Exclusion for Public Safety or Inclusion for Gig Employment: Managing the Tension with a Trilogy of Guardians

Gig platforms seek to create income opportunities, particularly for socially and economically marginalized people who find it challenging to engage in regular employment. Alongside this empowerment, safety concerns over unregulated drivers for transportation network company (TNC) platforms such as Uber and Lyft have led to discourse among policymakers on the necessity of background check laws (BCLs) with different stringency to exclude individuals from TNC jobs. Drawing on theories of labeling, routine activity, and rational choice theory, we conceptualize a trilogy of guardians—the government, TNC platforms, and the community—to safeguard ridesharing while mitigating the social costs of excluding marginalized citizens from TNC jobs. Empirically, we document the shifting of crimes into the property domain as an unintended consequence of the exclusion solution (i.e., BCLs by the government). Our findings indicate that digital safety technologies deployed by TNC platforms to deter crimes (i.e., in-app safety features) can serve as an alternative to BCLs. Moreover, we show that resources provided by the community can inhibit the negative impacts of exclusion by stringent BCL (i.e., through alternative income sources) and enable the effectiveness of deterrence by in-app safety features (i.e., through policing). Our study surfaces a holistic social justice assessment that involves examining the risks of excluding marginalized individuals from gig work and showing that digital technologies expand the solution space to achieve the public safety of citizens and inclusivity in gig employment through enabling the role of each guardian as well as their interdependence.