In the twenty-first century, work and the organization of it have been digitally disrupted due to advances in information communication technology (Schildt, 2017), including the near exponential growth in computing power, smart phones and cloud computing. On-demand digitally enabled ‘gig’ work represents a novel form of work organization (Koutsimpogiorgos et al, 2020), with online labour platforms (Kuhn and Maleki, 2017) digitally intermediating services performed by workers for discrete tasks on an ad-hoc basis. These platforms like to portray themselves as technology companies, in the business of creating online labour markets, rather than as employers, with workers commonly operating as independent contractors (De Stefano, 2016; Prassl, 2017). These changes to work pose fundamental challenges to the reach of state regulation.

The growth of gig work raises important questions for efficiency, equity and voice (Befort and Budd, 2009). From an efficiency perspective, platform technology has significantly reduced transaction costs (Srnicek, 2017). In the past, the type of non-standard work arrangements used by platforms would have been cumbersome and uneconomical, but it has now become feasible, due to technological advancements, to manage large-scale, geographically dispersed workforces that are only marginally attached to the organization (Veen et al, 2020). From an equity perspective, the preference of many platforms to use independent contractor arrangements means that many of these, often relatively vulnerable workers, have more limited opportunities for recourse and redress at work, while competition laws further tend to prevent them from bargaining collectively (Stewart and Stanford, 2017; Hardy and McCrystal, 2022).