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It’s two weeks until Christmas at West London’s Westfield shopping center and the stores are fully staffed. Emma Sleep, a new fashion mattress store, is no exception. But the smiling staff in their Emma Sleep T-shirts are not employees of the retailer. In fact, they are not employed by anyone. These are freelancers, who have been hired to do that day’s shift on an application called Young Ones.
So far, the growth of the sharing economy has been highly visible: in cities around the world, supposedly self-employed delivery drivers have filled the streets with their branded jackets and boxy thermal bags. But now the concept of gig work is beginning to infiltrate the traditional retail and restaurant economy. And, as Emma Sleep store manager Suzanne Robinson told me when I walked in unannounced last week, “it’s really invisible to the outside world.”
Young Ones, an app founded in the Netherlands that has expanded to the UK and France, also counts sportswear stores GymShark and Decathlon among its clients. Temper, another app also from the Netherlands, is announcing shifts in the UK at retailer Uniqlo and coffee chain Colicci, among others. The model is simple: clients post specific shifts with a certain wage rate (the apps set minimum floors that are above the national minimum wage), to which workers registered in the app can apply. Workers and customers give each other a rating at the end of each shift.
What to do with this development? There are clearly advantages for people who do it. Elena, one of the Young People gig workers at Emma Sleep the day I visited, she said she started using the apps after growing tired of the hassle of applying for traditional jobs with their multiple rounds of interviews.
She and her fellow Young People seemed almost like a floating workforce who knew each other and were often found working together on different shifts, but were not tied to anyone. employer. She regularly booked appointments at Emma Sleep, but was always up for trying new places; I had just seen a shift advertised to work with ceramic 3D printing, for example. “You broaden your horizons,” he said. “It just opens up a lot of opportunities.”
Young Ones told me that each freelancer registered on the platform filled an average of five different types of roles. Temper said people who worked shifts through his app applied for jobs at 24 companies, on average. Workers can usually send substitutes if they can’t do the shift themselves.
All that said, I am skeptical of the techno-optimistic narrative that this model is (or should be) the “future of work.” On the one hand, that would be a terrible outcome for government revenue and the public services on which that revenue depends, since far fewer taxes are typically collected on self-employment than on employment.
Then there’s the question of power: The relationships negotiated by these apps may seem flexible and empowering for both parties when workers are in high demand, but what about in a recession, where many people could be chasing the same shifts? Would you feel empowered by receiving a rating after each shift, knowing that those ratings would also affect your chances of being hired by a variety of other potential companies? Would you feel able to stand up for yourself if you thought something was unsafe or unfair?
When I raised this with companies, Young Ones said their platform “offers the opportunity to build a strong reputation or risk negative reviews,” as is the case for any freelancer. Temper said his system “incentivizes both parties to act” and that clients were typically willing to view a freelancer’s profile “in the round.”
Britain’s new Labor government wants to boost the power of low-paid workers with a raft of new workplace rights. But those rights will only fall on people who are employed. Meanwhile, technology is reducing the friction of hiring people without employing them, placing them just outside corporate boundaries. And the government has increased the financial incentive to do so by increase employers’ national insurance contributions.
One could make a case for accepting this type of informal work and creating some personalized protections for the people who do it, or conversely, say that these workers are misclassified and should have labor rights like everyone else. The worst thing of all would be to avoid the issue and let the law on this issue be haphazard and poorly applied. Otherwise, as the government increases the cost and complexity of traditional employment, the benefits it wants to achieve could simply slip through the cracks.