Fractional Work: For some a choice for others a necessity. For all, a major distinction between what one needs from the work. Technologies. Several studies identified how only a fraction of participants in platform livelihood were full time. Some divide platform work and sales across multiple platforms. Others work a full-time job and use platforms to augment the income of a pull time job. Others work only part time on a platform while in school, or helping family. If one is building the optimal platform for individuals, or if one is regulating for optimal outcomes for individuals, which individuals are being designed for? What are the assumptions about how much individuals rely on that platform as the primary source of income, protection and benefits for them and their families?
Find references for this section at the bottom of this page or see the PDF for in-text citations.
Across the corpus of 75 studies, many researchers have made distinctions between full-time and part-time work. This split, whether by choice or by necessity, interacts with several of the 12 core elements, including Flexibility, Earnings, and Betweenness & Protection, as well as with the crosscutting element of youth.
Early studies on microwork and freelancing were among the first to discern and describe the split between full- and part-time engagement in platform livelihoods. Lehdonvirta (2016) describes microworkers in the Philippines as “precariots” pursuing several ways of earning a living. Across various country samples and microtasking platforms, others found 25% (Gupta et al. 2014), 32% (Rani and Furrer 2019), 32% (Berg et al. 2018) or 40% full-timers (Brawley and Pury 2016). This dynamic is not limited to microwork and freelancing. Budiman (2020) is a full-time personal driver who hopped on to Indonesia’s Gojek ride-hailing platform when available. In Zollmann and Wanjala’s (2020) study across several platform livelihood types, “almost no one in the study [was] doing only one thing.” In Kenya, as elsewhere, side hustles are everywhere, and have become increasingly digital (Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa 2019). In China,
Part-time workers constitute a good part of the online labor force for both types of platforms—43% on the ride-hailing apps and 60% on the food-delivery apps, respectively…. Close to 70% of part-time drivers for ride services and 40% of part-time riders for food delivery worked less than 8 hours a day. (J. Y. Chen, Sun, and Qiu 2020, 17–18)
These fractions, regardless whether it’s 25% or 75% full-timers, create a distinction between a “core group” and a ”rotating periphery” (Berg 2016). Grey and Suri (2019, 103–104) call it a “Pareto distribution” in which
work currently organizes around a small percentage of people who turn project-driven tasks into full-time work. A slightly larger proportion of people consistently contribute a few hours here and there as their schedules allow. And the majority people come to the platforms to experiment and may find their way to intermittent or regular work, but they are just as likely to do one or two jobs and leave. All three approaches to ghost work contribute to the platform’s bottom line. Even opening an account and having it added to the platform’s “head count”—whether worker is active or not—generates value for the platform, as it gives the appearance the platform has a lot of labor on standby…. For our purposes, we labeled these three groups experimentalists, regulars, and always-on.
The overall distribution of part-time versus full-time pursuit of platform livelihoods likely differs across livelihood type and by country. For example, other studies have found that most Gojek drivers in Indonesia are full time (Nastiti 2017), while another study in China suggested that the majority of platform workers report a primary source of income from platform work (B. Chen et al. 2020). This depends also on how the questions are asked; there’s a difference between driving all of one’s income and most of one’s income from a given livelihood, and how individuals might describe one livelihood among many as their “primary” one (J. Y. Chen, Sun, and Qiu 2020). It’s for these reasons that Grey and Suri’s distinction between experimentalists, regulars, and always-on is a durable, cross-sectoral dynamic in platform livelihoods, and why it drives differences in individuals’ experiences.
Whether one is fully or fractionally engaged can determine how much participation and identity one brings to the work (Wood, Lehdonvirta, and Graham 2018). Whether one is fractionally or fully engaged can determine how likely it is that one has benefits from outside work or full-time contracts (J. Y. Chen, Sun, and Qiu 2020), and can determine how selective one wants to be in taking that next gig. After all, part-timers can afford to say no (Anwar and Graham 2019). As Ma and Hanrahan (2019, 247) note about drivers in in the Global North: “Drivers’ level of dependency on ride-sharing plays an important role in their experience of working on the platform.”
And of course, the distribution of who is a part-timer is not random. This fractionality of livelihoods may intersect with gender (women are more likely part-timers, as observed in local services [Garcia et al. 2020]) and with youth (it’s not surprising that many freelancers and microtask workers are young people, perhaps still in university, still working towards full-time employment [Melia 2020; Onkokame, Schoentgen, and Gillwald 2018]).
Finally, in some cases, part-time work is split between several distinct livelihoods. Someone can be a shopkeeper by day and a freelancer at night (Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa 2019). In other cases, it’s the same activity, done where the platform supports a fraction of the livelihood. This kind of work, driving outside the app, working on one’s own on a project for former clients in freelancing, etc., has its own set of dynamics about the relative power shared between individuals and the platforms, and the trajectory of individual careers. We will cover this in a little bit more detail in the section on Contestation.
The overall implication of this section can be summed up as this: If one is building the optimal platform for individuals, or if one is regulating for optimal outcomes for individuals, which individuals are being designed for it? What are the assumptions about how much one uses the platform, and how much individuals rely on that platform as the primary source of income for them and their families?
References
Anwar, Mohammad Amir, and Mark Graham. 2019. “Hidden Transcripts of the Gig Economy: Labour Agency and the New Art of Resistance among African Gig Workers:” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, December. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X19894584.
Berg, Janine. 2016. “Income Security in the On-Demand Economy: Findings and Policy Lessons from a Survey of Crowdworkers.” ILO Working Paper 74. Conditions of Work and Employment Series. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_protect/—protrav/—travail/documents/publication/wcms_479693.pdf.
Berg, Janine, Marianne Furrer, Ellie Harmon, Uma Rani, and M Six Silberman. 2018. “Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Work: Towards Decent Work in the Online World.” Geneva: International Labour Office (ILO). https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—publ/documents/publication/wcms_645337.pdf.
Brawley, Alice M., and Cynthia L. S. Pury. 2016. “Work Experiences on MTurk: Job Satisfaction, Turnover, and Information Sharing.” Computers in Human Behavior 54 (January): 531–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.031.
Budiman, Bido. 2020. “Ride-Hailing: Stories from Gojek and Grab Drivers in Indonesia.” CGAP Background Documents. https://www.findevgateway.org/sites/default/files/users/user331/Financial-Inclusion-Story-of-Ride-Hailing-Stories-from-Gojek-and-Grab-Drivers-in-Indonesia.pdf.
Chen, Bin, Tao Liu, Lin Guo, and Zhenglin Xie. 2020. “The Disembedded Digital Economy: Social Protection for New Economy Employment in China.” Social Policy & Administration n/a (n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12603.
Chen, Julie Yujie, Sophie Ping Sun, and Jack Linchuan Qiu. 2020. “Deliver on the Promise of the Platform Economy.” Bengaluru, India: IT for Change. https://itforchange.net/platformpolitics/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/China-Research-Report.pdf.
Garcia, Liza, Teresita Barrameda, Jessamine Pacis, and Arlen Sandino Barrameda. 2020. “Digitization and Domestic Work: The Policy Environment in the Philippines.” Bengaluru, India: IT for Change. https://itforchange.net/platformpolitics/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Philippines-Research-Report.pdf.
Gray, Mary L, and Siddharth Suri. 2019. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Gupta, Neha, David Martin, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, and Jacki O’Neill. 2014. “Turk-Life in India.” In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Supporting Group Work – GROUP ’14, 1–11. Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2660398.2660403.
Lehdonvirta, Vili. 2016. “Algorithms That Divide and Unite: Delocalization, Identity, and Collective Action in ‘Microwork.’” In Space, Place and Global Digital Work, edited by J. Flecker, 53–81. London: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Ma, Ning F., and Benjamin V. Hanrahan. 2019. “Part-Time Ride-Sharing: Recognizing the Context in Which Drivers Ride-Share and Its Impact on Platform Use.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3 (GROUP): 247:1–247:17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3361128.
Melia, Elvis. 2020. “African Jobs in the Digital Era: Export Options with a Focus on Online Labour.” Discussion Paper. https://doi.org/10.23661/DP3.2020.
Nastiti, Aulia D. 2017. “Worker Unrest and Contentious Labor Practice of Ride-Hailing Services in Indonesia 1.” In Arryman Symposium. Jakarta: Buffett Institute, Northwestern University. https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/2017-nastiti—arryman-paper,-evanston-symposium,-may-13.pdf.
Onkokame, Mothobi, Aude Schoentgen, and Alison Gillwald. 2018. “What Is the State of Microwork in Africa? A View from Seven Countries.” Cape Town, South Africa: Research ICT Africa. https://researchictafrica.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/After-Access_The-state-of-microwork-in-Africa.pdf.
Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa. 2019. “Micro-Entrepeneurs in a Platform Era.” Farnham, Surrey, UK. https://www.financedigitalafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/FiDA-Micro-entrepreneurs-in-a-platform-era.pdf.
Rani, Uma, and Marianne Furrer. 2019. “On-Demand Digital Economy: Can Experience Ensure Work and Income Security for Microtask Workers?” Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher Fuer Nationaloekonomie Und Statistik) 239 (3): 565–97. https://ideas.repec.org/a/jns/jbstat/v239y2019i3p565-597n6.html.
Wood, Alex J., Vili Lehdonvirta, and Mark Graham. 2018. “Workers of the Internet Unite? Online Freelancer Organisation among Remote Gig Economy Workers in Six Asian and African Countries.” New Technology, Work and Employment 33 (2): 95–112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12112.
Zollmann, Julie, and Catherine Wanjala. 2020. “What Is Good Work? Perspectives of Young Workers in Nairobi.” Text report and accompanying slides. Nairobi, Kenya: The Mastercard Foundation. https://www.juliezollmann.com/are-new-jobs-good.