Online Labour Index
What is it measuring?
The index counts the number of projects and tasks posted across 12 different English-language online platforms, classified by occupation and country.
What does it tell us?
The Online Labour Index 2020 (OLI 2020) is intended to track trends in online labor, and is normalized to the number of projects posted in May 2016, when the project begun. The number of projects and tasks in the first month has a value of 100, and numbers higher than that represent growth. In June 2021, the index had risen to 151.2, representing a 51 percent increase since May 2016. The OLI 2020 indicates changes in the geography of online labor supply over time, notably the growth of India's share of the global online worker population from 25 to 33 percent between 2017 and 2021.
How is it collected?
All projects or tasks posted on the included platforms are automatically incorporated into the index in real time. The platforms include six English-language, three Spanish-language, and three Russian-language platforms.
Who collects it?
The iLabour Project of the Oxford Internet Institute, a project of the University of Oxford funded by the European Research Council.
Considerations
OLI 2020 is one of the few international measures of gig economy activity. It is a measure of projects and tasks, rather than of people participating in gig work. It can only be used to look at trends since 2016, rather than absolute counts of either tasks or workers. Initially launched as the Online Labour Index in May 2016, OLI 2020 is an updated version of the original OLI introduced in February 2021. The update added tracking on Spanish- and Russian-language platforms, changes to the geography of global online labor supply, and data on female participation in the digital gig economy.
How to access this data?
Live data available from the iLabour Project at https://ilabour.oii.ox.ac.uk/online-labour-index/. Data repository is available on Figshare, an online open access repository. https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Online_Labour_Index_Measuring_the_Online_Gig_Economy_for_Policy_and_Research/3761562
Reports
Online Labour Index: Measuring the Online Gig Economy for Policy and Research; 2018; ; Technological Forecasting and Social Change;
Online Labour Index 2020: New ways to measure the world's remote freelancing market; 2021; ; Forthcoming with Big Data & Society;