Increasing Demand for Online 'Gig Economy' Jobs

The online gig economy has been booming, but not for all workers. People from all over the world are trying to get into the bit-work economy of completing tasks for money. This can be for data entry, transcripts, writing, computer programming or graphic design.

Location matters: dollar inflow and median requested hourly pay by country
Source: Oxford Internet Institute

The work usually comes from richer countries, and those who work those jobs usually come from lower standards of living countries. Currently, one of the major gig platforms has 1.75 million worker profiles, but only 200,000 of them have done an hour of work or earned over $1. There are many people looking for this work, but not enough jobs to supply the demand as it is.

Demand is expected to get higher, with a billion more people expected to get online by 2020. This surge in job demand will come from low to middle income countries like Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. People like the bit-work of the gig-economy because they have more autonomy than local economic opportunities.

The problem is all of this demand is creating a race to the bottom, as people undercut each other to get the job. Current bit-workers don't have employee-right protections, like unions provide. Most of the work is unregistered by regulators. It's up to the countries these jobs come from to change their laws and provide the same working standards to the gig economy as they do for their local economies.

Normal work is done in an "under one roof" model for supervision and control to occur. The new gig model shifts that to non-proximate relationships where monitoring is more difficult. Reputation scores from past work make someone more desired for future work, but this means getting a task when you have no reputation can almost be impossible. People will undercut and ask for lower wages in order for the opportunity to get a high rating.

Workers in the online gig economy are regarded as replaceable throw-aways, where those who create tasks can easily find someone else to do the job. Labor can now be bought and sold. Middle-men "agencies" with high scores form to outsource tasks they accept, where they get desperate workers to complete the task at a fraction of the cost, so they bank more by exploiting desperate workers. The market price for work will get more and more unfair, promoting more predatory exploitation.

If people continue to look out only for themselves as entrepreneurs in competition, it will be a race to the bottom with the desperate getting ripped off for the work they do. Whereas if people look at each other as workers in a common setting, they can be more willing to organize and cooperate to secure better working conditions together. Cooperatives are a good avenue, where you get a stake in the platform you work for by completing tasks. Those who aren't part of the cooperatives will still be victim to re-outsourcing middle-men that get others to work for less.

Many workers accept the mentality of "entrepreneurship", but are getting most of the risks and little of the rewards that usually comes with that role. Forming digital unions or cooperatives might not solve the problem of a global digital workforce, but it's a starting point like was started in the real world at some point. Workers of the world can unite and try to establish better working conditions and get better job security.

The coming oversupply of workers isn't going to be matched by a supply of work for them. Underemployment and reduced pay through increased competition will affect many of these impoverished people who were seeking better employment than their local labor markets, or for those simply seeking employment at all.

Has anyone tried bit-work through a gig-economy?

How did it go?

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Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.

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References:

• Pay crash expected in online gig economy as millions seek work
• Online workers get a rough deal
• The hidden dangers of the global gig economy
• Why the digital gig economy needs co-ops and unions
• New Report: Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work at the Global Margins
• The Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work At the Global Margins
• Overview of a Field Study on Feedback and Reputation Guilds

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2017-03-26, 10:58am