Re-Governing Platform Mediated Work: Disrupting the Disruption to Provide Decent Work

Résumé analytique

Platform owners cast themselves as disruptors, and platform mediated work (PMW) purports to dissolve the standard employment relationship, recasting workers as individual entrepreneurs who contract with clients through the platform under commercial rather than employment law. Where this construction takes effect, the worker-platform relationship becomes a form of what Elizabeth Anderson calls "private government," in which workers are subordinated to and dominated by platforms and their clients. This brief illuminates PMW from a political economy perspective — treating platforms as capitalist enterprises built to generate profit — examines the vulnerabilities this structure creates for workers, considers how place-based and cloud-based workers have challenged that private government, and proposes ways to re-govern PMW to provide decent work.

A key distinction separates ground work (local services for local clients, such as food delivery) from cloud work (online work for global clients). Cloud work draws on a global, low-paid, low-skilled microwork force subject to opaque algorithmic control, engineered platform dependency, and no meaningful worker voice. Ground work is also mostly low-skill and low-paid, valued for scheduling flexibility, and pervasively controlled by algorithms across six identified dimensions (restricting, recommending, recording, rating, replacing, rewarding), with a lack of transparency intensifying worker stress.

Workers have resisted through labour and political organizing, but it has been a hard slog. Ground workers in jurisdictions including Canada have sought union recognition by qualifying as employees or dependent contractors — Foodora workers in Ontario organized successfully, only for Foodora to withdraw from the province — and have pursued minimum standards protections, though Canadian workers have won no such judgment. Cloud workers face a harder landscape: a globally dispersed workforce and client base undermines place-based organizing, employment-status claims would almost certainly fail because platforms remain external intermediaries, and organizing has been largely limited to information sharing that generates little countervailing power. The brief argues for a bifurcated re-governance strategy: for ground work, deeming or presuming employee status, algorithmic-management transparency laws, protections against arbitrary suspension or removal, and sectoral bargaining; for cloud work, better support for and strengthening of worker self-organization, given the difficulty any single jurisdiction faces in regulating it.