GIGWELL

In November 2024 CHASM’s Lorenza Antonucci published the first article from GIGWELL - ‘The lived experiences of the welfare state of platform workers: The barriers to accessing social protection in Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom’.

GIGWELL is an academic research project about the gig economy, run by Lorenza and their team within the Birmingham School of Social Policy, which looks at welfare state interventions’ gaps affecting platform workers. GIGWELL is financed by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The recent literature on platform work and the welfare state has stressed that, despite being affected by high-income insecurity, platform workers cannot easily access social protection. However, it is unclear why platform workers encounter such barriers. Lorenza’s article offers an inductive and empirically based theoretical framework to investigate the obstacles faced by platform workers. It shows that the barriers experienced by platform workers depend on the eligibility criteria, the assessment criteria and the trade-off between taxation and social protection.

GIGWELL investigates numerous issues associated with ‘gig work’, whereby such workers receive request for jobs through their phone, and perform their work tasks using their own facilities. GIGWELL investigates these issues by connecting the GIG research to ‘welfare studies’* (WEL)–and exploring whether and when the GIG game turns out WELL. The project aims to understand how state policies intervene (or could intervene) to make the lives of gig workers better (or worse) and compares their experiences in Italy, Sweden and the UK.

Antonucci, L. (2024). The lived experiences of the welfare state of platform workers: The barriers to accessing social protection in Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom. International Journal of Social Welfare, 1–19.