Measuring employment precariousness in gig jobs. A pilot study among food couriers in Brussels.

Background: Within the extensive literature on precarious working conditions in the gig economy, there is remarkably little attention paid to how we can formally assess precarity. The few existing measuring instruments that seek to capture precarity in the gig economy assess platforms as job providers, but not the situation of individual gig workers. Moreover, these approaches do not account for different employment statuses of gig workers. We propose to address these challenges through the adaptation of an existing, theory-based, multidimensional instrument for measuring employment precariousness. Objective: This research’s objective was to adapt, test and validate the Employment Precariousness Scale (EPRES) to the context of food couriers in Belgium. Methods: To this end, fieldwork observations were combined with primary survey-data (N=123). The scale was validated by testing reliability and external validity. Results: Although the small sample size requires caution, the EPRES-gw (i.e. our adaptation for ‘gig work’) indicated good reliability through sufficiently high internal consistency. The scale also showed good external validity through a significant positive correlation with poor well-being. Conclusion: The scale’s characteristics in empirical analyses compare to previous research using the EPRES among employees. The EPRES-gw is therefore a potentially successful instrument for studying employment precariousness in gig jobs.