Freedom, domination and the gig economy

Employment practices in the gig economy have routinely been defended through the language of individual freedom. Indeed, this particular model of on-demand employment is often presented as removing constraints on the freedom to choose when, where and how to sell one’s labour, enabling individuals to exercise greater self-authorship over their working lives. In this article, however, I show how the particular conception of freedom that underpins this pro-gig work discourse functions to obscure significant threats to the liberty of gig workers. An alternative perspective, inspired by the republican tradition of political thought, reveals instead how the structural vulnerability of gig workers exposes them to extraordinary forms of domination, compromising their freedom. Relative to typical employees in advanced capitalist labour markets, the precarious legal and economic status of gig workers leaves them less free, with fewer institutionalised resources to disarm the multiple forms of dominating, arbitrary power to which they are vulnerable. To maximise freedom within existing capitalist labour markets, on this republican view, we should seek to (re)build the rights and protections available to workers, rather than promote the further normalisation of under-regulated and precarious gig work.