**2. The sociology of platform work**

Platform work – the matching of supply and demand for paid labour through an online platform – is an emerging and growing employment form which still lacks a clear definition, shows a heterogeneity of business models and calls for the regulation of the contract and employment status and the working conditions [6, 7]. It includes both web-based platforms, where work is outsourced through an open call to a geographically dispersed crowd ("crowdwork"), and location-based applications (apps) which allocate work to individuals in a specific geographical area (**Table 1**).

The main differences between these types reside in the scale of tasks, the service provision (online or locally), the required skills, the process of contact between clients and workers and the form of work allocation. Other taxonomies of platform work make similar distinctions between location-based vs. remote platform work and between microtasks or microjobs vs. macrotasks or project jobs (see [6, 8, 9]).

Following classical approaches on capitalist development, the gig economy is a new form of capitalist colonisation of non-capitalist spaces. Rosa Luxemburg [10] (1913; see also [11]) distinguished two forms of colonisation of non- or precapitalist spaces: external colonisation towards pre-capitalist countries and regions and internal colonisation of non-capitalist spheres in existing capitalist economies. The platform economy combines both forms of capitalist colonisation. Gig work opens new spaces for the capitalist mobilisation of cheap and flexible labour, operating in a no-man's-land outside the scope of labour and social legislation and without


#### **Table 1.**

*Five types of platform work.*

collective bargaining mechanisms. Looked at from this perspective, gig work is the colonisation for capitalist exploitation of new human spaces and new labour potentials (evenings, weekends of students, housewives, care workers, rural workers in Africa or Asia…) for capitalist value production. Digital networks facilitate temporally and spatially extended access to a labour pool otherwise inaccessible to wage labour [12]. For example, gig workers in Africa or Asia often have to work at night to be in sync with the time zones of their clients in North America or Western Europe ([13]: 67). In his classical study of the development of German post-war capitalism, Burkart Lutz [14], drawing on Luxemburg, described the prosperity decades after World War II as an exceptional period of capitalist colonisation of non-capitalist milieus. The current expansion of platform-based business models may be seen as a new period of capitalist colonisation using the possibilities of globally dispersed digital work and electronic networks [15].

From a historical perspective of capitalism, many, if not all, of the organisational work practices of the platforms are not genuinely novel [5, 16]. Breaking up jobs into small, low-skilled, repetitive tasks, home-based production practices, the 'putting out' system, on-demand work, piecework, intermediary-based business models, etc., were part and parcel of early capitalism in Western Europe up to the 19th century and remain common in the global South until today. The gig economy is reintroducing these practices into Western core countries, while at the same time enabling the exploitation of geographical differences in skills, labour costs, environmental and fiscal regulations.

Gig work represents a new form of capitalist work, a new dimension of the recommodification of labour in the context of the shift towards neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards, a new contested terrain to be regulated by politics, labour law, interest groups, etc., a challenge to invent new institutional settings in an emerging field of precarious and flexible work [17]. To a large extent it is low-qualified flexible but standardised work outside regular labour contracts, a sort of digital Taylorism without the Taylorist mass worker [9, 12]. As a new business model, the gig-enterprise represents the complete disintegration of the traditional Fordist organisation and its collective interest groups into a flexible, market-driven, individualised form of enterprise-customer-worker network. "The gig economy can be regarded as the latest stage in the development of atypical forms of employment"

([18]: 36). The institutional form built around the Fordist enterprise with a fixed contractual workforce, collective bargaining and labour relations, labour law, social security, health & safety provisions, fiscal responsibilities and social responsibility is fading away.

The classical transformation problem in the management of labour, i.e. how to convert contracted labour power into effective value-creating work, adopts a new form of managerial control in the case of app-based platform work. All direct and personal control is replaced by an app which exerts total surveillance over the workers through automated messaging, assigning tasks, working time, location, performance evaluation (rating and ranking), etc.; "an algorithmic Panopticon provides a God-like view over the workers' behaviour through a combination of Taylorism and panopticism" ([19]: 13). "The unremitting process of appraisal and evaluation generates a level of pressure that is of such magnitude, it is completely out of sync with the activity or task" ([9]: 30). The app is the boss and entirely in the hands of the employer, thus representing the completest expropriation of workers' means of production in the capitalist era.

Having developed a general taxonomy and the main elements of the business model of the expanding platform economy, the following sections on the employment relations will concentrate on the delivery and transport gig-work as one form of location-based platform work where several labour conflicts and worker mobilisations could be observed recently.
