The gig economy and social insurance systems : public opinion, policy analysis, and policy design

My dissertation focuses on the mismatch of the current welfare system designed for the traditional employment model with the increase in new forms of employment. With technological advancements, the labor market has seen an increase in non-standard workers. Despite the increase of new precarious workers from the technology transformation, we know less about how to align the labor market change with the social welfare system, and how the politics of welfare policy about the new group will be formed. Among various types of non-standard workers, this dissertation mainly focuses on gig workers with the rapid emergence of the gig economy. As such, my three-paper dissertation examines how and whether the current social welfare system can provide protection for gig workers, a newly precarious group, how it relates to their policy attitudes and political participation, and analyzes their public opinions and deservingness for social programs. In the first paper, my co-author, Prof. Haselswerdt, and I investigate the app-based gig workers' experience on social programs and how it relates to policy attitudes and political participation by conducting an innovative online survey. The findings show that an outdated welfare system exposes non-standard workers to heightened uncertainty and economic risk by limiting their access to social insurance programs. Also, gig workers who are excluded from the social insurance system are more likely to be supportive of social programs and have informal political participation. In the second essay, I assess the impact of pandemic-era changes to the unemployment insurance program on non-traditional workers' economic security and mental health. By using a quasi-experimental design, it demonstrates that non-standard workers face more considerable financial struggles than traditional ones, highlighting the blind spot of the existing social insurance systems for non-eligible groups. The third paper examines public perceptions of app-based workers' deservingness of assistance by using an innovative survey experiment. It establishes the existence of a "gig work penalty" in perceived deservingness relative to people in more traditional forms of employment, and also identifies a "double deservingness penalty" that immigrant gig workers face, a novel and important contribution that existing literature has not established. Taken together, these essays contribute significantly to literatures on social welfare policy and political behavior theoretically and empirically in the changing labor market.