I have a new publication coming out soon in the Review of African Political Economy, with my colleague Mark Graham. The paper is based on the research we have been carrying out over a number of years in Africa. It deals with the role African digital labour is playing in the global information economy and… Read More »
I’m very happy to announce the first sharable details about my new forthcoming book (co-authored with Jamie Woodcock). The book will be out in November, but you can already pre-order it with a 20% discount using this flyer or the code GIG20 on the Polity Books website. The Gig Economy A Critical Introduction Jamie Woodcock &… Read More »
I have a new co-authored article out, with two colleagues, based on our fieldwork with gig workers in Africa and Asia. The piece is about collective organisation in the gig economy and argues that as the gig economy grows in importance so too will worker self-organisation. Wood, A., Lehdonvirta, V., and Graham, M. 2018. Workers of the Internet… Read More »
Nature just published a published a long article about the ‘three ways that the digital revolution is reshaping workforces around the world.’ Amir Anwar and I were interviewed for it, and the article includes some of our findings from our research in Africa and Asia. You can read the full piece here: http://www.nature.com/news/the-shape-of-work-to-come-1.22839
This report is based on a three-year investigation conducted by researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford and the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) at the University of Pretoria. Online gig work is becoming increasingly important to workers living in low- and middle-income countries. Our multi-year and multi-method research… Read More »
As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east… Read More »
The European Trade Union Institute has just put together a 40-page report that comes out of their conference on ‘Shaping the new world of work. The impacts of digitalisation and robotisation’, held from 27-29 June 2016 in Brussels. I spoke in the Plenary on ‘technology’, and spoke about both fears for digital workers, and potential… Read More »
We live in a world in which it is increasingly possible to use online labour markets to outsource work directly to any corner of the planet. Millions of new jobs are thus available for workers in some of the poorest parts of the planet. But the fact that we now have millions of people around… Read More »