The gig economy is coming to a shop near you

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It is two weeks before Christmas in west London’s Westfield shopping centre and the shops are fully staffed. Emma Sleep, a trendy new mattress store, is no exception. But the smiling staff in their Emma Sleep T-shirts aren’t employed by the retailer. In fact, they aren’t employed by anyone. They are self-employed freelancers, who have been hired to perform that day’s shift on an app called Young Ones.

Until now, the growth of the gig economy has been very visible: in cities all over the world, supposedly self-employed delivery riders have filled the streets with their branded jackets and boxy thermal bags. But now the gig concept is beginning to creep into the bricks-and-mortar economy of shops and restaurants. And — as the Emma Sleep store manager Suzanne Robinson told me when I popped in unannounced last week — “it’s invisible, really, to the outside world”.

Young Ones, an app founded in the Netherlands which has expanded to the UK and France, also counts sportswear shops GymShark and Decathlon among its clients. Temper, another app also from the Netherlands, advertises UK shifts at retailer Uniqlo and café chain Colicci among others. The model is simple: clients post specific shifts at a certain rate of pay (the apps set minimum floors that are above the national minimum wage), which workers registered on the app can apply to do. The workers and clients give each other a rating at the end of each shift.

What to make of this development? There are clearly advantages for the people doing it. Elena, one of the Young Ones gig workers at Emma Sleep on the day I visited, said she began to use the apps after becoming fed up with the hassle of applying for traditional jobs with their multiple rounds of interviews.

She and her fellow Young Ones seemed almost like a floating workforce who knew each other and often found themselves working together on different shifts, but were not tied to any one employer. She regularly booked shifts at Emma Sleep, but was always keen to try out new places — she had just seen a shift advertised to work with ceramic 3D printing, for example. “You broaden your horizons,” she said. “It just opens a lot of opportunities.”

Young Ones told me each freelancer registered on the platform worked an average of five different types of roles. Temper said the people who worked shifts via its app went on to apply to work at 24 businesses, on average. Workers can usually send substitutes if they cannot make the shift themselves.

All that said, I am sceptical of the techno-optimist narrative that this model is — or ought to be — the “future of work”. For one thing, that would be a terrible outcome for government revenues and the public services upon which those revenues depend, since much less tax is typically levied on self-employment than on employment.

Then there is the question of power: the relationships brokered by these apps might feel flexible and empowering for both sides when there is plenty of demand for workers, but what about in a downturn, where many people could be chasing the same shifts? Would it feel empowering to be rated after every shift, knowing those ratings would affect your chances of being hired by a range of other potential businesses, too? Would you feel able to stand up for yourself if you thought something was unsafe or unfair?

When I put this to the companies, Young Ones said its platform “offers the opportunity to build a strong reputation or bear the risk of receiving negative reviews”, just as is the case for any self-employed person. Temper said its system “incentivises both sides to perform” and that typically clients were prepared to see a freelancer’s profile “in the round”.

Britain’s new Labour government wants to increase the power of low-paid workers with a raft of fresh employment rights. But those rights will only accrue to people who are employed. Meanwhile, technology is reducing the friction involved in hiring people without employing them, putting them just outside the corporate boundary. And the government has increased the financial incentive to do so by raising employers’ national insurance contributions.

You could make a case for accepting this type of gig work and building in some bespoke protections for the people doing it, or conversely for saying these workers are misclassified and should have employment rights like everyone else. The worst of all worlds would be to duck the issue and leave the law on this question both messy and poorly enforced. Otherwise, as the government pushes up the cost and complexity of traditional employment, the benefits it wants to achieve might simply leak out through the cracks.

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