J Prassl, Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 208 pp, hb £26.49. At labour law conferences of the past two or three years, the emergence of the gig economy was the cause of a flurry of excitement. Having spent decades charting the apparent decline of our discipline – as protective employment laws were successively weakened or repealed in the name of greater labour market flexibility and ‘more jobs’ – scholars, myself included, were as if rejuvenated by a sense of the new. Here was a development that had caught the interest of the general public, and of political and social commentators, as well as academics in diverse fields, and on which scholars of labour law were in a unique position to offer expert comment. For what was at the heart of the gig economy but work and working relations? When an Uber or Lyft driver picked up a passenger and drove her to her desired destination, he was surely working. When a student agreed via Cloudcrowd or Clickworker to proofread so many pages of a manuscript for a specified rate, she quite obviously contracted to work in exchange for pay. The important questions here, it seemed to us, were precisely questions of employment law …
€
Ruth Dukes, Review Article: Regulating Gigs, Modern Law Review. First published: 14 October 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12485.
First posted 2019-10-15 14:28:08
Leave a Reply