Mapping precarity: How the UK Supreme Court redistributes risk and value in the gig economy

Dominant labour-law commentary treats gig-economy litigation as a cartographic exercise: are drivers and couriers being “correctly” mapped into the statutory boxes of employee, worker, or independent contractor? Drawing on critical-labour-law theories of law’s constitutive power, this article shifts the focus from misclassification to political economy. Using the UK Supreme Court’s twin flagship cases, Uber BV v Aslam (2021) and IWGB v CAC & Deliveroo (2023), as analytical prisms, it shows how section 230(3)(b) ERA 1996 constructs a legal subject who is at once too “entrepreneurial” to merit full employment protection and sufficiently subordinated to fuel on-demand logistics.

The analysis traces the distributive consequences of that construction. It argues that doctrinal valorisations of “substitution” and “multi-apping” redirect wages, liability, and bodily depletion onto racialised migrant workers and, downstream, onto the UK welfare state, while freeing platforms to realise extraordinary profits. Law, welfare policy, and shareholder returns thus form a single redistributive circuit.

By foregrounding these entanglements, the article questions whether jurisprudential tinkering can deliver substantive change: when legal categories are already embedded in—and reproductive of—the very accumulation regimes they purport to regulate, any emancipatory project must look beyond classificatory refinement to structural re-engineering of value and risk flows.