The iLabour Project: How big is the online gig economy
Words: Otto Kässi
Labour markets are thought to be in the midst of a dramatic transformation, where standard employment is increasingly supplemented or substituted by temporary gig work mediated by online platforms. The potential implications of this emerging platform economy are deep and wide-ranging, but not yet fully understood. The real scale and scope of these changes are hard to assess, because conventional labour market statistics and economic indicators are ill-suited to measuring work that is transacted via online platforms.
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. The indicator tracks the number of jobs posted on the five main English language platforms, which together make up around 70% of all traffic in the online platform economy, looking at what types of work are being conducted and where both workers and employers are based.
Over a period of little over two years (May 2016 to August 2018) the online crowd work economy has grown by about a quarter, with around 10,000 vacancies posted daily. The biggest growth has been in graphic design and software development, which now make up the 2 biggest sectors in the online platform economy.
All in all, there are roughly 3.5 million registered users on four of the 5 biggest platforms*. From this population, we see that approximately 100,000 workers work at least once in any given week. Since our measurement does not cover the universe of all platforms, the total number of online workers is likely at least twice that amount globally.
Whilst around 70% of employers are located in the global north, the vast majority of workers are located in the global south, with India and Pakistan providing 45% of the total labour force.
You can explore the Online Labour Index further at: https://ilabour.oii.ox.ac.uk/online-labour-index/
*The largest platform, Upwork, is not included in this index due to difficulties around data collection.
