ILPC 2027

 Jörn Janssen, 19 October 2016:

Gig Economy,
the Latest Stage in The Great Transformation of Karl Polanyi.

The gig economy, shared economy, platform economy, crowdworking, digitalisation of labour and many more denominations indicate a new stage of dominant social and economic relations at global level. Karl Polanyi (1886 – 1964) was perhaps the greatest pioneer in the debate about secular historical change since what is still commonly called the age of industrialisation with his book on ‘The Great Transformation’[1]. Two more books come to mind as complementary explorations in the same field of enquiry, ‘Les métamorphoses de la société salariale’ by Michel Aglietta and Anton Brender of 1984[2] and ‘Les métamorphoses de la question sociale’ by Robert Castel of 1995[3]. A wide-ranging debate in France from the early 1970s known as ‘l’école de la régulation’ was dedicated to this question of politico-socio-economic development.[4] This paper is not intended to present a panorama of this diverse research into the determinants of contemporary social developments but to assess their main theory, methods and results in hindsight from the latest stage of transformation, most recently often addressed as the gig economy.

From a point of view in which the gig economy features in the centre of present socio-economic transformation, labour relations come to the fore of historical research. Consequently, a different pedigree has to be taken into account, namely historical research on the wages of labour[5] as represented by James Edwin Thorold Rogers (1866-1902)[6], Georges d’Avenel (1894-1926)[7] and William Beveridge et al. (1939)[8].

However, in this school of research wages are not explicitly central to understanding the course of economic history but rather an important special aspect of it. Alternatively, we shall present labour relations as the principal agent in social, economic and, implicitly, political history. Wage-labour relations will be identified as specific historical formations having become dominant in Europe superseding relations of feudal serfdom. D’Avenel, Rogers and Beveridge set the emergence of wage labour in the 13^th century. The great breakthrough was prompted by the Black Death 1348-50. The following 700 years witnessed a permanent transformation of the levels of pay, conditions of employment, share of the population, geographical scope, legal regulations etc. largely regarded as a consolidation of this mode of labour relations. The question raised in this paper is whether the present demise of collective agreements and direct employment associated with the rise of the gig economy is another transformation or heralds the end of wage labour.

In this context it may help to refer to Polanyi’s ‘Great Transformation’. His time horizon was limited by the era of industrial capitalism which he saw as emerging in the late 18^th century and coming to a close when his book was published in 1944. But he had a vision of the future as the next stage in the process of social transformation. We will allocate this stage into a different era, the era of employer-employee relations between the 13^th and 21^st century. The gig economy is based on labour relations as contract relations between individuals and anonymous units. Maybe we ought to envisage social relations beyond employment for wages in societies providing basic conditions for the subsistence to every citizen, according to Polanyi: “This is the meaning of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty that we need.”[9]