Dirigida por: Elias Moser
In social sciences, this development is observed almost exclusively with great concern. In their popular academic book ‘Ghost Work’, for example, Mary Gray and Siddarth Suri ask ‘How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass’ (2019). Gig work, they argue, is leading to unprecedented precarity. Workers become face fierce competition and are forced to accept low prices. They are usually overworked and self-insured or not insured at all.
Various political philosophers are therefore convinced that the emergence of the gig economy has led to the loss of an important institution for society that protects individuals – the firm. In his article ‘On the (Mis-)Classification of Paid Labour’ (2021), Daniel Halliday calls for platforms to be legally recognised as employers and for workers to regain the status of traditional employees. Friedemann Bieber and Jakob Moggia (2021) criticise that the emergence of the gig economy is shifting a disproportionate amount of risk onto workers. So, the social challenges posed by gig work seem to lead to a kind of ‘corporate nostalgia’. For a long time, however, there was a conviction in political philosophy that in a free market system, employees are exposed to an unjustifiable power of companies. For example, Elisabeth Anderson (2017) criticises companies as ‘Communist Dictatorships in Our Midst’.
Orders may be arbitrary, and can change at any time, without prior notice or opportunity to appeal. Superiors are unaccountable to those they order around. They are neither elected nor removable by their inferiors. (…) The [firm] owns all the nonlabor means of production (…) It organizes production by means of central planning. The form of the government is a dictator-ship. In some cases, the dictator is appointed by an oligarchy. In some cases, the dictator is self-appointed.
For many, the firm was (and still is) the kind of villain that employees need to be protected from. So why this urge to return to an economy characterised by traditional companies as employers? What is the ethical and social challenge of contract labour mediated by platforms? In this talk, I will explore the origins of the ethical problems of gig work. The aim is to identify the main factors of the newly emerged precarity. To do this, I will take a step back to the beginnings of economic theory of the firm. Using the approaches of the neo-classical economists Frank Knight (1921) and Ronald Coase (1937), I will re-examine the question of why companies exist at all. Based on their explanations, I hope to illustrate the ethical challenges faced by people working in the gig economy.
References
• Anderson, E. (2017). Private government: How employers rule our lives. Princeton University Press.
• Bieber, F. und Moggia, J. (2021). Risk shifts in the gig economy: The normative case for an insurance scheme against the effects of precarious work. Journal of Political Philosophy 29(3), 281–304.
• Coase, R. H. (1937). The nature of the firm. http://econdse.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/firm-coase.pdf
• Halliday, D. (2021). On the (mis) classification of paid labor: When should gig workers have employee status? Politics, Philosophy & Economics 20(3), 229–250.
• Knight, F. H. (1921). Risk, uncertainty and profit. Houghton Mifflin.
