ILPC 2027

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. Instead of hiring a standard employee or contracting with a conventional outsourcing firm, companies are using online labour platforms to find, hire, supervise, and pay workers on a project, piece-rate, or hourly basis. Enterprises from small to large are using these platforms to access skills and flexible labour, assisted by specialized consultants and online outsourcing firms. Dozens of platforms have appeared to cater to different types of clients, workers, and projects, ranging from deskilled microtasks to complex technical projects and professional services. Tens of millions of workers are thought to have sought employment through such platforms (Kuek et al., 2015).

The potential policy implications of this emerging ‘online gig economy’, ‘platform economy’, or ‘on-demand economy’ are deep and wide-ranging, but not yet fully understood. It may create significant new earning opportunities in countries and occupations suffering from unemployment, but also erode labour protections and contribute to economic insecurity. It may alleviate local labour shortages, but also generate demand for new skills and training. It may contribute to temporal flexibility, but also to the unpredictability of working life, and further undermine social policies based on binary notions of employment and unemployment, breadwinners and dependants. Yet the real scale and scope of these implications is hard to assess, because conventional labour market statistics and economic indicators are ill-suited to measuring work that is transacted via online platforms. The entire digital transformation of labour markets remains largely unobservable to policy makers and labour market researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Online Labour Index (OLI), a new economic indicator that provides an online labour market equivalent of conventional labour market statistics. The Online Labour Index is an index that measures the utilization of online labour platforms over time and across countries and occupations. It provides a solid evidence base for future policy and research. The OLI is published online as an automatically updating open data set and interactive visualization at http://ilabour.oii.ox.ac.uk/online-labour-index/. In this paper we describe how the OLI is constructed and illustrate how it can be used to address crucial policy issues that existing data sources are unable to address. We also briefly discuss the current limitations and planned extensions of the index.