Covid-19 Impact on Platform Economy. A Preliminary Outlook

With this report, PLUS consortium wants to contribute to a large debate on the role of platform economy and on how to deal with labour transformations after Covid-19 outbreak. Considering the ongoing very unpredictable situation, the observations contained in the report should be considered as explorative to further investigations. In any case, we would suggest to avoid framing Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 as outstanding event clearly dividing what occurred before from what will occur shortly after. Rather, one of the purposes of this report is to test if some of the hypothesis we produced during the first year and half of the project are still persuasive even after virus appearance. At first sight it seems that Covid-19 pandemic highlights and, if anything, emphasizes very well some platforms characteristics we had already identified: the lack of social protections for platform workers, the becoming essential infrastructures of platforms, the digitalization of services, the changing nature of urban economies.