83 6 Labor and the Platform Economy Juliet B. Schor and Steven P. Vallas 6.1 Introduction A defning feature of twenty-frst century capitalism has been the rapid growth of plat- form work, which allows frms to use digital technology (websites or apps) to mediate economic transactions between service providers and customers. Though platform work as yet accounts for a small proportion of the labor force – estimates typically lie in the low single digits (Collins et al. 2019) – many scholars are convinced that the ranks of the platform labor force will grow signifcantly in coming years (Sundararajan 2016), exercising potentially far-reaching effects on the nature of work and employ- ment, perhaps even reconfguring what is conventionally meant by a “job.” Mindful of the stakes, academic researchers have generated a food of studies of platform work (Calo and Rosenblat 2017; Ravenelle 2019; Schor et al. 2020b; Wood et al. 2019). Yet this research has provided little clarity or consensus on any number of important questions. How does “algorithmic management” reshape the exercise of power and authority over labor? How will frms in the conventional economy be affected by the rise of platform work? What adjustments are needed in regulatory policy and welfare- state provisions, given the disruptive power that platform frms have shown? Will the availability of crowd-working sites such as Upwork and Mechanical Turk encourage frms to outsource their staffng systems? Or will platforms instead foster a more inclu- sive economy, enabling workers in marginalized regions or those with disabilities to gain greater access to income earning opportunities? Finally, how are legal and politi- cal struggles over platform workers’ rights likely to evolve? Which groups will succeed in shaping the narrative that defnes platform work in the years to come? In this chapter we can hardly aim to resolve these questions. Our goals are more modest, aiming to outline the main lines of contention in the literature, to identify major gaps in our knowledge, and to suggest some of the most important areas for future research as nations struggle with the structural upheavals unfolding across the contemporary capitalist landscape. The chapter begins by sketching three dominant lines of analysis that have opened up in recent years: First, a hopeful view, in which platforms help to expand the range https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108865630.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press