Platforms, wages and individual bargaining power: assessing labour market competition among Swedish couriers

Carl Fredrik Söderqvist

Chapter 9 in The Elgar Companion to Regulating Platform Work, 2025, pp 152-170 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Early claims by platforms that their business models would improve the efficiency of labour markets by expanding outside work opportunities to a flexible workforce provide an interesting backdrop to evaluating the impacts of platforms on the wage bargain. If a labour market expands, adding more outside options, yet sheds numerous institutional protections, what is the net effect on worker incomes? This chapter explores developments for couriers in working time, income and competition in the Swedish labour market, using detailed employer-employee linked administrative data between 2014 and 2020. Although employer concentration is reduced, labour incomes in the occupation are stagnant and mean working time is lower. Together with poor options for other occupations, couriers’ individual bargaining power has been reduced during this period of platformisation. Rather than viewing the platform economy as an efficiency-enhancing phenomenon, it is perhaps better understood as a fissurisation process in which subcontracting is used to reduce the share of economic rents paid to workers.

Keywords: Platform economy; Wages; Bargaining power; Labour market concentration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035321131
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