As California legal challenges to the treatment and classification of so-called gig work continues apace, a Massachusetts trial over the same issues touched off this week. Indeed, the fight over platform companies’ treatment of gig workers as independent contractors has become a central discontent of the modern “gig” economy, so-named because of the sheer number of independent contractors that populate today’s workforce.
But Northeastern University-led research suggests both workers and platforms may benefit from a move away from the independent contractor model to standardized employment. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Northeastern studied the working behavior of Deliv, a U.S.-based package delivery platform, that facilitates so-called last-mile deliveries between retailers and consumers. The group found that as workers transitioned from independent contractors to employment status, their flexibility remained the same, while the company’s operational efficiency improved.
