INTRODUCTION

The advent of the platform economy with the eruption and rapid growth of digital platforms and related technology-based economic forms since the early 2010s has revived the political and scholarly interest in cities and urban areas as reservoirs of an economically undervalued service workforce. Despite their devaluation, service workers provide goods and services that are crucial to the pursuit of individual and societal well-being in today's capitalist societies. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the multiple crises that have followed it have further deepened the perception that contemporary societies increasingly depend on a reserve of low-paid, overworked “essential workers”, or “key workers”, as they have been variously defined during the emergency phases of lockdowns and sanitary restrictions. These workers not only provide crucial goods and services, but their presence is ubiquitous across the economic sectors, starting with health, food, transport, environmental services and education.

The notion of gig workers and that of essential or key workers are distinct but complementary in significant manners. The term “gig workers” refers to people working on a part-time basis for online platforms and other tech-based economic entities. These labourers are characterized by the fact of being in a variety of casual employment relationships, as they can be recruited as independent contractors, as temporary staff or in other mixed arrangements such as freelance and on-call workers. In terms of income, gig workers are among the worst-paid service workers, as several analyses have shown (e.g. Zipperer et al. 2022). For their part, essential workers, and the sub-group of “essential critical infrastructure workers”, as they have been defined by the Federal Government in the US during the pandemic, are “those who conduct a range of operations and services in industries that are essential to ensure the continuity of critical functions” (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/categories-essential-workers.html).

Gig workers and many of the essential/ key workers are frontline workers, which means that their work entails continuous interaction with the general public as either customers or recipients of their services.