Understanding, Challenging, and Demystifying Perceptions of Gig Worker Vulnerabilities

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: de Jong, Sander, Hsieh, Jane, Kuo, Tzu-Sheng, Jacobsen, Rune Møberg, van Berkel, Niels, Zhu, Haiyi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author de Jong, Sander
Hsieh, Jane
Kuo, Tzu-Sheng
Jacobsen, Rune Møberg
van Berkel, Niels
Zhu, Haiyi
author_facet de Jong, Sander
Hsieh, Jane
Kuo, Tzu-Sheng
Jacobsen, Rune Møberg
van Berkel, Niels
Zhu, Haiyi
contents Across service domains, platform-based gig workers often face a wide range of severe yet hidden vulnerabilities, including opaque pay practices, illusions of flexibility, health and safety risks, and privacy violations. To the general public and inexperienced workers such latent vulnerabilities remain largely unknown and concealed by intentional platform design that gives illusions of adequate labor protections, or $\textit{myths}$. This study examines how workers perceive (and shift their beliefs away from) five commonly held misconceptions regarding gig worker vulnerabilities. In $Phase~I$, crowdworkers ($N~=~236$) rated their agreement with five common myths surrounding vulnerabilities in gig work:$~227$ of them believed one or more myth(s). In $Phase~II$, we challenged these workers to defend their views by presenting an expert- or LLM-generated counterargument. Our findings show workers' underexposure to personal and shared vulnerabilities of gig work, revealing a knowledge gap where persuasive interventions can scalably raise awareness around such hidden labor conditions. We reflect on the effectiveness of different persuasion strategies and discuss implications for promoting more accurate public perceptions that support collective bargaining of workers' rights.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_00273
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Understanding, Challenging, and Demystifying Perceptions of Gig Worker Vulnerabilities
de Jong, Sander
Hsieh, Jane
Kuo, Tzu-Sheng
Jacobsen, Rune Møberg
van Berkel, Niels
Zhu, Haiyi
Human-Computer Interaction
Across service domains, platform-based gig workers often face a wide range of severe yet hidden vulnerabilities, including opaque pay practices, illusions of flexibility, health and safety risks, and privacy violations. To the general public and inexperienced workers such latent vulnerabilities remain largely unknown and concealed by intentional platform design that gives illusions of adequate labor protections, or $\textit{myths}$. This study examines how workers perceive (and shift their beliefs away from) five commonly held misconceptions regarding gig worker vulnerabilities. In $Phase~I$, crowdworkers ($N~=~236$) rated their agreement with five common myths surrounding vulnerabilities in gig work:$~227$ of them believed one or more myth(s). In $Phase~II$, we challenged these workers to defend their views by presenting an expert- or LLM-generated counterargument. Our findings show workers' underexposure to personal and shared vulnerabilities of gig work, revealing a knowledge gap where persuasive interventions can scalably raise awareness around such hidden labor conditions. We reflect on the effectiveness of different persuasion strategies and discuss implications for promoting more accurate public perceptions that support collective bargaining of workers' rights.
title Understanding, Challenging, and Demystifying Perceptions of Gig Worker Vulnerabilities
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00273