Chapter 2
Theoretical background: Risks and working environment challenges in digitalized work arrangements across different forms of employment

This chapter presents and discusses key themes in the research on working environment challenges and occupational safety and health hazards associated with digitalization and different forms of employment. We first discuss the conceptual frameworks used in analysing, discussing and regulating occupational safety and health in general. Second, we give a brief description of how occupational safety and health is regulated in the Nordic countries. Third, we survey the research literature on three key aspects of work environment challenges in the future of work: field technologies, non-standard forms of employment and platform-mediated gig work. As such, this chapter provides a conceptual backdrop for the empirical investigations in the chapters that follow.

The concepts of “work environment” and “occupational safety and health” are often used interchangeably and in different fields. They are partly legal concepts, partly a subdiscipline of medicine and public health defining an area of scientific inquiry, and partly a sociological concept referring to features of a workplace or labour processes. The concept of a work environment tends to be used without a rigorous definition, referring broadly to the context, the environment within which work is performed. It is, in this sense, a feature of a job or workplace, composed of a number of different factors. According to the National Institute of Occupational Health of Norway (STAMI), work environment refers to how work is organized, planned and executed. It varies across different workplaces, necessitating different approaches in different contexts, and affects workers’ health and engagement and the organization’s results and productivity (STAMI, 2021: 13). Similarly, the International Labour Organization (ILO) (ILO, n.d.) highlights the work environment as a factor that can affect workers’ health negatively.

STAMI (2021: 55ff) differentiates between four types of work environment, or work environment exposures. First, the organizational and psychosocial work environment concerns the factors associated with how work is organized on the one hand, including formal regulations and practices such as scheduling, working time, layoffs, and hierarchies, and the formal and informal relationships in a workplace and their consequences on the other hand. The second type of work environment in STAMI’s typology is the mechanical work environment. Sometimes referred to as the ergonomic work environment, this is the aspect of a work arrangement that affects how the work is conducted mechanically, emphasizing risk factors such as static or monotonous movements, heavy lifting and so on. Third, the chemical and biological work environment refers to substances workers are exposed to during work. Fourth and finally, the physical work environment refers broadly to the physical conditions under which work is conducted, such as factors associated with the buildings or equipment used, noise levels, temperature, light and radiation.

The Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority has further specified these various aspects of the work environment into a conceptual model with different entry points for assessing the work environment in a business organization. The model is based on the Working Environment Act (2006) and includes various aspects that regulatory authorities should examine and impose requirements on (Arbeidstilsynet, n.d.).

For organizations such as the ILO and the World Health Organization (WHO), occupational safety and health is a key concern. According to the ILO, a healthy work environment is aimed at promoting and maintaining the “highest degree of the physical, mental and social well-being of workers” (ILO, n.d.; see also WHO, n.d.). Occupational safety and health (OSH) has as its objective to “promote and maintain [the] highest degree of physical, mental and social well-being of workers in all occupations” (WHO, n.d.). In the 1984 International Labour Conference Resolution on improving working conditions and work environments, for example, the ILO emphasizes the following principles: “Work should take place in a safe and healthy working environment; conditions of work should be consistent with workers’ well-being and human dignity; work should offer real possibilities for personal achievement, self-fulfilment, and service to society” (ILO, n.d.).

As the above conceptualization of work environments and occupational safety and health highlights, workers are exposed to several factors that might affect their health and well-being negatively. The work environment has thus become a subject of state and collective agreement regulations (Abrams, 2001).

Safer working conditions and healthier working environments have also historically been an important issue for the labour movement (Abrams, 2001; Alsos and Bråten, 2023; Holdren, 2020; Rosner and Markowitz, 2020).

The Nordic countries have developed a number of common features in legislation and regulation of the labour market, often referred to as the “Nordic labour market model” (Andersen et al., 2014). What has been described as a “Nordic model of OSH regulation” was developed in the 1960s (Lindøe, 2002), and today, OHS regulations in the Nordic countries are based on a common EU Directive, 1989/391/EEC. This is often referred to as the “Framework Directive”, which aims to promote improvements in safety and health at work. The EU OSH legislation centres around the concepts of the “working environment” and “health”. In this context, the term “working environment” – as emphasized by ILO and WHO as seen above – goes beyond accident prevention to include humane work process design, work organization, and health promotion (EU-OSHA, 2013/2021). Similarly, “health” in this context is defined by the WHO as complete well-being, including physical, mental and social aspects, not just the absence of illness (EU-OSHA, 2013/2021).

The Nordic model for OSH has influenced regulation within the EU and vice versa (Lindøe, 2002; EU-OSHA, 2013/2021).

Occupational safety and health regulations in the Nordic countries aim to ensure a secure and satisfactory working environment. These regulations encompass a wide array of standards and requirements, covering aspects ranging from the physical workplace and technical equipment to the psychological work environment, accessibility and accommodations. These regulations also address the methods and measures for ensuring compliance, which include risk assessment and prevention, internal control systems and consultation and cooperation with employee representatives. Thus, these regulations and the organizations enforcing them revolve around the broad objective of safeguarding workers’ health and safety (Hotvedt et al., 2020). The rules on internal control systems for supervising, controlling, and improving OSH are essential principles of the Nordic approach to working environment regulation. This is facilitated in all the Nordic countries through organized cooperation with employees’ representatives. Employee representation in the workplace thus plays a crucial role in monitoring compliance with OSH standards (Hotvedt et al., 2020).

All the Nordic countries also have labour inspection authorities with the mandate to oversee and enforce compliance with OSH standards. These authorities can issue binding orders, impose fines and halt hazardous activities, with the possibility of criminal sanctions. Still, the regulations chiefly operate by assigning duties to employers to protect their employees. While traditional employees are covered by their employers’ responsibilities, the Nordic OSH legislation does not necessarily protect workers classified as self-employed contractors to the same extent (Hotvedt et al., 2020).

Over the last decades, changes in the work environment have received significant attention from scholars and regulators. Important trends such as new technologies, the growing prevalence of non-standard forms of employment, new types of organizations, new industries and so on have resulted in new ways of organizing and conducting labour, which, in effect, have consequences for workers’ health and well-being (EU-OSHA, 2018; Nielsen et al., 2022; Papadopoulos et al., 2009). Automation, for example, can protect human workers from hazardous environments, but it might also introduce new risks. EU-OSHA started the “Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2023–2025” in 2023 to meet these emerging OSH challenges. The campaign focuses on how new digital technology affects work and workplaces, along with the challenges and opportunities it presents for the work environment (EU-OSHA, 2018).

The notion that new technologies will reduce the demand for labour power by increasing productivity and automating tasks is old. Aristotle, for example, used the concept of “automatous” to discuss the future potential of self-moving tools (in particular self-weaving shuttles and self-playing harps) and their consequences, arguing that such innovations might result in a situation without the need for slaves (Bhorat; 2022; Bielskis, 2023). These – and other similar speculations – have not, however, come to fruition (Benanav, 2019a, b). Still, new technologies have, without abolishing the need for human labour power, had significant consequences for how work is being done and by whom (Aloisi and De Stefano, 2022; Frey, 2019). These changes are both quantitative and qualitative, affecting both occupational structures and the content of workers’ labour processes (Rolandsson et al., 2019).

In the literature on technological change and work, one of the tendencies often highlighted is that of “upskilling” (Gallie, 1991; Davis and Eynon, 2018) or “upgrading” (Rolandsson and Dølvik, 2021).

In contrast to upskilling, what is often called the “deskilling” tendency, or what Braverman termed the “degradation of labour” (Braverman, 1974), describes how, under capitalism, there is a tendency toward managers simplifying and dividing tasks – reducing skill requirements – to make workers more easily replaceable in an effort to reduce labour costs (for a discussion of this tendency, see Littler and Salaman, 1982; Smith, 2015; Spencer, 2000).

Upskilling is an example of how new technologies can transform labour processes and their content to increase skill requirements (more conception, less mere execution), reduce the share of potentially heavy manual tasks and increase wages, thus leading to “better” jobs (Gallie, 1991; Martinaitis et al., 2021). At the aggregate level, there has been a tendency toward upskilling in the all the Nordic countries except Denmark over the last two decades, with the share of employment in highly skilled and paid occupations increasing and the share of employment in occupations at the lower end of the spectrum decreasing (Rolandsson and Dølvik, 2021).

In Denmark, Rolandsson and Dølvik (2021) note there has been a tendency toward “polarization”, i.e., increased employment in both highly skilled/paid and low-skilled/low-paid occupations, but declining employment in the middle strata.

At the same time, other tendencies highlight how new technologies such as digitalization can both increase existing occupational safety and health risks and create new ones (EU-OSHA, 2019). Digital technologies can have significant consequences for workers’ working environment (Bråten, 2019), and new risks, working environment challenges and occupational safety and health hazards associated with digitalization have become a widely discussed topic in recent years (Christensen et al., 2020; Christensen, 2021; EU-OSHA, 2019; Howard, 2017). Along this line of reasoning, new technologies pose new challenges as they make it possible for work to be coordinated and performed remotely. Such developments have enabled new business models – such as the gig and platform economy, which we discuss below – and reorganizations of workplaces. However, the literature on work environment challenges associated with digitalization also argues that these models have also emerged out of new forms of monitoring, controlling and surveilling workers and labour processes (see for example Hagen and Oppegaard, 2020). What consequences technologies have, however, varies depending on multiple factors, including the occupation and job content in question, markets and competition between employers, the power balance between workers and employers and the regulatory context (Dølvik and Steen, 2019; Peng et al., 2018). 

In a literature review on digitalization and occupational safety and health, Christensen et al. (2020) showed that technological development is associated with poor working conditions and identify factors that mitigate the potential negative effects of new technologies. They found that the same technological change can have both positive and negative effects on work environments and occupational safety and health, depending on the context within which it is deployed, how it is implemented and which function the technology has in the organization and labour process. Important aspects in this respect are workers’ autonomy, involvement, co-determination and training. The literature review highlighted two gaps in the research on new technologies and work environments. First, there is a need for studies that explore the specific aspects of different technologies and their implementation; and second, there are few studies directly analysing occupational safety and health in the gig and platform economy (Christensen et al. 2020).

In the following, we discuss the work environment risks associated with digital transformation by exploring three aspects of this transformation. First, we discuss field technologies, namely technologies that enable the coordination and monitoring of work outside a fixed workplace. Second, we highlight the occupational safety and health consequences of non-standard forms of employment. Third, we explore platform-mediated gig work and the occupational safety and health risks and challenges associated with these forms of work. Platform-mediated gig work can be seen as combining a type of field technology (the digital platform, often in the form of a mobile application) with a non-standard form of employment (usually self-employment).

Field technologies, electronic systems for registering data on workers outside a fixed workplace (Tranvik and Bråten, 2015), illustrate and highlight some of the challenges raised by new digital technologies. Field technologies record and register massive amounts of data and can provide detailed descriptions of workers and of how, when and where work is being and has been done. They are often used in industries such as transport, logistics, security and cleaning and care work and might in some cases take the form of smartphones and tablets. Field technologies make it possible for an employer to observe and control how work is performed from a distance. These technologies are therefore often used in organizations where workers work outside a fixed workplace.

Electronic travel logs, GPS-based logging systems installed in vehicles that measure time, distance travelled and position, are an example of field technology. The data these logs record cannot be edited or deleted by users and is often used to monitor whether professional drivers comply with regulations regarding driving time and rest periods (Levy, 2023). Fleet management systems are another example of field technology. These are systems that coordinate a fleet of vehicles for different purposes. They can have the function of keeping stock of a fleet or of managing assignments and allocating workers to vehicles and vehicles to tasks (Monnerat et al., 2019). In the taxi industry, the dispatching centres (also known as radio dispatchers or taxi centrals) that allocate bookings to drivers are an example of fleet management (Steen, 1988; Aarhaug et al., 2020). In home care work, digital task lists can also be seen as an example of a field technology that is used to coordinate tasks, workers and clients. Through smartphones or tablets, workers can plan and report on each visit and get access to information about patients, such as medication dosage (Underthun and Steen, 2018).

A final example of field technology is handheld devices such as the scanners used by workers in warehouses. In the case of Amazon in the United States, warehouse workers are equipped with scanners that are used to process the packages they handle. These scanners have built-in location tracking and can tell the workers where they must go to find the next items to process. However, they also collect detailed data on the workers. Vallas et al. (2022) found that this data is used to build real-time profiles of and evaluate individual workers’ performances. The scanners and the data they collect make it possible to analyse production rates at an individual level and compare workers with each other, averages, and performance targets. If a worker is found to perform poorly, they might be automatically flagged and potentially receive a notice or warning or – subsequently – be terminated.

Previous research has found that field technologies can have a significant effect on working conditions and occupational safety and health. For example, they can lead to isolation and fewer social interactions between colleagues (Håkansta, 2022), partially due to the increased flexibility in when and where work can be performed such technologies offer (Håkansta and Bergman, 2018). Others argue that field technologies have a tendency to increase standardization of work tasks and decrease workers’ autonomy, leading to increased dissatisfaction and decreased job motivation (Bråten and Tranvik, 2012; Håkansta, 2022; Tranvik and Bråten, 2015). Field technologies are also associated with work environment challenges such as reduced well-being, job satisfaction, competency development and learning opportunities (Håkansta and Bergman, 2018; Tranvik and Bråten, 2015), and increased stress due to detailed monitoring of how much time workers spend of tasks (Aiello and Kolb, 1995; Bråten and Tranvik, 2012). Other studies have found that field technologies can threaten workers’ privacy by giving employers access to a lot of data on individual workers and their work. A lack of privacy can impact the work environment negatively (Tranvik and Bråten, 2015).

Non-standard forms of employment refer generally to all forms of employment that differ from the so-called standard employment relationship, which, in the Nordic context, generally entails full-time permanent employment. The most common examples of non-standard forms of employment are part-time work (long part-time work is often defined as between 15 and 29 hours of work per week, while marginal part-time work entails less than 15 hours of work per week), temporary employment (both fixed-term contracts and temporary agency work) and self-employment (Ilsøe and Larsen, 2021). 

Different forms of employment tend to be associated with different legal protections and different levels of access to social benefits and welfare services (Rasmussen et al., 2019). Employees in the Nordic countries are covered by legislation on the working environment. These regulations provide employed workers with certain rights, like the right to unionize and bargain collectively and the right to have a safety representative; stipulate how OSH should be organized in workplaces; and specify requirements of the work environment (Hotvedt et al., 2020). Workers in non-standard forms of employment, however, are not necessarily covered by the same regulatory framework. Workers classified as self-employed contractors, for example, are legally seen as businesses and essentially excluded from the stipulations in the working environment act and are usually not included in the same kinds of social benefit and welfare schemes as legal employees (Alsos et al., 2022; Jesnes and Oppegaard, 2020). In addition, workers in non-standard forms of employment often have work arrangements characterized by greater insecurity and unpredictability than full-time employees. Part-time workers might earn only a portion of the wages needed to make a living from a given employer, requiring them to juggle multiple sources of income, while temporarily employed workers might lose their means of making a living when their contract ends. In addition to not being covered by the working environment regulations, self-employed workers are often paid per task completed rather than for the time actually spent at work. Still, there are variations within the same form of employment in regard to the degree to which OSH regulations are practiced and organized (Andersen and Bråten, 2022; Andersen et al., 2019; Bråten, 2016, 2018; Bråten and Oppegaard, 2020; Bråten et al., 2023).

Non-standard forms of employment can offer new and expanded economic opportunities for some workers, particularly for segments of the workforce with few other labour market opportunities (Valestrand and Oppegaard, 2022). Some research indicates, for example, that in certain cases, self-employment and the associated freedom from bosses can appear attractive for migrant workers who previously have had experiences with unfriendly bosses or co-workers (Altenried, 2022; Jesnes and Oppegaard, 2023; Waldinger, 1986). There are, however, significant occupational safety and health risks associated with non-standard forms of employment. As Howard (2017: 7) argues, there is “mounting evidence [that] shows that these novel ways of working pose occupational safety and health risks for some workers” (see also Cummings and Kreiss, 2008). Studies have found that there are higher rates of accidents and injuries among workers in non-standard forms of employment, which can partially be explained by a lack of training and increased fear of job loss, but also by the higher prevalence of this kind of employment in high-risk sectors such as construction, agriculture and transportation (Tran and Sokas, 2017; see also Fabiano et al., 2007).

Workers in non-standard forms of employment also tend to have flexible shifts and working hours. Previous research has found that working irregular hours and rotating shifts increases the frequency of psychological problems among workers. Sleep problems, for example, are associated with non-standard working hours, which increase the risk of depression, while irregular schedules and over-time work can lead to chronic fatigue due to stress and limited periods of rest between shifts (Papadopoulos et al., 2009: 944; see also Lie et al., 2014; Samant, 2020). Rotating shifts, deregulated working hours and limited resting time; night work, overtime and occupational stress also increase the frequency of accidents at work (Papadopoulos et al., 2009: 945; see also Lie et al., 2014). Job insecurity and work intensification are, furthermore, linked with a higher frequency of occupational accidents, as well as mental, emotional and physical exhaustion (Papadopoulos et al., 2009: 945), while flexible forms of employment increase the probability of accidents among workers (Papadopoulos et al., 2009: 945).

Platform-mediated gig work can be seen as a form of work that highlight the challenges brought on by new digital technologies, new ways of organizing work and non-standard forms of employment (Bråten and Thorbjørnsen, 2023; Gregory, 2020). These forms of work can be conceptualized as comprised of a formal work arrangement – the gig aspects – and a technological work arrangement – the platform aspects

In practice, however, these work arrangements interact to produce gig and platform workers’ working conditions and work environments, and the distinction between the two aspects remain primarily analytic.

(Oppegaard, 2021, 2023). The formal work arrangement refers to workers’ forms of employment, wage systems, scheduling practices and so on. Gig and platform workers tend to be classified as self-employed independent contractors (Jesnes and Oppegaard, 2020; Piasna et al., 2022), although some are classified as employees, either of the platforms (Jesnes, 2019; Jesnes and Oppegaard, 2023) or of intermediary companies (Oppegaard, 2020). They are, furthermore, usually paid per completed task (Woodcock and Graham, 2019).

The technological work arrangement, on the other hand, refers to the ways in which the digital platforms are used to coordinate, organize and control the workers and the labour processes (Oppegaard, 2021). Functioning like field technologies, digital platforms, usually in the form of a mobile application, monitor and instruct workers. This is often referred to as “algorithmic management” (Aloisi and De Stefano, 2022; Altenreid, 2022) or platform-based control (Oppegaard, 2023; Oppegaard and Jesnes, forthcoming). In the literature on platform-mediated gig work, “algorithmic management” is often conceptualized as comprising of three techniques (Lee et al., 2015).

First, platforms allocate tasks to workers based on the real-time data they collect on workers, customers and locations, among other things. Thus, platform workers generally do not choose their own customers but are assigned requests they can accept or decline (Oppegaard, 2023). Since workers are usually paid by the piece, or a piece rate, they tend to accept most requests. Moreover, declining requests can lead to a worker’s account being “deactivated” by the platform (Wells et al., 2021). A piece rate, however, can in itself also contribute to time pressure and stress and thus constitutes an individual occupational safety and health risk factor (Garben, 2017).

Second, the platforms adjust the prices of the service according to variations in supply and demand. From the companies’ perspective, such mechanisms serve to provide workers with incentivized to supply their labour power when demand is high (see Chen and Sheldon, 2015).

At the time of writing, the authors of this study were employed by Uber.

These dynamic pricing systems are often combined with different types of bonus schemes and make earnings unpracticable and variable according to a set of opaque variables. According to Dubal (2023), this leads to individualized payment systems that can be characterized as “algorithmic wage discrimination”. 

Third, platform companies use different rating systems to evaluate workers.

The rating systems the platforms use have been described as key mechanisms for producing “trust” and enable transactions between strangers on digital platforms (Botsman and Rogers, 2011) and online markets in general (Dellarocas, 2003).

The mechanisms used vary widely across different platforms. Some, like those used by taxi platforms, allow customers to assign drivers between one and five stars after each ride. If the drivers’ average rating falls below an undisclosed threshold, the drivers might be “deactivated” (Oppegaard, 2023; Wells et al., 2021). Platform companies also monitor how many requests workers accept, decline and cancel. These ratings can have consequences for future requests and, as a result, future earnings. On some platforms, the number of requests workers accept and the speed with which they complete a task can have consequences for what shifts they can work, as we will see in Chapter 5 on platform workers in the food delivery industry in Denmark and Norway. Chapter 3 on cleaning platforms in Norway, furthermore, shows how these kinds of rating systems shift the power balance between workers and customers in the latter’s favour, creating new insecurities for the former. While the rating systems vary in the degree to which the evaluations are transparent and visible to workers, they generally create additional unpredictability for workers (Oppegaard, 2021). 

As a combination of field technologies and non-standard forms of employment, platform-mediated gig work can be seen as an extreme case illustrating the tendencies present in the digitalization of work and non-standard forms of employment more generally. As Huws (2015) argues, the occupational safety and health risks associated with platform-mediated gig work are also present in many other service sector jobs.

Furthermore, platform-mediated gig work has to a large extent emerged in already “gigified” and/or poorly regulated industries. In Norway, for example, we have seen that platforms primarily have gained foothold in transportation, logistics, cleaning, and creative services (Oppegaard, 2020). These are industries with low collective agreement coverage and unionization rates, where wages usually are relatively low and where price-rate models are prevalent. In a Nordic context, these industries can be seen as the “fringes” of the Nordic labour market model, i.e., industries where the core features of the Nordic labour market model have not been institutionalized (Oppegaard and Nosrati, 2024; Valestrand and Oppegaard, 2022).

Platform-mediated gig work is nonetheless seen as a form of work with significant occupational safety and health risk factors (Garben, 2017; ILO, 2023). The literature on platform-mediated gig work highlights several work environment risks and occupational safety and health hazards associated with both the formal work arrangement and the technological work arrangement of this kind of work. The challenges emerging from the formal work arrangement largely overlap with the challenges associated with non-standard forms of employment discussed above (ILO, 2023). Studies specifically exploring occupational safety and health in the gig and platform economy highlight the unpredictability of these work arrangements, wherein workers are exposed to significant market risks (Maffie, 2023). Recent analyses of platform-mediated gig work in Europe have found that due to the piece rate model, workers often have to work long hours to make a decent living (Piasna et al., 2022) and spend a substantial segment of the working day waiting for requests from the platforms, or performing unpaid labour (Pulignano et al., 2021). Platform workers’ lack of job security, through their non-standard forms of employment and unpredictable pay (Schor et al, 2023), is an important factor that often is found to potentially contribute to poor overall health (Tran and Sokas, 2017). The piece rate model, furthermore, incentivizes workers to take risks and – particularly among couriers and drivers – to move fast and hurry (Garben, 2017; Gregory, 2020).

For delivery workers and drivers, both in traditional offline and digitalized work arrangements, road traffic also constitutes a significant safety hazard (Tran and Sokas, 2017). Christie and Ward (2019) argue that drivers and couriers working for gig platforms are exposed to risk factors such as fatigue, pressure to violate traffic regulations and being distracted by their phones or tablets. They found that 42 percent of drivers and delivery workers in their sample reported being involved in an accident where their vehicle had been damaged, and ten percent reported that they themselves or other persons had been injured in a collision. These workers tend to have little safety and health training (depending on context and whether they are required to be licensed professional drivers). They therefore argue that the rise of gig platforms in transportation and delivery produces significant risk factors that affect the safety and health of not only the workers themselves but also other road users. 

As mentioned, platform workers are subjected to the same kinds of risks and work environment exposure that long have characterized the industries in which the platforms have emerged (Huws, 2015). Hence, it is important to recognize that the work environment risks platform workers are exposed to vary significantly between industries, labour processes, control systems and regions (Bajwa et al., 2018). One important factor identified in the literature on occupational safety and health is age; platform workers tend to be younger, which constitutes an independent risk factor for injuries at work (Garben, 2017; Tran and Sokas, 2017). Another factor that is likely to be influential is the role of choice, as previous research has found that women involuntarily working temporary jobs have higher levels of psychological distress and more somatic complaints than those who prefer temporary work (Tran and Sokas, 2017). 

While the work environment challenges associated with platform-mediated gig work both overlap with non-standard forms of employment in general and vary with industry- and labour process–specific hazards, the effects of the platforms’ algorithmic management systems and platform-based control (Aloisi and De Stefano, 2022; Oppegaard, 2023) might constitute an independent source of insecurity and unpredictability (Oppegaard, 2021) and therefore have their own risk factors. Bérastégui (2021), for example, discusses how platforms’ continuous surveillance, automated control techniques and rating systems contribute to increase the pace of work for platform workers. Another key factor for platform workers’ occupational safety and health is allocation of responsibility for providing workers with protections and occupational safety and health measures (Samant, 2020). Since platform workers are usually classified as self-employed contractors, they are often not covered by the working environment acts and the platform companies evade employer responsibilities. This makes it difficult to determine which actors are responsible for creating a safe and healthy work environment and providing safety training and personal protective equipment (Randolph, 2019).

The work environment challenges in platform-mediated gig work are thus simultaneously both new and old – i.e., associated with the industry in which the platforms operate and the workers labour processes – and the occupational safety and health risk factors can be both physical and psychological (Garben, 2017). The above review also identifies three key areas of occupational safety and health risks in platform-mediated gig work: unclear OSH regulations and employer responsi­bili­ties and a lack of social protections, including access to benefits and welfare services, associated with the workers’ non-standard forms of employment; algo­rith­mic management and surveillance and privacy problematic emerging form the platformized work arrangements; and organizational and psychosocial conditions, including unpredictable earnings, opaque control techniques, stress and isolation.

Finally, platform workers’ form of employment is contested (Hotvedt, 2016, 2020; Johnston et al., 2023; Niebler et al., 2023). Some argue that these workers should be regarded as the platforms’ employees since the workers tend to be dependent on and, in practice, subordinate to the platforms and the control they exercise. Reclassification of workers, however, is a complicated legal process and in many countries, employment status is determined on a case-by-case basis (Garben, 2017). While there are examples of platform workers being classified as employees in the Nordic countries (Ilsøe and Söderqvist, 2023; Jesnes, 2024), the potential misclassification of these workers has nonetheless emerged as an important political point of contention (Jesnes and Oppegaard, 2020). In January 2024, the Norwegian Working Environment Act was amended to clarify the conditions under which workers can be classified as self-employed contractors and when they are to be considered employees. The amendments essentially codified a legal presumption of employment, shifting the burden of proof onto companies who wish to use self-employed workers. With the passing of the EU directive on platform work in March 2024, which, other things, asks member states to enact legal presumptions of employment (European Council, 2024), the other Nordic countries might follow Norway in tightening the regulations on forms of employment. 

The above discussions highlight the continued need for regulations, enforcement of legislation, and inspections to ensure healthy work environment for workers. What the “future of work” will bring remains an open question, and the answer depends on a myriad of factors. It is not only a question of technology and technological capabilities or of new business models and strategies. Politics and regulations will continue to shape the world of work, enabling and constraining new forms of work. 

This chapter has explored three key themes related to the future of occupational safety and health: field technologies, non-standard forms of employment, and platform-mediated gig work. This exploration has highlighted that there are significant occupational safety and health risk factors associated with digitalization of work and non-standard forms of work. The risk factors are associated with new forms of control, opaque and unpredictable management systems and a lack of OSH regulations. However, the risks workers face are also tied to their labour process and industry-specific features, as is emphasized with the case of platform-based taxi drivers and food couriers. Nonetheless, in these cases, the pre-existing risk factors might be exacerbated by new digital technologies. In the following chapters, we investigate these themes in detail through empirical and conceptual analysis of case studies from the Nordic countries. 

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