On Tuesday, Uber drivers took part in strikes organised by the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU) meanwhile the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) Union are planning for more Uber drivers to strike on the 6th October. Additionally, IWGB’s Deliveroo and UberEats members have organised numerous strikes and demonstrations over the past five years.… Read More »
How are online labour markets reacting to the COVID-19 crisis? Does demand for online work diminish, as companies are facing declining revenues and reduce non-essential spending, or could the pandemic lock-down lead to additional demand for remote work? In one of our last iLabour blog posts, we briefly talked about these two opposite effects, as… Read More »
In general, a striking feature of the geography of online labour utilisation is the similarity of occupational demand profiles of leading employer countries. The fact that national online labour demand profiles resemble each other suggests that demand largely comes from the same industry within each country: the information technology sector, generally speaking. However, there are… Read More »
After three years and nine months, I’m leaving the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the end of the month to take up a Lectureship in the Sociology Work at Birmingham University. I’ll be joining a highly regarded group of researchers in the ‘Organisation, Work and Employment Group’ at the Department of Management. I joined the… Read More »
How digital technologies are implicated in profound changes in the nature of work has been a topic of much interest in the past years. One realm of high-skilled ‘knowledge work’, historically conducted by full-time professionals in the office, is increasingly technology-mediated and executed by remote independent contractors. Platforms operating online labor markets are the harbingers… Read More »
Online labor markets for professional knowledge work is growing 30% a year. Established intermediaries, brokers and staffing agencies should be concerned about this, according to Dr. Gretta Corporaal (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford). “When the media reports about the gig economy of platform labor, they often talk about low-skilled, low-paid platform labor, such as at… Read More »