Digital technologies, gig work and labour share

Abstract

Conflict over the functional income distribution, discussed and explained in Keith Cowling’s work in the 1980s, remains a feature of capitalist economies. In the twenty first century labour flexibilisation strategies have become a key tool in enabling monopoly capitalists to manipulate the functional distribution of income. Through the lens of institutional theory, this paper traces labour flexibilisation in the UK since the 1980s, in order to describe and evaluate how the use of digital technologies has become allied to non-standard contracting and ‘dependent’ self-employment in the growth of the gig economy. The paper argues that this provides employers with increased flexibility of the labour input at both extensive and intensive margins. Digital technology and gig working also position dominant internet platform businesses to apply downward pressure to labour share at a monopoly-monopsony nexus between individual consumers and new service sector workers. This has led to new ways in which employment contracts and the nature of organisations as an outcome of monopoly capitalist labour process are contested.