EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Legally Self-Employed but De Facto Worker: Motor Couriers’ Working Conditions and Work-Life Balance in Zonguldak, Türkiye

İsa Demir and Aydın Özkan
Additional contact information
İsa Demir: Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit Üniversitesi
Aydın Özkan: Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit Üniversitesi

Journal of Economy Culture and Society, 2025, vol. 70y, issue 71, 121-139

Abstract: This article investigates the working conditions and work-life balance of couriers in Zonguldak, Türkiye. The study aims to determine whether there is any differentiation in working conditions and work-life balance between self-employed platform couriers and employed platform or non-platform couriers. The “Survey on Socio-demographic Data and Opinions on the Working Conditions of Motor Couriers” which consists of close-ended questions prepared by researchers and the “Work-Life Balance Scale” developed by Fisher, Bulger, and Smith, was used as a data collection tool. The purposive sampling method was employed in the selection of a sampling group, and the snowball sampling method was used for data collection. In the field study, 195 couriers were surveyed out of a total of 250-275 couriers. According to the data, self-employed platform couriers work longer than salaried platform and non-platform couriers, and their work-life imbalance is higher than others. Although they make more money than all other couriers, their life satisfaction is not much higher than that of salaried and weekly-waged couriers. In the SPSS analysis, it was found that self-employed platform couriers are not in a more advantageous position than other fixed-wage employed couriers in terms of income, work hours, seniority, flexibility, and work-life balance.

Keywords: Food delivery workers; couriers gig economy; gig workers; platform workers; flexibility; work-life balance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cdn.istanbul.edu.tr/file/JTA6CLJ8T5/3512830141124D15967B7FED8C2335BF (application/pdf)
https://iupress.istanbul.edu.tr/en/journal/jecs/ar ... in-zonguldak-turkiye (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ist:iujecs:v:70y:2025:i:0:p:121-139

DOI: 10.26650/JECS2024-1597125

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economy Culture and Society is currently edited by Veysel Bozkurt

More articles in Journal of Economy Culture and Society from Istanbul University, Faculty of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Istanbul University Press Operational Team (Ertuğrul YAŞAR) ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-10-11
Handle: RePEc:ist:iujecs:v:70y:2025:i:0:p:121-139