BEYOND FORMALITY. The informalisation and tertiarisation of labour in the gig economy

The debate on the platform gig economy is often focused on its disruptive characteristics within the new cognitive capitalism, disintermediating labour relations and challenging labour regulation and protection. On the contrary, in this chapter, we adopt a long-term perspective, based on historical capitalism, defined as a concrete time-space system of production activities oriented to endless accumulation. We argue that the platform economy represents the latest backlash of “informality” within capitalism, in the continuity between old and new forms of labour. Since the 1970s, the link between informality and tertiarization laid the ground for the de-materialization of the economy as a means of accumulation, following the crisis of profitability in Fordist capitalism. On the one hand, the shift to a labour-intensive and low productivity economy based on "relations of service" and intangible goods amplified the spaces for commodification; on the other hand, it trapped the economy in the so called “costs disease” issue. We argue that the rise of the platform economy can be seen as a response to the need to maintain profitability and to contain costs, through onlife service work – as a way to devaluate and disappearing labour through commodification of our intimate space, relations and emotions and algorithmic forms of labour control, giving space to regulatory loopholes, new forms of capital accumulation and value extraction.