Exploring the impact of legislative absences on the working environment of gig workers in South Africa

Abstract

This study pursues two objectives. Empirically, it examines how legislative exclusion is produced in South Africa and how gig workers experience it in their everyday working lives. Theoretically, it develops an interpretive account of the relationship between political and economic processes that are ordinarily treated as separate domains, reading political and regulatory exclusion as constitutive of the forms of economic insecurity and precarity that participants describe rather than as their determinant. The study is framed by the concept of legislative exclusion, understood as the process through which state action constitutes a category of workers as falling outside the scope of labor law; precarity, platform capitalism and algorithmic management are used to elaborate the processes through which that exclusion operates and the conditions with which it is associated. A qualitative phenomenological design was adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 purposively sampled gig workers in Johannesburg working across e-hailing, delivery, freelancing and content creation, and the data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The sample spans two structurally distinct segments of platform labor, which are analyzed separately throughout: location-based work (e-hailing and delivery), which is geographically tethered, capital-intensive for the worker and in principle regulable by the national state; and remote online work (digital freelancing and social media content creation), which is contracted across borders and mediated by clients and monetization programs rather than by dispatch algorithms. The analysis reads exclusion as actively produced rather than merely absent: a statutory definition of the employee that platform work is arranged to fall outside, a jurisdictional architecture that renders the responsible corporate entity difficult to reach, and a recent transport regulation that recognizes e-hailing while leaving the employment relationship untouched. These instruments do not bear on the two segments equally: the transport regulation reaches location-based drivers alone, whereas remote online workers are addressed by no domestic instrument at all. Exclusion is in turn bound up with unbounded working hours, exclusion from employment benefits and the absence of any accessible dispute-resolution forum, though it is lived differently in each segment. Location-based participants described unreviewable deactivation and the transfer of vehicle, fuel and licensing costs; online participants described client non-payment, unenforceable informal agreements and dependence on opaque monetisation and visibility rules. The study contributes an interpretive account in which legislative exclusion is understood as a structuring condition through which risk is transferred to workers, platform and client authority is rendered unreviewable, and disadvantage is compounded over time.