Collective action

  - Is labor solidarity possible in the new realities? And what can workers fight for today?

- Unlike marketplaces, hidden corporations create the same mass worker as in a factory, with unified, identical interests. And in this case, a base of solidarity arises. When all employees are in identical structural positions, they have identical interests, and accordingly, they are capable of collective action. We constantly hear about strikes of couriers and taxi drivers - some kind of pseudo-strikes, of course, since they are not so massive, but still. A base for trade unions is emerging - unions of platform workers have already arisen in the West.

Freelancers, by contrast, do not have this unification of interests. I am not aware of any collective action against freelance exchanges. And I don't really believe in them. There may be some other forms of solidarity, since there are common things that freelancers can fight for - at least for these marketplaces to function fairly, because they often deliberately create information asymmetries. For example, as a freelancer, you must provide a lot of information in order to be hired, and the customer has the right not to provide you with any information, he remains anonymous. You can fight for such things.

- Can we assume that these two forms of employment personify two images of future work?

- I won't say that freelancing and marketplaces are the ideal type of work organization, no, this is a completely definite solution that works in certain areas, in others it does not work. The simplest example: you cannot rely on freelancers in areas that involve some kind of trade secret. Or where it is required to work on a project continuously for many years.

Freelancing is not the future of work in the sense that this form cannot absorb everything. This is another floor that is being built on top of the existing ones, increasing the diversity and complexity of the economy.

It is not economically feasible to model a marketplace for standardized services or services to be delivered here and now. The more important question is the government's response - most likely, legislation will impose more and more responsibilities on platforms. I do not think it will come to the point that the state recognizes (although there are now such precedents) as employees of digital platforms of taxi drivers and couriers, but, perhaps, they will come up with an intermediate status - the status of a platform worker who will have his own rights and responsibilities and some social guarantees provided by platforms.

How has isolation affected freelancers' lives and platform employment?

- Under the influence of the pandemic, we are witnessing a kind of rebirth of remote work. Since everyone forcibly switched to such a regime, perhaps someone thought: “Why do I need this company and my boss? I can be fired at any time. Maybe I'll be looking for a job on free bread, since I'm still at home? " Firms think similarly: “Why keep an employee? To pay wages? He will stay at home, I don't see him, I can't control him, I'd better hire a freelancer. " In this sense, the pandemic is likely to contribute to the development of freelancing and related infrastructure.

We see the other side: delivery services have become more in demand. It is in this industry that there has been a boom in employment, they are hiring more and more couriers, and people who have lost their jobs in other areas have gone there. But the pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of such workers. At the most dangerous time, everyone sits at home, and these people bring them pizza. Such workers are deprived of social and medical guarantees. If all is well, then guarantees are not really needed, and when a crisis occurs, it is the people without guarantees that are the first to be hit. Now we seem to have to get used to the fact that crises are not only economic.

- The isolation and transfer of a large number of workers to a remote format has led to a revision of the concepts of not only work, but also free time. What can be expected in the future in terms of trends that are already being recorded?

- When this whole story began, as a researcher, I had a surprise that even turned into some gloating: it has been known about remote work for a long time, but at a certain point in society, business, and science there was an opinion that this innovation was, as it were, overestimated. She has become unfashionable. And researchers like me studied all this: freelancers, their work, the device of remote work. But those around it were not very interesting. And suddenly everyone was sent home, everyone looked like freelancers, and it turned out that we did not know anything about this experience. Articles began to appear in magazines and newspapers about how hard it turns out to work remotely, and next to them are children, family ...