Platform Labour Discourse: How Hyr Targets the “Bucket List Generation”

This paper provides an analysis of the discursive contradictions and narratives of labour withinHyr, a location-based freelance platform app that caters to the retail, hospitality, and restaurantsectors in Toronto and New York. The app provides companies with access to individuals with avariety of skills in these sectors and provides workers with access to contract jobs. The paperprovides an analysis of Hyr’s promotional marketing, that targets urban “millennials,” anddiscusses how the platform exerts algorithmic and information control over its workers throughtheir legal documentation and conditions of work within the platform. Situated within the “gigeconomy,” the paper also reviews current local policy proposals to alleviate the situation of gigworkers in the Canadian context.