Gig Worker

A gig worker doesn’t work in a fixed job with a monthly salary, but rather takes on individual small assignments. The word “gig” comes from music, where it refers to a single performance. These assignments are almost always brokered through an app or website that connects clients and workers. Typical examples include food deliveries by bike, ride services with one’s own car, or assembling furniture at strangers' homes. Payment is per completed job, not per hour. Whoever doesn’t accept anything earns nothing – but in return, one decides for themselves when to switch on the app.

Between self-employment and being an employee

The decisive point is the legal status. Most platforms treat their gig workers as self-employed, i.e. as their own small entrepreneurs. This has consequences: there is no paid vacation, no continued pay during illness, and no minimum wage in the usual sense. One also has to pay health and pension insurance contributions themselves.

Unions and courts often see this differently. Their argument: anyone who is precisely told which route to drive and how fast they need to be is, in truth, an employee. In several countries, courts have therefore ruled that certain drivers count as employees. In 2024, the EU passed a Platform Work Directive that makes it harder for platforms to classify workers as self-employed across the board.

Economically, the topic is significant. Millions of people in Europe earn their money entirely or partly this way. For investors, it is also interesting because companies like Uber or Delivery Hero are listed on the stock exchange. If they suddenly had to hire their drivers permanently, their costs would rise significantly.

The algorithm as boss

What’s special about this form of work is that no human distributes the assignments. This is handled by an algorithm, i.e. a fixed computational procedure within the platform’s software. It knows where each driver is currently located, how many orders are open, and how well someone has been rated so far. From this, it calculates in fractions of a second who gets offered which job.

Experts call this algorithmic management. The software takes over tasks that used to be handled by a shift supervisor: assigning jobs, measuring performance, and in extreme cases blocking access to the app. The price is often not fixed either. During high demand, amounts automatically rise so that more people go online – this principle is called surge pricing.

A common misconception is that a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence lies behind every such decision. Much of it is simple rules and optimization procedures. Nevertheless, the lack of transparency remains a critical issue: those who receive bad assignments usually don’t find out why. That’s why new laws require that important automated decisions be reviewable by a human.

From food delivery to training chatbots

Gig workers are most visible on the street: bicycle couriers with large backpacks, ride-service drivers, parcel deliverers. Alongside this, however, there is an entire world of small digital assignments that no one sees. On platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Clickworker, people label images, check texts, or sort data sets. Such tasks sometimes take only a few minutes and pay just a few cents.

This is precisely where the topic directly touches the AI industry. For a language model to give polite and useful answers, humans evaluate thousands of sample responses. Content that an AI should not produce also has to be flagged by humans beforehand. A large part of this work is outsourced via platforms to countries with low wages, such as Kenya or the Philippines. Reports about the pay and distressing content of this work regularly appear in the news.

In business news, you’ll usually encounter the term in three contexts: court rulings on employment status, strikes by delivery services, and quarterly figures from platform corporations. The gig worker should be distinguished from the classic freelancer, who seeks out their own clients and sets their own prices. And also from the mini-jobber, who earns little but is regularly employed.