Laissez-Unfair: Gig work, platform giants and the politics of social policy (in)action in pandemic Southeast Asia

A Research in Progress seminar with Gerard McCarthy
Assistant professor
Date
Thursday 30 Mar 2023, 13:00 - 14:00
Type
Seminar
Spoken Language
English
Room
Room 3.39
Location
International Institute of Social Studies
Ticket information

No registration is required to attend this event.

Add to calendar
Grab delivery driver
Grab

In this Research in Progress Seminar, Dr Gerard McCarthy examines how laissez faire approaches to the precarity of workers in the gig-economy have evolved in different ways across the region in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The boom of app-based delivery platforms across Southeast Asia in recent years has created a paradoxical problem for policy-makers and precarious gig-economy workers alike. Apps such as Grab, Gojek and FoodPanda have filled logistical and food security gaps during lockdowns and provided work to some people laid off during the peak of downturns.

Yet the growing centrality of platform giants to critical social infrastructure has exposed the cracks in social policy frameworks at the same time that worsening pay and conditions in the sector has led to growing acrimony among gig workers. This is especially true in Southeast Asia, where patchy support to low-income households and the unemployed during the pandemic forced many to turn to gig work and private debt to survive the 2020-2021 economic recession.

Informed by case-studies of state-worker-business relations during COVID-19 in Thailand and Singapore, McCarthy examines how laissez faire approaches to the precarity of workers in the gig-economy have evolved in different ways across the region in the wake of the pandemic.

Focusing on the challenge to and reinforcement of welfare regimes in the face of worker precarity and frustration with platforms, he highlights how representative incentives of hybrid political institutions have collided with welfare capitalist logics of existing social policy frameworks to produce partial and conditional reforms to the gig economy.

More information

The Research in Progress seminars are intended to provide an informal venue for presentations of ongoing research by ISS scholars and other scholars from the wider development studies community.

Compare @count study programme

  • @title

    • Duration: @duration
Compare study programmes