Expendable to essential? Changing perceptions of gig workers on Twitter in the onset of COVID-19

While ride-hailing ridership declined in 2020 due to COVID-19 induced restrictions like stay-at-home orders, food/grocery delivery services became quasi-essential. This study investigates if and how public perceptions of gig work related to platform-based ride-hailing and food/grocery delivery services changed during the early stages of the pandemic. We collected a sample of 23,845 Twitter posts ('tweets') related to these platform-based services within two-week periods before and after the US COVID-19 emergency declaration. Sentiment analysis on tweets was conducted to investigate changes in public perception of gig work. Tweet content was analyzed by descriptively coding about 10% of the sample of tweets manually along ten different dimensions (e.g., personal experience, informative, and about driver);then we used thematic analysis to gain an understanding about the public's views towards gig work/workers. We tested supervised machine learning methods to explore their potential to classify the rest of the sample along the ten descriptive dimensions. The number of tweets increased by approximately 150% after the emergency declaration and became more positive in sentiment. Qualitative results indicate that tweets about negative personal experiences with drivers/companies decreased during COVID-19, while tweets exhibiting a sense of community (e.g., sharing information) and concern towards gig workers increased. Findings can inform policy and workforce changes regarding platform-based service companies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Do What You Love? New Music, New Work—After 2020: JM

This article analyzes musical labor and notions of love in relation to gig work with a focus on musicians in new music in New York City. Working in new music as a gig worker entails many skills, many tasks, and many jobs, which hardly guarantee a release from precarity. Meanwhile the neoliberal myth of a "labor of love” propagates the conviction that love and hard work can overcome any challenge, including those posed by racialized and gendered difference. The account of contemporary musical labor I offer concurs with recent critiques of the complicity of new music discourse with neoliberal agendas. Yet I argue that even as contemporary practices of musical work demonstrate how new music is entrepreneurial work embedded in a capitalist system, the everyday experiences of working musicians confound a totalizing account of the neoliberal agenda. Musical work takes place alongside and despite neoliberalism. Based on ethnography and interviews, I argue that the unsettled norms of musical gig work in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore ways in which musical work is more than the perfect manifestation of exploitable "labors of love.”

"I Could Be Unemployed the Rest of the Year”: Unprecedented Times and the Challenges of "Making More”

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented in many ways, but perhaps no more so than in the sudden expansion of—and increase in—unemployment assistance benefits. We ask how precarious workers, many of whom were "hustling” for money or engaged in creative fields, feel about making more on unemployment. How are they using the funds? We draw on remote interviews and online surveys with 199 gig and precarious workers in New York City during the first wave of the pandemic. We find that workers are ambivalent about unemployment assistance and concerned that a financial influx today portends a shortage tomorrow. This "specter of the unknown” affected workers' use of their benefits. As a result, even though the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act was intended to mitigate the social and economic impact of the pandemic, these programs—despite being helpful—may have also contributed to precarious workers becoming even more certain of their insecurity.

"It's Not Like Chasing Chanel:” Spending Time, Investing in the Self, and Pandemic Epiphanies

The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the labor market and given rise to the Great Resignation. Drawing on a mixed methods panel study of 199 precarious and gig-based workers, we analyze how a changing conception of free time during the Covid-19 pandemic led low-wage service workers to seek more fulfilling careers. Whereas most workers initially perceived free time in terms of opportunity costs, they later reconceived this time as enabling an investment in personal growth, moving from "spending time” making money to "investing time” in themselves. This shift in temporal experience is expressed through the adoption of a "work passion” logic and "pandemic epiphanies” that motivated respondents to seek self-affirming and potentially more lucrative work opportunities.

Gig Work, Telework, Precarity, and the Pandemic

This issue examines technology-driven economic developments during the global COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Specifically, the articles cover the ways that gig work, the platform economy, and remote work have evolved during the course of the pandemic. The issue leads with articles that chart the interplay of the platform economy with various facets of the pandemic from the inequalities and risks faced by gig workers to market forces shaping the commercialization of hosting platforms. The following articles concentrate on the ways in which specific structural conditions—digital infrastructure as well as the structure of the economy—influence the unequal distribution of telework in Uruguay and the relationship between informality and remote work opportunities across Latin America. The last two articles explore remote work in Asia and North America. In the first of these two articles remote work in Japan is examined in order to investigate the cultural sources of resistance to the adoption of remote work. In the second and concluding article, the remote work preferences of U.S. adults are analyzed as a function of technology usage (videoconferencing versus instant messaging) as well as sociodemographic and occupational attributes. © 2023 SAGE Publications.

Temp nurses go digital: Examining gig care in US nursing homes.

Nursing homes in the United States have long struggled with a shortage of nurses, which has now been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. In response to the shortage, nursing homes have increasingly used temporary services to fill nursing vacancies. Existing studies have examined the care provided by temporary nurses from traditional staffing agencies; however, at the time of writing, no studies have examined care provided by their counterparts from digital gig platforms. This article reports the findings from 15 months of fieldwork (6/2019-8/2019; 6/2020-5/2021) at two US nursing homes, both characterised by high gig-nurse usage. I asked the following questions: how nurses engage in and perceive gig services, and how the use of gig services affects the work environment and everyday care. The findings indicate that gig services (1) offer gig nurses monetary incentives at the expense of exaggerating the budget deficit of nursing homes, (2) increase gig nurses' working autonomy while creating a loophole in managerial oversight, (3) lead to an uneven distribution of duties between gig nurses and nursing home staff, which demoralises the latter. Taken together, gig services, while empowering the gig nurses, have resulted in the precarisation of nursing home staffing and care environments.

Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted: (1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Laws, Policies, and Collective Agreements Protecting Low-wage and Digital Platform Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this commentary describes and compares shifting employment and occupational health social protections of low-wage workers, including self-employed digital platform workers. Through a focus on eight advanced economy countries, this paper identifies how employment misclassification and definitions of employees were handled in law and policy. Debates about minimum wage and occupational health and safety standards as they relate to worker well-being are considered. Finally, we discuss promising changes introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic that protect the health of low-wage and self-employed workers. Overall, we describe an ongoing "haves" and a "have not" divide, with on the one extreme, traditional job arrangements with good work-and-health social protections and, on the other extreme, low-wage and self-employed digital platform workers who are mostly left out of schemes. However, during the pandemic small and often temporary gains occurred and are discussed.

Heroes from above but not (always) from within? Gig workers’ reactions to the sudden public moralization of their work

How do individuals react to the sudden public moralization of their work and with what consequences? Extant research has documented how public narratives can gradually moralize societal perceptions of select occupations. Yet, the implications of how workers individually respond and form self-narratives in light of—or in spite of—a sudden moralizing event remain less understood. Such an understanding is even more critical when workers are weakly socialized by their organization, a situation increasingly common today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, radically shifting public narratives suddenly transformed grocery delivery work, previously uncelebrated, into highly moralized “heroic” pursuits. Drawing on interviews (n = 75), participant artifacts (n = 85), and archival data (e.g., newspaper articles), we find that these workers (here, shoppers on the platform organization Instacart), left mainly to themselves, exhibited varying responses to this moralizing and that their perceived relations to the organization, customers, and tasks shaped these responses. Surprisingly, those who facilely adopted the hero label felt morally credentialled, and they were thus likely to minimize their extra-role helping of customers and show low commitment to the organization;in contrast, those who wrestled with the hero narrative sought to earn those moral credentials, and they were more likely to embrace extra-role helping and remain committed to moralized aspects of the work. Our study contributes to literatures on the moralization of work and narratives by explaining why some workers accept a moralized narrative and others reject or wrestle with it, documenting consequences of workers’ reactions to such narratives, and suggesting how a moralized public narrative can backfire. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

“It’s Not Like Chasing Chanel:” Spending Time, Investing in the Self, and Pandemic Epiphanies

The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the labor market and given rise to the Great Resignation. Drawing on a mixed methods panel study of 199 precarious and gig-based workers, we analyze how a changing conception of free time during the Covid-19 pandemic led low-wage service workers to seek more fulfilling careers. Whereas most workers initially perceived free time in terms of opportunity costs, they later reconceived this time as enabling an investment in personal growth, moving from “spending time” making money to “investing time” in themselves. This shift in temporal experience is expressed through the adoption of a “work passion” logic and “pandemic epiphanies” that motivated respondents to seek self-affirming and potentially more lucrative work opportunities. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Work & Occupations is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Adapting to a jolt: A mixed methods study identifying challenges and personal resources impacting professional gig workers' well-being during COVID-19

Scholarship on stress and resilience at work has repeatedly overlooked professional gig workers despite the rapid growth of this independent workforce. Studying such workers, especially under conditions of global disruption, offers an opportunity to expand theory on the role of personal resources in promoting resilience and well-being in the absence of the contextual resources traditionally offered by organizations. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989) and using unique qualitative and quantitative data gathered prior to and during the COVID-19 global pandemic, we investigate the pandemic's impact on an international sample of professional gig workers and test the relationship between psychosocial resources and workers' well-being and resilience. Results suggest that workers experienced the pandemic as an environmental jolt (Meyer, 1982) that affected their working lives by shrinking the amount of gig work available, especially for women, and increasing the challenges associated with fluctuating emotions, organizing day-to-day work, and cultivating relationships. Further, we find that pre-pandemic levels of two theoretically informed personal resources—work meaningfulness and the emotional carrying capacity of these workers' networks—affect outcomes: Work meaningfulness is associated with cognitive and affective well-being, and emotional carrying capacity is associated with social and affective well-being, as well as psychological resilience. Taken together, this research provides novel insights into professional gig workers' experiences of and reactions to environmental jolts, and the personal resources that aid in their well-being and resilience.

Good jobs, scam jobs: Detecting, normalizing, and internalizing online job scams during the COVID-19 pandemic

Good jobs that allow remote work have enabled white-collar professionals to stay home during COVID-19, but for precarious workers, online advertisements for work-from-home employment are often scams. In this article, based on in-depth interviews conducted between April and July 2020 with nearly 200 precarious workers, we find that precarious workers regularly encountered fraudulent job advertisements via digital media. Drawing on Swidler's concepts of the cultural tool kit and cultural logic, we find that in this time of uncertainty, workers defaulted to the focus on personal responsibility that is inherent in insecurity culture. Following the cultural logic of personal responsibility, job seekers did not place blame on job search websites for allowing the scams to be posted, but normalized the situation, deploying a scam detection repertoire in response. In addition, the discovery that advertised "good jobs" are often scams affecting workers' desire to continue job hunting and perceptions of potential future success. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of New Media & Society is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Relationship between occupational injury and gig work experience in Japanese workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional internet survey.

This study evaluated the relationship between occupational injury risk and gig work, which included the exchange of labor for money between individuals or companies via digital platforms. As Japan has experienced a severe economic decline during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, an increasing number of individuals have engaged in gig work. While few studies have evaluated occupational risks in gig work, several traffic accidents associated with food delivery gig work have been reported in the mass media. In this study, 18,317 individuals completed an internet survey that collected information pertaining to their involvement in gig work and experience of related occupational injuries; data regarding several confounding factors were also recorded. Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that workers involved in gig work had a greater risk of any minor occupational injuries (odds ratio, 3.68; 95% confidence interval, 3.02-4.49) and activity-limiting injuries (odds ratio, 9.11; 95% confidence interval, 7.03-11.8) than those not involved in gig work, after adjusting for age, sex, household income, lifestyle factors, and work-related factors. The results of this study indicate that gig workers are exposed to greater occupational hazards during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additional studies are warranted to clarify the causal mechanism for this relationship.

Impact of digital surge during Covid-19 pandemic: A viewpoint on research and practice.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an inevitable surge in the use of digital technologies due to the social distancing norms and nationwide lockdowns. People and organizations all over the world have had to adjust to new ways of work and life. We explore possible scenarios of the digital surge and the research issues that arise. An increase in digitalization is leading firms and educational institutions to shift to work-from-home (WFH). Blockchain technology will become important and will entail research on design and regulations. Gig workers and the gig economy is likely to increase in scale, raising questions of work allocation, collaboration, motivation, and aspects of work overload and presenteeism. Workplace monitoring and technostress issues will become prominent with an increase in digital presence. Online fraud is likely to grow, along with research on managing security. The regulation of the internet, a key resource, will be crucial post-pandemic. Research may address the consequences and causes of the digital divide. Further, the issues of net neutrality and zero-rating plans will merit scrutiny. A key research issue will also be the impact and consequences of internet shutdowns, frequently resorted to by countries. Digital money, too, assumes importance in crisis situations and research will address their adoption, consequences, and mode. Aspects of surveillance and privacy gain importance with increased digital usage.

Flexible employment relationships and careers in times of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a crisis that affects several aspects of people's lives around the globe. Most of the affected countries took several measures, like lockdowns, business shutdowns, hygiene regulations, social distancing, school and university closings, or mobility tracking as a means of slowing down the distribution of COVID-19. These measures are expected to show short-term and long-term effects on people's working lives. However, most media reports focused on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on changes in work arrangements (e.g., short-time work, flexible location and hours) for workers in a regular employment relationship. We here focus on workers in flexible employment relationships (e.g. temporary agency work and other forms of subcontracted labor, as well as new forms of working, such as in the gig economy). Specifically, we will discuss (a) how the work and careers of individuals in flexible employment relationships might get affected by the COVID-19 pandemic; (b) outline ideas how to examine period effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work and careers of those individuals, and (c) outline how the pandemic can contribute to the ramification of flexible employment relationships.