RAPID: Gig Service Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Assessing Financial Impacts, Relief Attitudes, and State Policies

This RAPID research project aims to investigate the financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the low-wage gig workers who are providing essential services on the front lines of transportation, domestic work, and food delivery. Although the CARES Act expanded some forms of governmental assistance to independent contractors, gig workers continue to fall through the gaps of existing benefit and relief programs. As information clearinghouses, the online platforms they work for shape workers? access to information about shifting state responses to health and safety regulations and available financial assistance. However, little is known about gig workers? attitudes toward financial relief, or the role online platforms play in communicating this information. This project will investigate how factors such as platform design, messaging, and algorithms affect workers? financial well-being. The research will also examine how relationships between online platforms and state governments affect workers? knowledge of and attitudes towards financial assistance during the pandemic, and how workers make trade-offs between health and economic opportunity in the face of rapidly changing conditions. Understanding the ways that platform companies cope with this crisis holds broader value for understanding changes in the relationship between technologies, workers, and companies. Many organizations have transitioned from conducting work at the office to work from home and it remains unknown how long this shift will last. As a result, organizations are forced to rely on digital technologies to communicate with a dispersed workforce in much the same was as platforms communicate with gig workers. The findings from this research will surface emergent tensions and trade-offs for more equitable communication, algorithmic design, and platform design that affect gig workers, with implications for workers who have more traditional relationships with employers.

This project brings together disciplines including sociology, anthropology, economics, engineering, computer science, and human-computer interaction. The project team is structured to achieve multiple convergent goals. First, drawing on sociology and anthropology, this project will use in-depth interviews and ethnography to understand online gig workers? experiences and decision-making around work related to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as their knowledge and attitudes about benefits and financial relief programs. Second, drawing on economics, this study will use interviews, surveys, and publicly available data to examine how pandemic conditions affect employer and worker relationships, particularly in the contexts of debates over the contested status of gig workers as independent contractors. Third, in collaboration with engineers and computer scientists, researchers will present this research at conferences to reach audiences in these disciplines. This project has been funded by the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier cross-directorate program to promote deeper basic understanding of the interdependent human-technology partnership in work contexts by advancing design of intelligent work technologies that operate in harmony with human workers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.