Changing labor

  The second problem has to do with time and its measurement. When a worker leaves the enterprise, this is understandable, but the so-called creative work continues outside the workplace. On the other hand, who said that after spending eight hours at your workplace, you were doing this creative work? We know what we often do at work: we formally sit out some meetings, fill out completely meaningless forms, and so on. This has nothing to do with creative work, and often in general with socially useful activities.

- In terms of new forms of employment - the so-called platform employment - what has changed? How have our concepts of work become more complex as a result of the technological revolutions of recent years?

- This is a slightly different theoretical approach and level of analysis. I see platforms as a completely new form of labor organization, never seen before in history. Historically established places of work have their own temporality - for example, a farm, factory, factory, office, etc. We more or less imagine how production and work in these places are arranged. The platform is another new place that is associated with a completely different work organization. If we talk about time, then, probably for the first time in history, it became possible to fully implement the principle of just in time in work - just in time. It has been used for a long time in production: why keep inventory? Need to deliver on time. There is no warehouse in supermarkets - when everything on the shelves is over, you need to order a new one. And with difficulty it was not. The employer always bought labor, and the latter existed in anticipation of whether it would be required or not. And now, for the first time, the employer has the opportunity to use labor only at the moment when he needs it, only for a specific task, without any downtime.

The platform allows the employer to buy a specific workforce for a specific task. When I explain the mechanics of this action, I do not justify this system - such an organization of labor has a lot of flaws. Taxis are a perfect example. If earlier someone wanted to enter the taxi market, they had to hire a hundred taxi drivers, and they waited in their cars for demand to appear. And then suddenly it turns out, as it was quite recently, that everyone is sitting at home, and taxi drivers have to pay their salaries. Thanks to the aggregators, this is not necessary - you pay the taxi driver exactly at the moment when he was called and he served the client. The rest of the time, the employer does not bear any costs. This is the first feature. The second is that, for the first time in history, remote work has also become possible on an unprecedented scale.

Through the platform, you can hire someone or, conversely, being a freelancer, fulfill an order - while in both cases, you will never in your life see those who work for you or for whom you work, because they live far away.

And this allows you to build very complex strategies, benefit from it and incur certain costs, because as a freelancer, for example, you live without a corresponding salary, but you work for an American employer. You improve living conditions, because you live in a small Russian town, unable to get out of there, to move.

An interesting story about the contribution of platforms to inequality in labor markets is appropriate here. We have now completed a study on how freelancers face one significant problem: you can work from any region of the world, but no one has canceled time zones. This problem has nothing to do with taxi-type services, but it creates fierce competition for other freelancers. Suppose some customer from Moscow places an order at the end of the working day, and right there people who are ready to fulfill it respond. If you want to receive an order, respond quickly. Accordingly, residents of Moscow respond at six o'clock in the evening, and somewhere it is already late evening or night, and instead of having lunch, for example, with children, at this time the freelancer must sit at the computer and monitor these notifications. This is a round-the-clock activity, that is, such a market really exists 24/7 without interruptions. There are no restrictions.