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The study provides a portrait of who the workforce is in this new digital economy, a profile that varies somewhat by job type. In terms of gender, men predominate in face-to-face tasks – this would include, for example, the riders from Glovo or Cabify drivers – with 65%; while in the remote modality – micro-tasks for all kinds of sectors such as design or translation – they are 49%, with a slight advantage of female participation. “Here conciliation plays a key role, but also the fact that in face-to-face work the risks of violence and discrimination are more pronounced for women”, clarifies Ferran Muntané Isart, one of the UPF researchers who participated in the study.
The average age of these workers is 33.8 years and in face-to-face platforms more than half (55.7%) are of foreign origin. This percentage implies an over-representation of the group in this type of work, since people of foreign nationality are around 15% of employed Spanish people, according to data from the latest Active Population Survey (EPA) published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). The weight of migrants is lower in remote work applications, where they represent 29%. In addition, 68% have a university education, a proportion that is greater in the case of remote employees.
The report also states that the average monthly income of these workers represents 32.2% of the state average income for face-to-face employees and 11.2% for remote employees. “In the case of Spain, where the average annual income is around €23,600, these proportions show the low contribution of the platforms to the total income”, the document points out.
Sexual harassment and loneliness
What are these workers exposed to as they deliver on the street or program code from their homes in exchange for rates they cannot set themselves? The study reveals that 23.6% of face-to-face workers declare to have suffered sexual harassment and 28.7% have experienced situations of discrimination. On the other hand, 87.4% of remote employees identify with the feeling of loneliness at work.
The most common physical risks for face-to-face digital workers are exposure to extreme temperatures (64.5%) and strenuous or forced positions (62%), followed by traffic (54.7%) and handling heavy loads (48.3%). On the contrary, 29.6% of people in the remote modality complain of exhausting positions, in this case more related to inadequate work furniture or prolonged working days with their eyes fixed on screens.
According to the researchers, these new forms of digital work shape a new map of occupational risks for the 21st century, where the traditional categories of occupational health are now insufficient and force a rethinking of the current framework. Technostress, anxiety, fatigue, social isolation, or dependence on automatic assessments are some of the psychosocial risks derived from this algorithmic control, which also accentuates the loss of boundaries between personal life and work. “This monitoring is more prevalent in work on platforms, but not exclusive. One of the great risks is that it serves as a laboratory for companies to put these methods into practice and extend them to other sectors,” warns Muntané.
In this sense, the UPF researcher celebrates the approval of the law rider in Spain to protect the presumption of work for delivery drivers, but warns that the regulations are still too ambiguous and leave many other groups unprotected who also work under the orders of a platform without being able to negotiate their working conditions. “The people who work remotely are the forgotten ones and have an even harder time organizing themselves and articulating joint demands,” points out Muntané. In addition, he warns that artificial intelligence (AI) will bring even more vulnerability to this scenario, forcing the expulsion of thousands of workers through the lowering of tariffs.
