Noncompliance among remote gig workers

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18: Precarious and Nonstandard Work

Abstract

Workers find ways to game, escape, resist, or outright defect from the organization of production imposed upon them—though these often wind up serving the interests of employers. The gig economy is no exception. A growing literature has documented myriad practices developed by gig workers to preserve autonomy, sanity, and power in the face of algorithmic modes of surveillance, piece-rate pay, and atomized conditions of employment. The existence of such tactical noncompliance in gig economy workplaces should be unsurprising. Relational contracts underpin workplace organizations of all sorts and the mutual commitment that such contracts rely on may break down, fail to arise, or shift for numerous reasons over diverse contexts. However, deeper explanations of gig worker noncompliance—either in terms of relative prevalence, origins, or mechanisms of persistence—remain sparse. Prior literature suggests potential reasons why and under what conditions we might expect gig workers to be more or less compliant but provides thinner empirical assessment. This paper proposes and evaluates three factors that might explain why remote gig workers (i.e., those who find, complete, and deliver work remotely) engage in noncompliance: (1) perceptions of gig platform competence and trustworthiness; (2) adverse experiences at the hands of gig platforms; and (3) economic dependency on gig work. We report analysis of a novel survey of over 1,000 remote gig workers collected in 2024. Our results indicate that tactical noncompliance is extremely prevalent among remote gig workers, with increased noncompliance associated with past adverse experiences and greater dependency on gig work income. Overall, the findings suggest that precarity exacerbates breakdowns in labor relations in the gig economy.

Authors

• Floor Fiers, Northwestern University

• Aaron Shaw, Northwestern University

• Amy X. Zhang, University of Washington

• Kevin Ackermann, Northwestern University