Abstract
An unknown number of people around the world are earning income by working through online labour platforms such as Upwork and Amazon Mechanical Turk. We combine data collected from various sources to build a data-driven assessment of the number of such online workers (also known as online freelancers) globally. Our headline estimate is that there are 163 million freelancer profiles registered on online labour platforms globally. Approximately 14 million of them have obtained work through the platform at least once, and 3.3 million have completed at least 10 projects or earned at least $1000. These numbers suggest a substantial growth from 2015 in registered worker accounts, but much less growth in amount of work completed by workers. Our results indicate that online freelancing represents a non-trivial segment of labour today, but one that is spread thinly across countries and sectors.
Funder
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
Subject
Ocean Engineering,Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Reference27 articles.
1. Measuring the gig economy: Current knowledge and open issues;K Abraham,2017
2. Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers.;M Anwar;Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.,2020
3. Too Good to Be True? A Comment on Hall and Krueger’s Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners;J Berg;ILR Review.,2019
4. ICTs and the Urban-Rural Divide: Can Online Labour Platforms Bridge the Gap;F Braesemann;Information, Communication & Society.,2018
5. Digital Labor Studies Go Global: Toward a Digital Decolonial Turn.;A Casilli;Int J Commun Syst.,2017
Cited by
19 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献