Indecent Work? The Rise of Digital Platform Work in France and the United Kingdom

The digital platform economy has wide-ranging implications for the nature of work in the twenty-first century. The ease at which suppliers and demanders of labour come together across digital platforms creates a very new kind of labour market characterized by hyper-flexibility and an ambiguous employment relationship. Platform work has been hailed as providing employment opportunities for young people entering the labour market and other groups for whom access to more traditional forms of work is compromised (e.g. women with caring responsibilities or people with chronic health issues), or simply those seeking easily accessible, flexible work (e.g. students). On the other hand, unions and grassroots activist campaigners have highlighted the poor conditions that shape the experience of platform work, such as low pay, lack of choice over working time, tight control over the labour process and a dependency on platforms that belies their self-employed status. These dimensions of decent work are examined in the context of France and the United Kingdom, two countries which represent very different employment contexts (Milner, 2015), and thus provide insights into how specific country contexts may mediate the experience of platform work and the policy response.