Development in digital communication technologies has made transacting work remotely easier and more economical. Online labour platforms, also known as online outsourcing, crowd-work, or online gig platforms, are at the forefront of this transition. They allow workers to serve multiple clients at varying hours remotely from their homes or co-working spaces instead of working full-time… Read More »
Digital labour platforms have become a pervasive feature of contemporary society. They allow us to order food, arrange a ride, or buy remote freelancing services online. But how are they transforming the world of work? The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has just released its annual flagship report, which this year focuses on platforms. ILO researchers,… Read More »
Income earned through gig apps, freelancing platforms, letting platforms, and other digital intermediaries presents big challenges for taxation and social insurance. People should voluntarily report income from these sources to authorities, but in practice this doesn’t always happen. For instance, only 69 taxpayers reported income from Uber and Bolt in Estonia in 2016, even though… 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 »
This September marks the two-year anniversary of the launch of the Online Labour Index, the experimental economic indicator on the utilisation of online labour. This is the final in the series of blog posts describing what we have learned from the data. The paper accompanying the Online Labour Index was just accepted for publication in… Read More »