IB Digital Society 4.2B Employment and Labour Notes

4.2B Employment and Labour

How Digital Systems Are Reshaping Work

1. Employment and labour covers the jobs people do, how they are hired and paid, and the rights they hold at work. As digitalization spreads, work gets broken into smaller pieces and increasingly runs through platforms.
2. The concepts in focus are change, power, and systems. Digital work offers flexibility and access to new opportunities, but it can strip away security and hand control to companies and algorithms. The flexibility and the risk often fall on different people.
3. Several strands can run together in one job. Digital change can alter where and how work is arranged (gig platforms, remote tools), how much human work is needed at all (automation), and how workers are managed and watched. One strand often frees a worker while another squeezes the same person.

The Gig Economy

1. In the gig economy, people are paid for individual tasks or short jobs arranged through a platform business, rather than employed with a steady wage. The appeal is flexibility: workers log on when they choose and reach customers instantly.
   1. Mechanism: an app matches supply to demand in real time. A customer taps, an algorithm offers the job to nearby workers, and whoever accepts is paid per task with the platform taking a cut. No roster, no manager, no guaranteed next job.
2. The model shifts risk onto the worker, a power and values and ethics tension: gig workers are usually classed as self-employed, so they lack sick pay, minimum wage, holiday, and job security. The flexibility the platform advertises comes out of the worker's own security.
3. Contested: platforms say workers are independent people who value freedom; workers say they carry an employee's risks with none of the protections. Courts and governments must decide, because the self-employment label determines whether basic rights apply at all.
4. The model varies worldwide: in Southeast Asia, Grab (the super-app Uber sold its regional business to in 2018) runs rides, deliveries, and payments across eight countries, bundling gig work with digital finance where labour protections are often weaker.