This article draws on data from the Online Labour Index and interviews with freelancers in the United States securing work on online platforms, to illuminate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report offers initial findings and recommendations to development organizations, policymakers, and other private and public stakeholders seeking to address barriers to employment and to promote opportunities for refugee women in the digital workforce in Jordan and Lebanon.
This book shows agribusinesses how to develop more sustainable, resilient, and productive supply chains and the substantial impact of doing so on development. The book compiles innovative solutions and cutting-edge ideas to meet the challenges facing smallholders around the world. Chapter 10, "Youth Participation," was led by S4YE.
This Short Note is part of a series based on the report Working without Borders: The Promise and Peril of Online Gig Work that aims to promote discussion among policy makers and practitioners on opportunities in online gig work. Gig workers, including self-employed individuals, often find themselves in a "missing middle" when it comes to social insurance coverage. With a focus on developing countries, this note answers the question, “how can policy makers leverage online gig platforms to extend social insurance to informal gig workers?”.
This Cedefop CrowdLearn study undertakes a comparative analysis of skill development and workplace learning practices among two major types of online platform work: online freelancing and microwork. It combines information on microworkers drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform with the original CrowdLearn sample of online freelancers surveyed from three major online labour platforms (Fiverr, Upwork, PeoplePerHour).
Information and communication technologies have long been predicted to spread economic opportunities to rural areas. However, the actual trend in the 21st century has been the opposite. Knowledge spillovers have fueled urbanization and pulled job-seekers into large cities, increasing the gap with rural areas. In this article, the authors argue that new assemblages of technologies and social practices, so-called ‘online labour platforms’, have recently started to counter this trend.
This study focuses on online outsourcing’s potential as a new and innovative channel for socioeconomic development for developing country governments and development practitioners, particularly in terms of youth employment, services exports, and participation in the digital economy.
In 2017, the JRC conducted the COLLEEM pilot survey, an initial attempt to provide quantitative evidence on platform work. This report builds on previous findings and contributes by describing the results of the second wave of COLLEEM (2018).
The Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2023 assesses and scores basic standards of fairness in working arrangements on 15 web-based digital labour platforms according to the five Fairwork principles: fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation.
The authors of this article combined data collected from various sources to build a data-driven assessment of the number of such online workers (also known as online freelancers) globally. Their headline estimate is that there are 163 million freelancer profiles registered on online labour platforms globally.
