Professor Samantha Prince’s co-authored article to be published by Georgetown Environmental Law Review

CARLISLE, PA—“The Climate Risk Transfer That Defines The Gig Economy,” written by Professor Samantha Prince and Dean of Creighton School of Law Joshua Fershée, has been accepted for publication by the Georgetown Environmental Law Review.

The article examines how climate change is reshaping working conditions for gig delivery drivers and how platform-management systems operate as sophisticated mechanisms of climate-risk transfer.

Prince and Fershée demonstrate that delivery apps utilize automated algorithmic systems, weather-related incentives, and "weather impact fees" to monetize hazardous environmental conditions and profit from climate-driven demand, while simultaneously penalizing drivers who prioritize their own safety. These conditions effectively erode a worker’s right to refuse unsafe work during extreme heat, severe storms, wildfires, and flooding.

However, by classifying delivery workers as independent contractors, tech firms use this status as a climate-liability shield, legally insulating themselves from the injuries, medical expenses, and financial losses that result from exposing drivers to dangerous environmental conditions. This dynamic functions as a modern form of corporate cost externalization, mirroring the historic pollution practices that environmental law was originally built to prevent by forcing public healthcare systems, social-service programs, and taxpayers to absorb the fallout.

Prince and Fershée note that this model creates a triple injustice: companies profit from an environmentally exposed workforce while evading safety standards; they externalize the financial costs of climate disasters to individual workers and the public safety net; and they concentrate these systemic harms on disproportionately low-income and minority populations. Because climate volatility systematically embeds risk into tech-driven labor systems, climate vulnerability is no longer confined to traditional geographic areas like floodplains or coastlines.

The authors establish that climate-exposed platform workers are an essential part of the modern environmental justice landscape. To solve this crisis, they argue that environmental law must expand its understanding of “environmental harm” to include climate-intensified working conditions mediated by algorithmic governance, calling on lawmakers to adapt frameworks like corporate duty-of-care principles and mandatory algorithmic transparency to force these entities to bear their fair share of climate adaptation costs.

This article complements Prince’s other work on worker classification law, including “The Shoe Is about to Drop for the Platform Economy: Understanding the Current Worker Classification Landscape in Preparation for a Changed World” published by the “University of Memphis Law Review and “The AB5 Experiment – Should States Adopt California’s Worker Classification Law?” published by the American University Business Law Review.

Professor Samantha J. Prince is an associate professor of law. She has a Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center and was a partner in a regional law firm where she handled transactional matters that ranged from an initial public offering to regular representation of a publicly traded company. A significant part of her practice was in employee benefits, including retirement plan design and operation. Her expertise from practice has fueled her research, enabling her to become an expert on 401(k) vesting schedules, employee benefits transparency, and gig work. In practice, most of her clients were small- to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. Professor Prince brought her practice knowledge to the Law School and established the Penn State Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program. She is an advisor for the Entrepreneurship Law Certificate that is available to students and is the founder and moderator of the Inside Entrepreneurship Law blog.