Tag: Microwork

8 March 2018

Authors: Mark Graham

  A network that I am part of – the The Future of Work in Developing Countries initiative – has just put out a new publication titled ‘The Future ...
Read More The Future of Work in the Global South

30 January 2018

Authors: Mark Graham

  I have a short piece in New Statesman about the rise of what I am calling a planetary labour market. I wrote it because this will be the ...
Read More The rise of the planetary labour market

10 January 2018

Authors: Vili Lehdonvirta

Gig economy platforms seem to provide extreme temporal flexibility to workers, giving them full control over how to spend each hour and minute of the day. What constraints do ...
Read More Flexibility in the gig economy: How workers manage time on online piecework platforms

19 October 2017

Authors: Mark Graham

Nature just published a published a long article about the ‘three ways that the digital revolution is reshaping workforces around the world.’ Amir Anwar and I were interviewed for ...
Read More The shape of work to come

11 July 2017

Authors: Vili Lehdonvirta

Online Labour Index top occupation by country, 1-6 July 2017 The Internet has created a global market for digitally delivered freelance work, which is currently growing rapidly. Our new ...
Read More Where are online workers located? The international division of digital gig work

11 July 2017

Authors: Otto Kassi

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. ...
Read More Measuring the supply of digital labour: How the OLI worker supplement is constructed

10 July 2017

Authors: Vili Lehdonvirta

Online Labour Index, July 2016 – June 2017 (28-day moving average) Online freelancing and crowdwork are some of the terms used for temporary and project-based work conducted remotely over ...
Read More The online gig economy grew 26% over the past year

4 July 2017

Authors: Mark Graham

New forms of digital work have emerged which, in theory, can be done from anywhere. Does this mean that geography no longer matters to digital work? Not exactly. My ...
Read More ‘Digital Labour’ – our new publication

13 April 2017

Authors: Vili Lehdonvirta

shutterstock.com Platforms like eBay, Uber, Airbnb, and Freelancer are thriving, growing the digital economy and disrupting existing business. The question is how to ensure that the transformations they entail ...
Read More Could universal basic income counter the gig economy’s problems?

21 March 2017

Authors: Mark Graham

This report is based on a three-year investigation conducted by researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford and the Gordon Institute of Business Science ...
Read More New report: ‘The Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work At the Global Margins’

21 March 2017

Authors: Mark Graham

This report is based on a three-year investigation conducted by researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford and the Gordon Institute of Business Science ...
Read More New report: ‘The Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work At the Global Margins’

20 March 2017

Authors: Mark Graham

The cartogram depicts countries as circles sized according to dollar inflow during March 2013 on a major online labour platform. The shading of the inner circle indicates the median ...
Read More New Report: Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work at the Global Margins

20 December 2016

Authors: Mark Graham

What do Google, Uber, and Facebook have in common? You might think that the answer is that they are all technology companies. But actually it is that they all ...
Read More Let’s make platform capitalism more accountable

14 December 2016

Authors: Mark Graham

The latest version of the Economist contains a boldly-titled piece: ‘Mobile phones are transforming Africa‘.  The general sense in the piece is that, where connectivity exists, mobile phones and ...
Read More Are mobile phones transforming Africa?

21 November 2016

Authors: Mark Graham

The European Trade Union Institute has just put together a 40-page report that comes out of their conference on ‘Shaping the new world of work. The impacts of digitalisation ...
Read More Shaping the new world of work

27 October 2016

Authors: Otto Kassi

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 ...
Read More Mapping the demand for online labour

27 September 2016

Authors: Mark Graham

We live in a world in which it is increasingly possible to use online labour markets to outsource work directly to any corner of the planet. Millions of new ...
Read More Why the digital gig economy needs co-ops and unions

21 September 2016

Authors: Otto Kassi

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 ...
Read More How is online work classified in the OLI?

19 September 2016

Authors: Vili Lehdonvirta

The Online Labour Index (OLI) is a new economic indicator that provides an online labour market equivalent of conventional labour market statistics. It is available online as an interactive visualization ...
Read More Which countries and occupations are embracing the online gig economy?