The platform economy has been one of the most profound changes to the labor market in recent years, with millions turning to services such as TaskRabbit, UpWork, and Deliveroo to offer their skills to the market.  According to research for the European Commission, roughly 10% of the adult population in Europe now uses such a platform, with the coronavirus-related lockdowns exacerbating a trend that has seen this number grow from just 4.7% of the population in 2016.

While a lot of attention has previously been given to platform economy workers, the research also explored consumers of services via platforms.  The analysis showed that it isn’t just the well off that purchase services, with around 30% of middle-income people using services from online platforms, and even 22% of the poorest doing so too.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who worked on platforms were also often consumers on them too, with 4.8% of the population both drivers and users of taxis, for instance.

Saving time

The analysis suggests that most consumers turn to platforms not in order to save money, but rather to save time, as they purchase things that they don’t ordinarily have time to do themselves, whether that’s cooking a meal or doing household chores.

For those who are working on these platforms as well, however, this can create a vicious circle as they become short of cash and take on more work, which leaves them even shorter of time.  It’s a situation in which time poverty can quickly translate into financial poverty.  It’s a cycle that has largely been exacerbated by the austerity policies of the last decade, which has often seen public services that many have relied upon paired back.

The researchers believe, however, that the same technology used to power these platforms could also help to reinvent the welfare state that has itself been so disrupted by these new ways of working.  It’s an argument the researchers make in their recent book Reinventing the Welfare State, in which they highlight how the algorithms that so aptly match workers with consumers could also be used to supply social care or to transport patients to hospital and children to school.

Of course, the concept of government as a platform is not a new one.  For instance, Tim O’Reilly’s musings on making government a platform have found supporters within the Government Digital Service that produced the Gov.uk platform in Britain.

As O’Reilly says, each era throughout the information age has been typified by a common framework that enables an ecosystem of participants to contribute to.  It’s perhaps fair to say that in the years since the concept of Goverment as a Platform was first mooted, it has not achieved the mass adoption that O’Reilly hoped for, but that may be as much due to the slow pace of change within government as any lack of justifiable use case.

With researchers such as Ursula Hews banging the drum for change, perhaps it’s a wait we won’t have to make for too much longer.