Barbara Švagan

This article examines why food delivery platform workers evaluate their job quality as high despite known drawbacks of this type of employment. Using qualitative data obtained from 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with couriers in Slovenia, the study employs a job quality model consisting of four distinct components (psychological well-being, social satisfaction, economic stability, and health and safety) as a conceptual framework used to determine which elements contribute most to the general job quality evaluation. Findings show that couriers often acknowledge the financial challenges and potential health and safety risks associated with their occupation but are willing to overlook some of these drawbacks due to how highly they value the autonomy, freedom and favourable work-life balance platforms offer. This article argues that platform companies, characterised as permissive entities which still hold a significant amount of power over the labour process, take advantage of the workers’ desire for autonomy and the large worker turnover to continue precarious employment practices. This is additionally fuelled by poor management practices and interpersonal relationships in traditional employment, which often push workers into platform work with no human supervisor, where they can “be their own boss”.

The paper studies the productivity change of the commercial banks in the CEE countries over the post-crisis period 2013–2018. The productivity change is measured by the Malmquist Productivity Index and its sub-components, applying two approaches—the asset-oriented and profit-oriented intermediation approaches. The analysis uses data from a balanced panel of 181 commercial banks in 11 CEE countries. We find that commercial banks’ productivity, measured with the asset-oriented intermediation approach, decreased in most of the CEE countries over 2013–2018, with a decline ranging, on average, from 1% to 6.9%, driven mainly by a decline in technical efficiency. Nevertheless, estimates using the profit-intermediation approach point to productivity growth in commercial banks in all CEE countries, ranging, on average, from 0.5% to 6.3%. The empirical findings imply the need for the CEE commercial banks to further digital transformation and cost rationalization.