Mental health and wellbeing of gig workers during the Covid-19 pandemic
The gig and informal economy have rapidly expanded around the world over past 10 years. Freelance and contingent workers are salient during the COVID-19 pandemic because quarantine policies and layoffs may increase remote work on outsourcing platforms such as Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk and TaskRabbit. Gig work can be defined as contingent work that is transacted on a digital marketplace. However, gig-type jobs have been found to pose a range of psychological and mental health risks, which could exacerbate health inequities.
Evidence shows that standard employment provides both manifest and latent of benefits to individual health and wellbeing. However, ample research suggests that gig workers can not obtain the same levels of manifest or latent benefits from standard employment. The material benefits for gig workers fluctuate with their ability of attracting and retaining clients on the digital platforms, which are shaped by the macroeconomic cycles and platform policies that are beyond their individual control. Therefore, gig workers may experience a higher level of financial precarity. Moreover, one of the critical latent benefits is social support from stable social networks. This may be difficult for gig workers to obtain for two reasons: first, the nature of their contacts with customers is often transient, so it is hard for them to form long-term relationships with their clients. Second, they seldom have a fixed workplace and predictable work schedule, making it hard to develop social networks among coworkers and colleagues. Thus, gig workers reported more loneliness than other workers, which could deteriorate their mental health, especially during the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, public policies should provide social support to freelance and contingent workers to reduce their loneliness and improve their psychological well-being, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Further reading: Wang, S., Li, L. Z., & Coutts, A. (2022). National survey of mental health and life satisfaction of gig workers: the role of loneliness and financial precarity. BMJ open, 12(12), e066389.
