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Partially Empowering but not Decent? The Contradictions of Online Labour Markets

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Book cover Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India

Abstract

Online labour markets (OLMs) are new global workplaces that represent the latest wave of offshoring. Indians have a strong presence on OLMs, being freelancers on both international and national platforms, adding to the country’s large and growing informal workforce. Through a critical hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this chapter examines the experiences of Indian freelancers on Upwork using the lens of decent work. The findings underscore that though full-time freelancers report some sense of empowerment in terms of income, quality of life, long-term investments and upward mobility, career development, work-life balance, link with the West and platform checks and facilities, there are decent work deficits across the four hallmarks of full and productive employment, rights at work ensuring human dignity, social protection and social dialogue. Effective pursuit of the decent work agenda on OLMs calls for counterhegemonic initiatives through global social movement unionism that reconciles labour differences across the North-South divide.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Upwork is a “spot” OLM where clients and freelancers, interacting based on profiles, job posts and bids, trade at agreed prices for certain durations of time (Horton 2010). Upwork was formed in May 2015 as the merger of Elance-oDesk. This latter entity, launched in December 2013, combined the two independent crowdsourced work platforms of Elance and oDesk (Empson 2013). Whereas the 2015 merger arose as Elance-oDesk realized that their impact would be even greater if they built a single site, the 2013 combination involved linking resources and benefitting from investments in technology in a bid to achieve higher quality results and accelerated growth and scale, though the two platforms operated as separate services with no fall-out on clients and freelancers (Swart 2013). Following the creation of Upwork, the oDesk platform remained the foundation, retaining the best of both legacies and adding new innovations. Upwork has 9 million registered freelancers and 4 million registered clients, with 3 billion jobs posted annually and US$ 1 billion worth of work done annually (Upwork 2015).

  2. 2.

    The case studies, drawn from a larger inquiry of Indian contractors engaged in crowdsourced paid work on Upwork (D’Cruz and Noronha 2016), have been selected to represent the four prototypes of full-timers evident in the sample such that together they optimize its theoretical generalizability (Thompson 1999). Based on data gathered via van Manen’s (1998) hermeneutic phenomenology, the lived experiences of the four participants vis-à-vis the site are first described ideographically. Then, taking up the lens of critical theory (Scherer 2011), participants’ narratives are subjected to ideology-critique nomothetically to highlight the extent of their empowerment. Following Comstock (1982), we adopt a hybrid approach synergizing interpretivism with critical theory, based on the well-recognized position that critical theory involves combining a phenomenological stance with social critique and praxis (Prasad 2005).

    It may be noted that the scope of the present chapter is limited to full-timers though D’Cruz and Noronha’s (2016) study also covered part-timers. That part-timers felt unable to shift to full-time engagement on the platform based on their experiences of erratic work and income is indicative of the spectrum of freelancers’ experiences on OLMs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, India

    Premilla D’Cruz

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  1. Premilla D’Cruz
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Correspondence to Premilla D’Cruz .

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  1. Organizational Behaviour, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Organizational Behaviour, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

    Ernesto Noronha

  2. Organizational Behaviour (OB), Indian Institute of Management Organizational Behaviour (OB), Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

    Premilla D'Cruz

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D’Cruz, P. (2017). Partially Empowering but not Decent? The Contradictions of Online Labour Markets. In: Noronha, E., D'Cruz, P. (eds) Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3491-6_10

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