'Mind the gap(s): Worker voice in the platform economy' with Dr Prakriti Dasgupta

Platform work is facilitated by location-based and online web-based digital labour platforms like Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon mechanical Turk and others, that connect workers with customers for standalone, short-term tasks. These platforms identify as digital intermediaries as opposed to employers, blurring traditional employment boundaries, undermining labour protections, and fragmenting work and workers – all of which threatens and presents challenges for worker voice. The foremost challenge emerges from the platforms’ use of algorithmic management which minimises any scope for direct organisational or managerial contact or interaction, and reduces voice into rudimentary, tightly controlled, and easily mutable arrangements maintained through algorithmically programmed interactions and chatbots. The second challenge emerges from barriers to institutional voice and representation structures that workers across many jurisdictions encounter given their status as independent self-employed contractors. Despite this, Prakriti's research joins others to show that platform worker voice is far from being suppressed and emerges via what I refer to as a grassroots voice mechanism constituted by the workers, and which takes their voices beyond traditional organisational boundaries. Their voice is best understood then as a form of praxis, relational and emergent and shaped by struggle, agency, community and context, but most importantly, is not without challenges associated with overcoming fragmented worker solidarities. Prakriti's research also shows that through a variety of expressions and actions that constitute voice, workers do have the ability to affect the platforms’ algorithmic systems and influence their immediate working conditions in the short term, but not necessarily to their benefit in the long-term as platforms introduce new measures to counter these. These insights together illustrate both the constraints and possibilities shaping workers’ voice and its ability to influence workplace dynamics, and the responsibility now lies with regulators and policymakers to actively engage with and support this bottom-up fight for decent work, ensuring that interventions are inclusive, and they align with and amplify these grassroots efforts.