Demand for online “on-demand work” increased by 41% between 2016 and the first quarter of 2023: this is one of the key findings of the report “Work without borders. Promises and perils of online gig work »published by the World Bank on Thursday September 7.
“We believe the best way to get people out of poverty is for them to get a job. However, the world of employment has changed a lot in recent years; forms of work did not exist ten years ago. Traditional data didn’t tell us anything about how many people work like this.”explains Namita Datta, lead author of the report, which aims to update knowledge on the flexibilisation of work.
To do this, the institution brought together ten forms of surveys, combining public data, a questionnaire in seventeen low- or middle-income countries, a survey of twenty thousand companies or even interviews with workers and some of the 545 platforms -forms recorded in the world.
Far beyond Uberization
The definition of “on-demand work” goes well beyond Uberization: it concerns all “odd jobs” carried out on a task basis and online. Through an online platform, a gig worker is put in contact with an employer whom he or she does not meet physically either. This concerns both Uberized jobs (delivery person, driver) and those which can be carried out entirely online, at various qualification levels.
Due to a lack of precise data across the globe, and because on-demand work mostly goes under the radar, researchers estimate that it concerns a wide range: between 4.4% and 12.5% of the global workforce, between 154 and 435 million people: “Four hundred million, that seems impressive, but that’s because this report is the first not to underestimate pieceworkreacts Antonio Casilli, professor at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris and co-leader of the DiPLab (Digital Platform Labor) research team. This is a worrying indicator that labor markets are dominated by precarity. »
If online and job-based employment platforms have established themselves in the French and European landscape, they have become dominant in developing countries, highlights the research work, particularly due to the generalization of the Internet, especially since the pandemic. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region in the world where this growth is strongest, with a 130% increase in job offers in five years. East Asia alone has 179 million workers, making it the most represented region.
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