The Diversity of Platform Work— Variations in Employment and Working Conditions

Platform work emerged as an employment form and business model in Europe about a decade ago. While it is still small in scale, it is dynamically developing. This also refers to an increasing heterogeneity within platform work, which results in different effects on employment and working conditions of platform workers. This chapter suggests a classification of platform work using a combination of five criteria: scale of tasks, skills level required to fulfill them, format of service provision, selector of task assignment, and form of matching. Applying these criteria identifies 10 distinctive types of platform work which had some critical mass as of 2017. Based on this, the chapter discusses the employment and working conditions of platform workers affiliated to 5 of these 10 types. It stresses that there is no type of platform work which exclusively poses advantages or disadvantages to the workers. Indeed, their opportunities and risks vary quite substantially. That said, platform work which is related to small-scale, low-skilled tasks (algorithmically) assigned to the worker by the platform which—beyond matching—also determines work organization tends to raise more challenges for workers and the labor market.