In this month’s Research Spotlight, we would like to introduce Otto Kässi, Vili Lehdonvirta, Fabian Stephany and their research article, ‘How many online workers are there in the world? A data-driven assessment’.
About the research
Development in digital communication technologies has made the process of finding work remotely simpler and more economical. At the forefront of this phenomenon are so-called online labor platforms, also known as online outsourcing, crowd work, or online gig platforms. Unfortunately, current economic statistics are not well suited to measuring this in terms of capturing its full extent and distinguishing its impact from other activities.
The pros and cons of the rise of gig work are widely debated. Some authors have asserted that digital jobs can facilitate virtual migration or bring jobs to people, instead of forcing workers to migrate to where the jobs are. On the other hand, the critics of platform work have noted that digital workers lack legal labor protection and are easily exploited by their employers.
To assess the scale and scope of the digital freelance economy, we produce an estimate of the total number of online workers globally and document the uncertainties related to the calculation.
What inspired you to investigate this?
I have been working on measurement issues related to the future of work for a number of years, and quite often people would ask me “How many platform workers are there?” I always had to refer to estimates that were either quite dated or had some methodological problems. I wanted to give my own estimate that did not suffer from the same issues.
What were the outcomes of your research?
Our headline estimates indicate 163 million registered online worker profiles on online labour platforms globally. At the same time, we estimate that only around 8.6% of them have earned any income from platform work, and only about 2% have completed at least ten projects or earned at least $1000. So, what to make of these numbers? In some sense, they are staggering. There are as many worker accounts as the population of Bangladesh (the 8th biggest country in the world). But only a minority of workers have worked at least once, let alone ten times. This implies that there are many workers in the “waiting room” of the global online working economy, while much fewer people are making any substantial income from it.
Why is Open Research important to you and your co-authors?
Many quantitative social science fields suffer from a lack of replicability (“most published research findings are false”). Open research practices are a step in a more credible direction.
A large share of my ongoing and past projects use data that is either proprietary or limited access, which limits the openness of my research. The data for this project was hand-collected from the web, so we were able to fully embrace open research.
What motivated you to publish with Open Research Europe?
We believed this paper would be of interest to the general public, so we wanted to make our research open access. This paper originated from my ERC funded postdoc, so ORE was the most obvious choice. Prospects of a speedy publication also played a role in our decision making.
What are your next steps?
Currently, I mostly think about COVID-19 and the effects of government policies adopted due to the pandemic, so I have less time for the gig economy research. However, I still follow the field through my collaboration with the International Labour Organization in the scope of the Online Labour Observatory, of which I am a collaborator. I try to at least skim through all of the research that comes out on the topic.
Interested in reading the article? Find out more about the research here.
