Category Archives: Future of Work

How are workers faring in the gig economy?

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Janine Berg, Senior Economist

Janine Berg, Senior Economist at the ILO and Valerio De Stefano, ILO Technical Officer on Non-Standard Forms of Employment

Most workers in the on-demand economy are considered by the platforms that they work for as being freelance workers. What are the consequences for workers of being classified that way?

To find out, we carried out two studies—one economic and one legal—on the on-demand economy to tackle some of these issues as well as learn more about the implications of the growth of new forms of casual labour.

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Regulating work in the ‘gig economy’

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Janine Berg, Senior Economist

Janine Berg, Senior Economist at the ILO and Valerio De Stefano, ILO Technical Officer on Non-Standard Forms of Employment

The ‘gig economy’ which includes ‘crowd-work’ and ‘work-on-demand via apps’, is often seen as the future of work.  And though it makes headlines nearly daily, many important questions regarding labour protection have yet to be addressed.

Crowd-work is work that is performed on on-line platforms by groups of individual workers, responding to on-line calls.  It can include skilled jobs such as programming and translation to more routine jobs such as cleaning data, tagging photographs or compiling lists of books or movies that on-line customers may be interested in purchasing.  The work is performed on-line by the ‘crowd’ who may live anywhere in the world so long as they are connected to the internet.

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Can cooperatives deliver more jobs and greater social inclusion in a changing world of work?

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Simel Esim, Chief of the ILO’s Co-operatives Unit and Waltteri Katajamaki, Junior Professional Officer – ILO Cooperatives Unit

The cooperative enterprise model is seeing a renaissance around the world. The turnover of the largest 300 cooperatives in the world over the last 3 years has grown by 11.6 per cent to reach 2.2 trillion USD in 2012. Preliminary data from 76 countries points to more than 250 million people working in co-operatives. The International Co-operative Alliance recently postulated that cooperatives would be the fastest growing form of enterprise by 2020.

This is an ambitious goal, even taking into account the momentum of the cooperative movement in the aftermath of the crisis and following the 2012 UN International Year of Cooperatives. Their continued appeal in follow up to the global ‘great recession’ suggests it might not be off target.

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