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 »
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 second 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 »
The impacts of technological change on jobs have been a topic of much interest over recent decades. Existing economic statistics are in general prone to mismeasuring the value of digital activities and investments, because these are often not directly related to production, but to development, design, and marketing, whose value is harder to establish. Existing… Read More »
Dr Alex J. Wood discussed the implications of the recent UK Uber Employment Tribunal ruling on BBC News. The court decided that Uber must classify its drivers as workers. The ruling means that, pending appeal, Uber drivers are entitled to the national minimum and living wage of £7.20 an hour, rest breaks and sick pay.… Read More »
The Online Labour Index is an index measuring the changes in the volume of projects transacted in major online platforms. As a part of OLI, we also report a breakdown across different occupations. In this post I will discuss how the occupation classification used in the OLI is constructed. In order to classify the work done… Read More »
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIoncQhmDJo&w=640&h=360] In this video, Prof Vili Lehdonvirta talks about the digital transformation of labour markets and introduces the Online Labour Index, the first economic indicator that provides an online gig economy equivalent of conventional labour market statistics, available as an interactive online tool.