Negotiations are a valuable and important tool for increasing the voice of workers in the informal economy. This paper provides empirical evidence from Africa, Asia and the Americas on negotiations and collective bargaining by workers in the informal economy. These practices demonstrate that...

Sharing economy online labor platforms play a critical role in bringing together freelancers and potential employers. This research is one of the few studies to address how freelancers' characteristics impact the likelihood of being hired by employers using the theory of person-environment fit...

Purpose: This study asks whether lower quality forms of employment lead to career transitions into higher quality forms of employment acting as steppingstones, or bridges or, whether instead they lead to dead-ends, or traps, in which workers move between unstable jobs with low prospects for...

Technological advances such as smartphones, mobile applications, and online platforms have enabled a new form of economy, known as a gig economy, at a large scale, in which there is a free-market system allowing organizations (job providers) to hire independent contractors (job seeker). Unlike...

This paper makes the case that current social contracts are often inadequate, irrelevant, or unjust for informal workers. It outlines three possible future scenarios: the bad old contract, an even worse contract, and a better new contract. Under the bad old contract, informal workers lacked...

This paper presents findings from the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest, a database of platform worker protest events around the world which gathers data from online news media reports and other online sources. For the period January 2017 to July 2020, we identified 1,271 instances of...

Only ten years ago, there were more internet users in countries like France or Germany than in all of Africa put together. But much has changed in a decade. The year 2018 marks the first year in human history in which a majority of the world's population are now connected to the internet. This...

This study provides empirical evidence from different regions of the world to identify avenues for platform economy workers to access freedom of association and collective bargaining. It shows that collective protests, the establishment of new organizations of workers and platforms, social...

It is well known that German and Spanish labour markets are quite different from a macro point of view. In this paper, we look at these markets through the lenses of individual unstable spells. These include all forms of atypical employment (such as temporary contracts and mini-jobs) as well as...

Lebanon is experiencing a structural transformation of its economy and labour market, but at the same time has been hit by a series of crises in recent years. In the face of rising unemployment, it is often argued that digital platforms can offer new employment and income-generating...

Moonlighting is increasingly popular in OECD countries, with 5 to 10% of workers holding two or more jobs. However, little is known about the responsiveness of moonlighting to financial incentives due to the lack of identifying variation. This paper studies a unique reform in Germany that...

Problem definition: The success of a gig platform is crucially driven by its ability to retain service providers. However, gig workers are independent contractors whose working schedules are not fully controlled by the platform. To overcome this challenge, gig platforms have commonly relied on...

Issues surrounding worker classification go back decades in the tax context. Given the rise of the gig-economy, these issues have resurfaced with urgency, with Uber and other gig-economy service providers making headlines for the past several years for allegedly misclassifying workers. The...