In 2017, over half of the world’s population will have joined the Internet. Many of these three and a half billion connected people will look to so-called ‘online labour platforms’, such as Freelancer.com and Fiverr, for work. These platforms allow workers to escape some of the constraints of their local labour markets and find work that they might not otherwise have been able to obtain.

This same ability for clients – potentially located anywhere in the world- to access labour power – also potentially located anywhere – has created a $5 billion market for online work that is served by 48 million workers. In the UK 11% of the labour force earn income from what has become known as the gig economy and 3% do so regularly. Online labour platforms connect individual workers with clients to carry out a wide range of contingent digital projects ranging from data entry to software programming. The Online Labour Index measures the utilisation of online labour platforms and suggests that their use is growing at an annual rate of 36 percent. It has even been suggested that within the next decade, labour platforms will mediate one in three labour transactions.

With colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute we carried out face-to-face interviews with over 220 online gig workers in the UK, US, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana and we also surveyed a further 450 workers from throughout Southeast Asian and Sub-Saharan African. One of our aims has been to investigate whether these online labour platforms are a force for good or whether they are in fact harmful for workers.