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Employee vs. Independent Worker: A Framework for Understanding Work Differences

Independent work and the growing on-demand and crowdwork-based job opportunities facilitated by digital platforms, which have emerged as the gig economy, provide a unique opportunity to examine the differences in work characteristics between alternative and traditional labor arrangements. Although it is well known that, through intermediary digital platforms, independent workers take up commissioned tasks without guarantee of further employment, it is less well understood how work characteristics on digital platforms differ from work characteristics in traditional labor arrangements. We contribute to filling this void by systematically examining the difference in work characteristics of occupational roles currently found through digital platforms rather than in traditional work arrangements. We find that such independent workers rely less on team production and coordination and have greater separability of individual work outputs. Our results thus suggest there is a statistically significant difference in fundamental work characteristics between independent work and traditional employment.