Platform work was absorbing a significant proportion of the Philippine workforce due to youthful preferences and a shortage of reasonable conventional job opportunities even before the pandemic, and has grown in importance since. Platform work tends to attract younger workers and women, the two demographic segments who are most likely to be driven by either preference or necessity for the perceived flexibility of platform work. Put a bit more bluntly than the PIDS report, platform work is — again, because of its “permanent impermanence” — a dead-end job. Three, strengthen social protections for platform workers; this is an issue that has already been raised, with recent calls to apply basic labor regulations to delivery app workers. Finally, the researchers recommend “improving the visibility” of platform work, primarily to be able to obtain better data about it in order to help guide policy and identify knowledge gaps.

Source: Manila Times December 23, 2020 17:48 UTC