Literature review - Online moderately skilled click-work: Employment and working conditions
Working Paper, WPEF19076. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, Dublin, (2019)Abstract
The importance of matching supply of and demand for paid work through online platforms, commonly referred to as ‘platform work’, is increasing worldwide. Types of platform work are highly diverse, ranging from highly specialised tasks, such as hiring a lawyer for legal advice, to more routine tasks, such as delivering food from a restaurant to a customer, to very basic tasks, such as entering numbers from a scanned receipt into a spreadsheet. This working paper focuses on online micro-tasks, a type of platform work which is delivered online via a website or app and requires only basic skills and education. As part of Eurofound’s research activities on ‘work and employment in the digital age’, and more specifically its research strand related to platforms (see for example Eurofound, 2018), this paper aims to provide a review of relevant literature on online micro-tasks. The literature selection mainly contains publications between 2011 and 2019. The paper aims to define online micro-tasks and give examples of the most relevant platforms and most commonly requested types of tasks. It focuses on the employment and working conditions of online micro-task workers, by defining their demographic profiles, discussing their motivation to do online micro-task work, reviewing their employment status and access to social protection, providing information on autonomy and earnings, evaluating their work intensity and quality, and looking at their ability to build representation and organise labour.