? It is critical to understand the nuances of the ongoing processes and recognize the heterogeneity among platforms as precarity of work or agency may be a function of the nature of the platform and the type of work that it offers. This paper presents a tentative heuristic framework that can be used to understand precarity and agency in the context of the platform economy. This framework and some empirical evidence is used to compare two types of platforms in the food sector to understand the nuances of the processes at work.

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Notes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_BV_v_Aslam.

  2. https://kamaii.in/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gmb.

  3. The interviews were conducted by students in the course ‘Urban Informal Economy’ at Ahmedabad University in November 2022. I am grateful to the students for the interviews and to Prerna Jain, MA Economics student, who helped in data entry of the questionnaires.

  4. https://www.simpliance.in/minimum-wages/gujarat.

  5. However, there were three men Cloud Kitchen entrepreneurs who worked for 12 h a day, clearly this was their main source of income.

  6. We are grateful to the student interviewers, Darshin and Aryaman, for this insight.

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Acknowledgement

Author acknowledges Ms. Stuti Jani, Director, KAMAII app, for sharing information on the business model and providing access to the Home Chefs on the platform and Professor Tejaswini Niranjana for introduction to KAMAII. Author is grateful to Professors Naila Kabeer, Suma Athreya, Rakesh Basant and Mona Mehta for incisive comments on various drafts that helped sharpen the arguments.

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  1. Master of Arts in Economics Programme, Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India

    Jeemol Unni

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This is a revised version of the presidential address delivered at the 63rd Conference of the Indian Society of Labour Economics, 1-3 March 2023, Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh.

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Unni, J. Platforms and Shared Economy: Precarity of Work or Building Agency?. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 66, 355–370 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-023-00435-8

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