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 »
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 »
A short video interview that I did about digital labour markets at the ETUI conference on ‘Shaping the New World of Work’.
For decades, large firms have been outsourcing and offshoring jobs. Work flowed from developed economies to developing ones, where wages were lower and regulations were of a lighter touch. Europeans and North Americans lost jobs, and Asians, South Americans, and Africans gained them. But the nature of these processes meant that business activities had to… Read More »
The Digital Transformations of Work Conference that Alex Wood and I organised brought together a room full of brilliant and passionate speakers and 80 guests to have a wide-ranging and critical conversation about what digital transformations mean for the future of work (and workers). Sadly, the room could only accommodate 80 and we had a huge… Read More »
As part of the Green Templeton College Future of Work Programme we are bringing together leading researchers to consider the ways in which digitalisation and the internet are globally transforming work, employment and labour markets. This one-day conference features: Professor Saskia Sassen (Columbia University) and Professor Linda McDowell (University of Oxford) on digital work and exploitation;… Read More »
We are lucky to have Mohammad Amir Anwar joining our team in the Geonet project! Amir is a Human Geographer by training, and his work has focused on geography of globalisation, political economy and development in the Global South, with a special focus on India and Africa. He is currently researching the growth of knowledge… Read More »
SciDevNet has just published some of my preliminary thoughts about digital labour in development. The argument being that just because digital work is international, doesn’t mean it operates outside of the realm of resistance or regulation. Virtual products aren’t built with virtual work. You can access the full piece here.
Our previous post contained a few maps that shed light on the geographies of online work. But what we didn’t do there was explore the spatial variance of wages. The cartogram in this post depicts each country as a circle and sizes each country according to dollar inflow to each country during March 2013 (on… Read More »