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• 04 déc 2017

  Call for papers - Sociology

  Digital platform-based employment and jobs

  A number of digital platforms (Airbnb, Deliveroo, Uber, etc.) have expanded in recent years by presenting themselves as new types of intermediaries linking end users and the suppliers of labour. The success of these new kinds of companies has intrigued the press, causing polarised debates between advocates of “the sharing economy” and critics of how “uber-isation” damages work and employment. Some of these new economic actors have become multinational enterprises within a very short period of time, generating colossal revenues, whereupon they become quickly and widely lauded as the harbingers of a new digital economy. Yet behind this supposedly innovative business model, one particularity characterising this new type of economic transaction is the fact that the suppliers or labour are often private individuals who neither earn wages nor qualify as bona fide professionals. The correct way of viewing them is as the owners of the means of labour (i.e. labour force) that they - acting in their capacity as independent contractors - either sell directly to consumers or else to other intermediaries.

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