Documents Barnard, Helena 2 results

Online gig work is becoming increasingly important to workers living in low- and middle-income countries. Our multi-year and multi-method research project shows that online gig work brings about rewards such as potential higher incomes and increased worker autonomy, but also risks such as social isolation, lack of work–life balance, discrimination, and predatory intermediaries. We also note that online gig work platforms mostly operate outside regulatory and normative frameworks that could benefit workers.
This report summarises the ways in which observed risks materialise in the market, highlighting responses from a 456-respondent survey and stories from 152 interviews. The report's central question is whether online gig work has any development potentials at the world's economic margins.1 Its motive is to help platform operators to improve their positive impact, to help workers to take action to improve their situations, and to prompt policy makers and stakeholders interested in online gig work to revisit regulation as it applies to workers, clients, and platforms in their respective countries."

"We examine how geography shapes workers' pay rates in the global platform economy, using transaction data from a major online labour platform and quotes from interviews to motivate and illustrate the quantitative analyses. Approximately 35 percent of variation in workers' pay rates is attributable to differences between their home countries, with workers from richer countries earning more. Our exploratory analyses suggest that this is not because of country differences in worker competence, but because workers from lower-income countries have fewer local labour market opportunities and are therefore willing to accept lower-paid gigs online. We also find that clients' perceptions of workers' home countries can explain a significant part of the variation in pay rates, though we do not rule out alternative explanations. We draw comparisons to disadvantages faced by emerging-economy firms seeking to break into international markets, and to immigrants entering host country labour markets, and discuss implications to development policy and platform design."