Online labour platforms allow companies to source work from freelancers over the Internet on an on-demand basis. We know that this phenomenon grew about 26 percent globally over the past year, and there is an increasing amount of research available on workers who work through these platforms (including our own). But there is a gap… Read More: How the world’s largest companies use online freelancing platforms: New… »
Our new Online Labour Index worker map provides a real-time measurement of the online gig economy by revealing where different types of jobs are taking place. To our knowledge, we are the first ones to provide this measure from across multiple platforms. The main strength of our our approach is the fact that it is… Read More: Comparing the OLI Worker Map to other studies on online… »
As more and more tasks and projects are transacted via online platforms and apps, national governments and statistical agencies face increasing challenges in tracking the growth of this phenomenon. To address this, we have created the Online Labour Index (OLI) and its new Worker Supplement. This post explains the methodology behind the OLI Worker Supplement.… Read More: Measuring the supply of digital labour: How the OLI worker… »
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: Uber: risk without autonomy or control »
Our colleagues over at the Geonet project have drawn some wonderful maps based on our Online Labour Index country data. The open vacancies are plotted in the figure below. As you can see the distribution is extremely skewed, with the United States buying as much online labour as the whole world combined. One explanation behind this is… Read More: Mapping the demand for online labour »
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: How is online work classified in the OLI? »