Introduction
Movement restrictions and closure of public places and shops during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a boom in sales and services purchases through online platforms, such as food delivery and groceries delivery apps. These online platforms rely on informal short-term workers to supply these services, which also provide incomes for workers who have lost their jobs due to the economic downturn. While some of these workers may choose to go back into formal employment as the economy recovers, a growing group of them is likely to remain in this new economy.
The rise of these temporary workers is enabled by improvements in digital platform technologies matching workers to tasks, thus increasing the variety and volume of tasks available due to greater access to the internet and remote work opportunities. These tasks can range from complex digital work (for example, designing a website) to repetitive digital micro-tasks (for example, labeling images) to tasks that are digitally-enabled but not done digitally (for example, food delivery).
Benefits and Risks of Digital Platform Work
One of the main attractions of digital platform work is the flexibility to choose which tasks to complete and when to complete them, benefiting full-time digital platform workers, part-time digital platform workers who already have full-time jobs and those who have important care-work to perform. Digital platforms also allow the rise of the "passion economy", which enables entrepreneurship among those who exploit the digital platform technology to only work on tasks that they are interested in. From a policy standpoint, digital platform work can reduce "brain drain" by allowing highly skilled workers in developing countries to work remotely for higher wages than they would otherwise earn locally.
However, workers venturing into digital platform work are also exposed to new vulnerabilities. The nature of this work is informal and the workers are part of informal employment. This means workers lack the various employer-linked protections that safeguard the current and future wellbeing of the workers, such as health insurance, as these protections are typically only provided for formal employees. Furthermore, some digital platforms do not provide basic workplace safety protections, exposing workers to physical and emotional harm.
Findings
Digital platform job-seekers in Malaysia are women, young and highly educated Compared to global microtask platform workers where only 20% of workers from developing countries are women while slightly less than 50% of workers in advanced countries are women, 54% of job-seekers on eRezeki are women. The median age of job-seekers is 29 while the mean age of job-seekers is 30 years old. In terms of education, 69.6% of eRezeki job-seekers do not have university degrees, while 30.4% of job-seekers have university degrees or better.
Degree holders are the most active digital platform job-seekers Degree holders have the highest average number of clicks per month at 0.0522 clicks, while non-degree holders have the lowest number of clicks per month at 0.0413 clicks. In other words, degree holders on average are 1.3 times more active on eRezeki than non-degree holders.
Fixed broadband and computer access are crucial for job-seeking Job-seekers with fixed broadband access have the highest average number of clicks per month, while job-seekers without computers have the lowest average number of clicks. The biggest difference in the average number of clicks is between those with computer access and those without - job-seekers with computer access are 1.5 times more active than those without computer access.
Email and digital payment skills indicate high job-seeking activity Job-seekers with experience in digital payment systems like Paypal have the highest average number of clicks per month, while job-seekers who are not familiar with email have the lowest average number of clicks. Job-seekers with experience using email have the greatest advantage, where job-seekers who are familiar with email are 1.8 times more active than those who are not.
Policy Discussion
Digital access and digital competencies can improve job-seeking activities in the digital platform economy, especially for the more disenfranchised groups of workers in the Malaysia labour force, including young workers, women and non-degree holders. We propose three policy improvements:
- Increasing digital access: Increased provision of affordable fixed broadband and computers could be crucial to growing the platform economy, especially for digital work that depends on a stable internet connection and a device with higher processing power.
- Making digital skills training accessible: Incentivising and enabling training for workers in this area is important for young workers, women and degree holders who stand to gain more from developing their digital competencies. Financial incentives and vouchers are an important policy mechanism in putting training into the hands of the workers themselves instead of their employers.
- Strengthening portable social protection: The vulnerability of digital platform workers to shocks also has to be addressed, given the informal status of their work. Given the rise of digital platform work, informalisation of work in general and workers switching jobs more frequently throughout their lives, an improvement to social protection policy would see social protection tied to the worker instead of tied to an employer.
Conclusion
As advancement in digital technology continues, digital platforms will be an increasingly viable mechanism for firms to obtain temporary workers - both formal and informal all around the world, while workers are able to earn incomes from outside their local area. However, there are important issues which need to be addressed; the contractual nature of digital platform work indicates that there is a lack of social protection and limited skills-upgrading opportunities for workers. Increasing fixed broadband and computer access , incentivising training programmes , and extending portable social protection to digital platform workers are necessary steps to reduce the precarious nature of this evolving work landscape.
