What is GIGWELL?

Receive a request for a job through your phone, perform the task using your own facilities and get paid. This type of work is called ‘gig work’ and is regarded as the model of work for the future. In reality, it’s already here. Many workers already perform gig work through popular platforms, such as Uber and Deliveroo. These gig workers are classified as self-employed individuals and do not access the mechanisms of support and protection available to employed workers. What does this mean for gig workers? What does this mean for our model of ‘work for the future’? Gig workers tend to have flexible work patterns, but face a number of additional risks: their incomes fluctuate, they get no sickness cover if they fall ill, they face unexpected costs if their equipment breaks and so on.

GIGWELL investigates these issues by connecting the GIG research to ‘welfare studies’* (WEL)–and exploring whether and when the GIG game turns out WELL. GIGWELL is an academic research project financed by the UKEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and run by the PI Dr Lorenza Antonucci and her team at the School of Social Policy of the University of Birmingham. In order to understand how state policies intervene (or could intervene) to make the lives of gig workers better (or worse) we compare their experiences in Italy, Sweden and the UK. Our research consists of analysing policies and in speaking with gig workers to know more about their lives (qualitative comparative research). Thanks to COVID-19, our GIGWELL research will be entirely digital. If you are a gig economy worker, we’re interested in knowing more about your experience.

* ’Welfare studies ’is a branch of academia that looks at how we use various systems to sustain ourselves, e.g. we get support from the state, the family, the labour market or communities (this field is also, rather mysteriously, called social policy).

Who we are

The project is run in the School of Social Policy (University of Birmingham) by: 

Dr Lorenza Antonucci (Associate Professor & Principal Investigator of the project).  Lorenza's research and teaching investigates the impact of European social policies on people's lives, with a focus on inequality: for example, the book Student Lives in Crisis and the research on inequality & Brexit voting (here and here). In addition to GIGWELL, Lorenza is currently conducting research on: the socio-economic triggers of populism for the comparative project PRECEDE, how to reform EU policies to address inequalities and LGBTI+ Social and Economic (in)equalities. You can follow her research via her Twitter.

Josie Hooker (Research Associate of the project) is undertaking her PhD in Global Political Economy at the University of Bath. In her PhD, she explores how precarity is re-produced and contested through recent restructurings of labour, welfare and immigration regimes – and their articulations. Using feminist and decolonial approaches to political economy, Josie’s focus is on the gendering and racialisation of these processes and the experience of precarity. Drawing from radical political theory and social movement studies, she is interested in how such gendering and racialisation shape grassroots organising against and beyond precarity in Spain and the UK. Josie’s written in defence of activist research amidst urban segregation during the Covid-19 pandemic and on social reproduction and decoloniality in Veronica Gago’s work on urban informality and ‘neoliberalism from below’ in Argentina.

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