Understanding, Challenging, and Demystifying Perceptions of Gig Worker Vulnerabilities
For researchers and policymakers concerned with gig worker welfare, this work provides empirical evidence of widespread misconceptions and a scalable method to correct them, though the findings are incremental and domain-specific.
This study investigates how platform-based gig workers perceive five common myths about their vulnerabilities, finding that 227 out of 236 workers believed at least one myth. By presenting expert- or LLM-generated counterarguments, the study demonstrates that persuasive interventions can effectively shift workers' beliefs and raise awareness about hidden labor conditions.
Across service domains, platform-based gig workers often face a wide range of severe yet hidden vulnerabilities, including opaque pay practices, illusions of flexibility, health and safety risks, and privacy violations. To the general public and inexperienced workers such latent vulnerabilities remain largely unknown and concealed by intentional platform design that gives illusions of adequate labor protections, or $\textit{myths}$. This study examines how workers perceive (and shift their beliefs away from) five commonly held misconceptions regarding gig worker vulnerabilities. In $Phase~I$, crowdworkers ($N~=~236$) rated their agreement with five common myths surrounding vulnerabilities in gig work:$~227$ of them believed one or more myth(s). In $Phase~II$, we challenged these workers to defend their views by presenting an expert- or LLM-generated counterargument. Our findings show workers' underexposure to personal and shared vulnerabilities of gig work, revealing a knowledge gap where persuasive interventions can scalably raise awareness around such hidden labor conditions. We reflect on the effectiveness of different persuasion strategies and discuss implications for promoting more accurate public perceptions that support collective bargaining of workers' rights.