Assessing the scale of place-based platform labour in Switzerland

Digital labour mediation is fundamentally transforming the world of work. On the one hand, platform companies such as UberEats, Coople or Batmaid claim fast-rising numbers of customers and workers. On the other hand, official labour statistics posit the phenomenon as marginal, as a large share of this labour remains undeclared. The actual scale of the place-based platform economy in Switzerland – as a high-wage country with very low unemployment rates – remains unknown.

This project aims to assess the scale of place-based platform labour in Switzerland by monitoring the type, number and spatial location of effectively mediated gigs on digital labour platforms and the profiles of the workers who get them over a period of several months. The project will thus provide knowledge that is highly sought after by Swiss policy makers to decide whether there is a need to adapt social security protection for platform workers.

Our method is two-fold: In a first step, qualitative content analysis of platform websites will be used to identify the relevant platforms and understand how and where they operate. In a second step, we will set up an infrastructure that allows us to periodically collect large-scale data from the chosen websites through automated crawlers.