The examination of the gig economy in Canada from 1976 to 2021

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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

It is currently important to provide practical recommendations to the Government of Canada in response to COVID-19 shocks to the labour markets on a global level as well as at a local/regional level. The gig labour market has been affected by the pandemic, but to date, there are no studies about the gig economy and its implications on the labour market in Canada. This project is one of the newest assessments of Canada’s gig economy in the scientific literature. Considering the fact that conventional labour market statistics and economic indicators are poorly suited to measuring work that is transacted via online platforms, the entire digital transformation of labour markets remains largely unobservable to policy makers and labour market researchers. The purpose of this thesis is to therefore take a long-term perspective to compare the gig labour market opportunities of today’s young working populations with those of previous and future generations in Canada in the context of the rising gig economy. Consequently, the thesis aims to explore the main challenges, along with some opportunities, in applying the gig economy platforms in Canada. The gig-economy platforms portray themselves as intermediaries in the two-sided market of workers and jobs, rejecting the idea that such platforms are employers (Koonse & Waheed, 2020). Thus, detailed labour and employment data are necessary to conduct the research which will shed light on the gaps in this area. The information about the conditions of the gig economy in Canada is extremely limited, at times even absent. As mentioned by Jeon and Ostrovsky (2020:3): “Despite the significant share of gig workers (GWs) in the Canadian labour force, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on them is very difficult to assess because GWs cannot be identified in any of the main sources of employment data. Unlike traditional wage employees, GWs enter various non-standard work arrangements to complete specific tasks or work for a specific period of time and, therefore, their work loss is not captured by standard employment or wage indicators”. In view of this lack of data, it is impossible to identify all the gig worker in the real labour market. Other scholars highlight that labour economic theory is no longer relevant (Ashford et al., 2018). Nevertheless, by using the linked Labour Force Survey master files at Research Data Center, this thesis offers as a means of filling the gap in knowledge in this topic. This thesis has five chapters. The first chapter introduces the topic of the gig economy and the theory behind this new phenomenon. In Chapter 2, we reviewed the relevant literature and definitions of the gig economy. Chapter 3 outlines the study design, the data source, and the variables and analytical procedures used for the logit model estimations and for the summary statistics. Chapter 4 interprets the empirical results from this research. The final chapter presents the conclusions, study limitations, and relevant recommendations for the future studies on this topic.