Abstract
The Online Labour Index (OLI) was launched in 2016 to measure the global utilisation of online freelance work at scale. Five years after its creation, the OLI has become a point of reference for scholars and policy experts investigating the online gig economy. As the market for online freelancing work matures, a high volume of data and new analytical tools allow us to revisit half a decade of online freelance monitoring and extend the index’s scope to more dimensions of the global online freelancing market. In addition to measuring the utilisation of online labour across countries and occupations by tracking the number of projects and tasks posted on major English-language platforms, the new Online Labour Index 2020 (OLI 2020) also tracks Spanish- and Russian-language platforms, reveals changes over time in the geography of labour supply, and estimates female participation in the online gig economy. The rising popularity of software and tech work and the concentration of freelancers on the Indian subcontinent are examples of the insights that the OLI 2020 provides. The OLI 2020 delivers a more detailed picture of the world of online freelancing via an interactive online visualisation updated daily. It provides easy access to downloadable open data for policymakers, labour market researchers, and the general public (www.onlinelabourobservatory.org).
Highlights
Since its launch in 2016, the Online Labour Index (OLI) has provided data and visualisations on the online gig economy to researchers, policymakers, and journalists (Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2018)
We present the Online Labour Index 2020 (OLI 2020), an updated version of the OLI developed in collaboration with the International Labour Organization (ILO)
The OLI 2020 is made available on the Internet via the Online Labour Observatory, a collaborative website hosted by the ILO and the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford
Summary
Since its launch in 2016, the Online Labour Index (OLI) has provided data and visualisations on the online gig economy to researchers, policymakers, and journalists (Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2018). We tracked data only from large English-language platforms. Large English-language platforms dominate the overall online freelancing market, there are important regional markets in other languages that missed our focus. We did not attempt to visualise many of the temporal dynamics of the market, since we had only been accumulating data for a short time, and we missed data on worker demographics, such as gender. The OLI 2020 makes use of both accumulated time-series data and newly obtained data on Russian- and Spanish-language freelancing platforms.
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