‘OWN TIME OWN TARGET: NEGOTIATING TIME AND PRECARITY IN SINGAPORE’S GIG ECONOMY’

Abstract

Digital labour platform companies are one of the biggest players in the gig-economy, utilising technological innovation to provide customers with on-demand services. Such companies often leverage on two main selling points: flexibility, and autonomy as part of their recruitment process. While current literature focuses on the efficient allocation of time and labour within gig-work and its economic impacts on society, it neglects the temporal dimensions of flexible labour. Few studies have explored the temporal dimension of flexible labour and how gig-workers often find themselves sandwiched between multiple social temporalities. This thesis critiques the rhetoric of flexibility that platform companies offer through the lens of time, by analysing how the rhythm of gig-work is constrained and structured technologically by platform companies. Moreover, it also reveals the power dynamics that arise from a seemingly unregulated and independent work environment, and how gig-workers negotiate and navigate their time and positions of precarity. This thesis further examines how strategies of work are ironically rationalised with the same rhetoric of flexibility and autonomy to produce a continuous casualisation of one’s precarious employment positions. With the rising acceptance and normalisation of the gig-economy globally, this research lends an increasingly relevant perspective on gig-work and its effects on workers today.