Volume 70, Issue 3

The social protection of platform workers is widely recognized as a major political challenge but remains vastly understudied. The few existing investigations focus on social protection coverage and the employment status of platform workers, while their social protection preferences remain a black box to date. In this article, we investigate the social protection preferences of platform workers using a mixed methods design based on an online survey (n = 719) and qualitative in-depth interviews (n = 20) with self-employed platform workers in Germany. While the quantitative data indicate that the vast majority of respondents reject compulsory social insurance contributions for platform workers and favour self-employment over dependent employment, the qualitative interviews reveal three main types of explanations for this regulation aversion in different segments of platform work: The casualization of work in the platform economy, free riding on protection derived from ‘regular’ employment and distrust in established welfare state institutions. Against this background, we discuss challenges for social policies aiming at improving social protection for platform workers.

Care work is mostly done by family members. While the (non-)reconciliation of care and work has already been researched in numerous studies, the state of research on studying and caring for (older) adults, such as one’s own parents or grandparents, has gaps. This paper, thus, asks: How many students engage in caregiving activities? How are caregiving activities socially distributed among the group of students? What burdens result from the (non-)reconciliation of study and care? In order to approach these questions, a university-wide online survey was conducted at the University of Stuttgart in October 2021, in which a total of 1622 students participated. Methods of analysis included logistic and linear regressions in addition to descriptive statistics. On the one hand, the results point out that caregiving is unequally distributed: Female and older students show a higher probability of caring for an older person during their studies. This also applies to students with a migrant background. On the other hand, students who are caregivers more often feel overburdened in various areas of their lives, from their studies, their partnership to their own health. This points to the accumulation of social inequalities – those who are already disadvantaged are more likely to find themselves in a care situation and, thus, experience increased stress. We assume that this could have long-term effects on the entire life course (e. g. on academic success, opportunities on the labour market and health).

Zusammenfassung Die Frage nach der Leistung von Erwerbslosen und ALG II-Bezieher*innen für die Gesellschaft ist im öffentlichen Diskurs ein wiederkehrendes Thema, in dem den Betroffenen oftmals ein Fehlen dieser Leistung attestiert wird. Der Beitrag nimmt die subjektiven Deutungen von ALG II-Bezieher*innen selbst zum Ausgangspunkt: Mit Hilfe von problemzentrierten Interviews werden unterschiedliche Deutungen von Leistung herausgearbeitet und entlang ihrer Position zur Erwerbsarbeit gegenübergestellt. Damit zeichnet sich erstens eine Leistungsdeutung ab, die Leistung mit Erwerbsarbeit gleichsetzt (Erwerbszentrierung). Dem gegenüber, zweitens, steht die Abweichung von der Erwerbszentrierung als nur partielle Erwerbszentrierung (neben der Care-Arbeit) oder Alternativen zu ihr (Ehrenamt und Alltagsbewältigung).