Online labour index: Measuring the online gig economy for policy and research

By O. Kässi, Vili Lehdonvirta. Technological forecasting & social change, 2018

458 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Labour markets are thought to be in the midst of a dramatic transformation, where standard employment is increasingly supplemented or substituted by temporary work mediated by online platforms. Yet the scale and scope of these changes is hard to assess, because conventional labour market statistics and economic indicators are ill-suited to measuring this “online gig work”. We present the Online Labour Index (OLI), an experimental economic indicator that approximates the conventional labour market statistic of new open vacancies. It measures the utilization of online labour across countries and occupations by tracking the number of projects and tasks posted on major online gig platforms in near-real time. The purpose of this article is to introduce the OLI and describe the methodology behind it. We also demonstrate how it can be used to address previously unanswered questions about the online gig economy. To benefit policymakers, labour market researchers and the general public, our results are published in an interactive online visualisation which is updated daily.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24ae32d99afccd63842c3d19b372ef72c2154ba9

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Citations in the corpus

Digital labour platforms and the future of work (2018, background): “6 However, the phenomenon is clearly non-negligible and recent efforts to map the size of the online gig economy (Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2016) show that the online labour market grew by 25.”
Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers (2019, background): “The latest estimates suggest that Africa accounts for just around 4.5 per cent of the global gig economy workers (K€assi and Lehdonvirta, 2018).”
Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy (2018, unknown): “This is seemingly due to the slightly superior bargaining power of workers from SEA, reflecting the greater demand for them over SSA workers (Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2016).”
Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods (2017, background): “An index measuring the utilisation of digital labour platforms suggests that their use is growing globally at a rate equivalent to 25 per cent a year (Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2016).”
Labour process theory and the gig economy (2018, background): “…process theory (LPT), a well-established Marxist approach in the sociology of work and a key resource for the study of the workplace in industrial capitalism, to offer new insights on the emergent phenomenon of the ‘gig economy’ (Fleming, 2017; Moisander et al., 2017; Kassi and Lehdonvirta, 2016).”
Flexibility in the Gig Economy: Managing Time on Three Online Piecework Platforms (2018, unknown): “An index measuring the use of online gig platforms suggests that they are growing globally at an annual rate of 26 percent (Kässi & Lehdonvirta 2016).”