The platform economy, as a new business model and phenomenon, brings both benefits and challenges to the workers, societies, and national policymakers. The CENTER is to conduct a pioneering research on scope of the platform economy in Serbia, from the labor and economic points of view. The focus is on the size of the digital labour force on digital platforms and via apps, in the sectors of transportation, and food/goods delivery. The research is intended to provide policymakers with reliable evidence on the phenomenon.
Digital work is one of the first and most massive phenomena that links the fields of digitalization, labour, and employment. It is facilitated by Internet-based platforms and apps that emerged as business models on the wave of digital innovation. According to some classifications, it entails „on demand“ work which matches workers and clients (service users) on one specific location through the mobile application, and „crowd work“ that stands for paid remote work in which the employer is not necessarily located, or registered, in the same country as the worker. One of the reasons for this rise is the ability of a platform to efficiently and quickly match supply and demand, thus significantly reducing transaction costs: platforms provide clients – individuals and legal entities – with a place for unprecedented scalability of the workforce having in mind their ability to offer the workforce only for those tasks that their clients need, and terminate the (working) relationship as soon as the required task is completed.
On the other hand, increasing number of people find themselves in non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) to which the platform ‘gig’ economy is greatly contributing. Common to all NSFEs is a higher level of material and psychological insecurity than in full (salaried) employment, and high prevalence of workers in informal status, while whithin the Serbian context national regulations are lagging behind to accommodate new realities for an increasing number of platform workers in terms of equal acess to labor and social rights. In order to reap full benefits of the on-going digital transformation in new reality of work, the application of existing regulation must be reinforced, to accommodate new reality of NSFE and legal vacuum to which platform work is belonging.
Further, capturing the full scale and scope of the emerging digital economy (‘platform economy’,) presents additional challenges not only in terms of conceptualizing such an intricate phenomenon but also for the conventional statistical toolkit and definitions researchers and policymakers rely on. Irregular and rare official surveying on a national level makes it hard to follow important labour market statistics over time and track the rapid changes of this dynamic transnational digital economy. On the other side, when discussing an impact of the platform economy on the market, national statistics do not capture services facilitated by digital platforms, in the field of transportation (CarGo, Uber, etc) accommodation (Airbnb, Booking), food delivery (Volt, Glovo), etc. Despite their statistical invisibility, they are disrupting the traditional functioning of the economy. Therefore, it is important for policymakers to get to know the size and the nature of this new market phenomenon and create policies by obtaining reliable evidence about it.
The effort is supported by the Olof Palme Center and UNDP.
The projects “White collar, blue collar platform workers in Serbia – sizing their number, the scope of work and career paths” (OPC) and “East and South-East Europe – New Digital Frontier” (UNDP) build upon the previos work done by the CENTER under the project “Disruptive Innovators: Decent Work Prototypes for Serbia in the Digital Age” (OPC) which proposed the methodology to identify numbers of platform workers, women and men, from Serbia and Digging into Digital Work in Serbia: Who are Crowdworkers from Serbia and Why They Work on Global Digital Platforms? (OPC)
