Despite sharing economy’s highly touted promise of a novel, inclusive and community building model of responsible production and consumption, sharing economy has been indicted for profiteering from previously private and occasionally non-monetized activities, creating precarious jobs and reproducing stereotypes. In the epicenter of such critiques are the ‘big’ and ‘limelight-ed’ platform firms, like AirBnB and Uber and the digital infrastructures they employ. Similarly, and to the best of our knowledge, the majority of related research focuses on SE platforms of this ilk. In response, while acknowledging that the problem is not the agency of the digital in the activity of sharing per se, but that the wrong people set the terms and benefit from this mediation, we find it timely to explore the existence of more self-organized and community-driven SE initiatives and explore how they use the digital to support their sharing ends. As a result, in this paper we report from our engagement with a community-run, self-organized ride-sharing initiative, called ‘Share the ride ;)’. ‘Share the ride ;)’ operates within a Facebook group since 2009 and is the most popular ride-sharing ‘platform’ in Greece. Extrapolating from our findings and while adopting a ‘Solidarity HCI’ approach, we participate in the ‘sharing discourse’ by providing design implications for the development of ‘Solidarity Sharing Economy Platforms’. We perceive those, as digital infrastructures which can favor self-organization and pluralism and which are developed for communities (existing and new ones) in order to facilitate multiple sharing activities and nurture a generative sharing ideology. To that end, we suggest malleability as a design affordance and the development of mechanisms which aim at supporting the formulation of enduring social ties among those platforms’ members. Finally, we underscore that in order to favor the establishment of strong relations, ‘Solidarity SEPs’ should avoid normalizing designs and on the contrary employ architectures which esteem pluralism and self-affirmation.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449097
Most scholarly discussions around ridesharing applications center on the experiences of the drivers and the riders (passengers), and thus the role of the owners of the cars, if they are different from the drivers, remain understudied. However, in many countries in the Global South, the car owners are often different from the car drivers, and the tensions between them often shape the experience with these ridesharing apps in those countries. In this paper, we address this issue based on our interview-based study in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which incorporates semi-structured interviews of 31 Uber drivers and 10 car owners. From our interviews, we identify the contract models that facilitate the partnership between prospective Uber drivers without a car and car owners seeking to rent their cars for Uber, describe the tensions between these two parties, provide a nuanced cultural portrayal of their negotiation mechanisms, and highlight the reasons for which the driver or the owner leaves Uber. Our analysis reveals how the local adoption of sharing economy amplifies existing inequalities and disrupts the prevailing social dynamics. We also connect our findings to the broader interests of CSCW around work, privacy, power and discuss their implications for design and policy formulations.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449244
The isolating nature of gig work has created unintended consequences over how workers engage with peers, friends, family, and society in general. We performed a qualitative study involving interviews with 21 delivery workers in Bangalore, India to understand how workers experienced and responded to social isolation perpetuated by the nature of their jobs. We found that the stigma and individual nature of app-based delivery work restricts access to inter-relational and instrumental support. As a response, workers organized peer networks for both companionship and emergency assistance. We analyze how the cultural context of India heightens these experiences, and offer ideas for mitigating the risks of isolation as a result of gig work.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449138
The individualistic nature of gig work allows workers to have high levels of flexibility, but it also leads to atomization, leaving them isolated from peer workers. In this paper, we employed a qualitative approach to understand how online social media groups provide informational and emotional support to physical gig workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that social media groups alleviate the atomization effect, as workers use these groups to obtain experiential knowledge from their peers, build connections, and organize collective action. However, we noted a reluctance among workers to share strategic information where there was a perceived risk of being competitively disadvantaged. In addition, we found that the diversity among gig workers has also led to limited empathy for one another, which further impedes the provision of emotional support. While social media groups could potentially become places where workers organize collective efforts, several factors, including the uncertainty of other workers' activities and the understanding of the independent contractor status, have diminished the effectiveness of efforts at collective action.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479535
Uber drivers in India are witnessing an early emergence of everyday work formalization predominantlythrough their engagement with the Uber platform. If a vast segment of the informal employment sector ina country resembles gig work, can companies like Uber bring organisational ability and wage regularity toemployment? Despite Uber’s economic model being challenged on several labour fronts under the criticalscholarship of the global North, we argue everyday interactions with the Uber platform are ushering organisedwork practices, improved financial stability for drivers who formerly hailed from the informal employmentsector in India. The everyday of driving for Uber is filtered through a conceptual and practical work modeldrivers gain with due experience of Uber’s platform features. Our ethnographic investigation uncovered therelationship between the controlling demands of the Uber platform and ensuing driver work adaptations. Wepresent findings from a qualitative investigation of Uber ride hailing services impacting drivers to 1. optimizeearnings, 2. Link work effort to wages 3. converge towards platform compliance. We highlight engaged andpersistent interactions with the Uber platform promoting compliance and bringing structure to the professionof driving for Indian Uber drivers
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479568
The speed of digital transformation has resulted in new challenges for job seekers to become lifelong learners and to develop new skills faster than before. In this paper, our main objective is to examine how online content can serve as indicators for changes to the Information Technology (IT) industry and its in-demand skills. To study this relationship, we collect Reddit posts to represent social media content and job postings to reflect the IT industry based on which we explore possible correlations between them. Further, we propose a methodology to quantitatively estimate the predictive power of social media content for future in-demand skills. Our results show that the frequency of skill-related conversations on Reddit correlates with the popularity of skills in job posting data. Additionally, our findings indicate that the number of social posts dedicated to a specific skill can be a strong indicator for future job requirements. This is an important finding because identifying what skills the labor force should acquire will assist job seekers to plan their lifelong learning objectives to (a) maximize their employability, (b) continuously update their skills to remain in demand, and (c) be informed and actively engaged in defining knowledge trends, rather than reactively becoming informed of the latest information.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479511
Career development is vital for ensuring a happy and productive workforce, and for maintaining relevance in a rapidly changing economy shaped by technological progress. Yet career development is largely ignored in crowdwork. Crowdwork platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) do not support crowd workers in reskilling and changing careers. In this paper, we study the career goals of AMT workers and the challenges they face in trying to transition out of crowdwork and into high-skill jobs offline or into specialized freelance work. We performed a qualitative study in which we surveyed 20 AMT workers and interviewed 6 of them about their career goals, how they are currently pursuing them, and the challenges they face. We found that crowdworkers aspire to transition out of AMT but face challenges due to lack of career guidance, and limited time and financial resources. Drawing on literature in career studies and organization science, we discuss how crowdworkers' challenges are further aggravated by the enviornment on AMT, and provide implications for future research and design that may better support crowdworkers make a career change.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449224
This paper examines the role played by informal mutual aid networks in mediating precarity for gig workers in Jakarta during COVID-19. Using an original survey of 350 mobility platform drivers conducted in May 2020 and a pre-pandemic set of semi-structured interviews with driver communities, I find that mutual aid dispersed through associative, informal labor networks became an essential infrastructure of support for drivers during the pandemic. However, results indicate this support was not universally accessible: the pre-pandemic structures of a driver’s community and the driver’s own participation within the community correlated with the magnitude of community support a driver reported receiving. By putting CSCW literature in conversation with broader literature on informal urbanism, this paper shows how informal labor networks and mutual aid can be a transformative form of labor solidarity, even outside of formal union structures. By analyzing the forms and limits of these networks this paper also carries lessons in how to build solidarity amongst distributed workforces. At the same time, this study highlights the role of local socio-economic context in shaping gig worker experiences of the pandemic. Thus, it points to the need for more contextually driven analysis of both gig worker precarity and what are deemed effective forms of labor solidarity.