Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Informal work activities, particularly gig work, embodies degrees of workforce participation, work identity, and workers’ motivations. Access to work based on one’s social identities and attachment to labor (work identity) influences their location on a spectrum of work that moves from formal labor to informal labor, with gig work a complex combination of informal and formal work attributes. This paper provides an alternate conceptualization of the meaning of ‘gig work’, seeks to understand the degree in which race, sex, age, familial status, internal motivations, and one’s attachment to formal labor, may influence engagement of informal and gig work activities, and explores the predictive qualities of workers’ motivations and social identities on digital gig work type using an adaptation of Kalleberg and Dunn’s (2016) gig work schema that categorizes digital gig work by platform and worker control.

Methods. Using U.S. representative population data from the Enterprising and Informal Work Activities (EIWA) survey, a series of logistic and multinomial logistic regressions were used to examine the predictive qualities of workers’ social demographics, work identity, and motivations to engage in informal and gig work activities.

Results. The interaction between race, sex, and parent status, were found predictive of participants’ decision to engage in informal and gig work activities. Compared to non-parental white males, non-parental white females were 21% more likely to engage in informal work; white females with children were 96% more likely to engage in informal work; non-parental, non-white females were 30% more likely to engage in informal work; and non-white females with children were 69% more likely to engage in informal work. Respondents with a compromised formal work identity and with a self-employed work identity are more likely to engage in informal work with statistical significance, illustrating the appeal of informal work to those who are outside the confines of formal labor participation. Social identities were not indicative of one’s economic motivations to informal and gig work suggesting paid work alone may be insufficient in meeting employee needs regardless of social or work identity. Social and work identities are predicative to digital gig work type. Males were more likely to engage in digital gig work that leveraged their assets such as selling goods or services, whereas females were more likely to engage in non-digital gig work (i.e., informal work activities), particularly non-white, non-parents.

Discussion. Those with compromised formal work identities are more likely to engage in digital gig work compared to non-digital gig work activities, illustrating the strength of work behaviors on sense of work identity. The digitization of gig work resembles the characteristics of formal work: work that is brokered, contracted levels of work autonomy, and a pseudo employee/employer relationship. Implications for future research and policy includes the need for publicly collected purposive data to understand gig work attributes such as industry, wage, work accessibility and flexibility, motivations to gig work beyond economic gain, and whether the stratification of the formal labor economy is replicated in the gig economy.