Millions of people get quick jobs through online portals Jonny White/Alamy Stock Photo

A huge number of people in South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa looking for online “gig economy” work could cause a race to the bottom on pay and conditions, according to a new report from the Oxford Internet Institute.

Millions of people in countries including Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines are signed up to websites that pay them to complete tasks such as data entry, transcription and graphic design. The jobs can last minutes or months, and are generally outsourced from companies in richer countries.

The researchers didn’t name the sites they looked at, but Mark Graham, one of the authors of the report, says they are comparable to freelancer.com, Upwork and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “The sheer variety of people doing this work is surprising. Almost any sort of work is being done digitally. There’s no model,” he says.


Over three years, Graham and his colleagues conducted 152 interviews and surveyed 456 workers. They found that workers enjoyed the higher levels of autonomy and pay offered by online work compared with some local job opportunities, but that an increasing over supply of labour is worsening conditions.

Surge in demand

Seventy per cent of people surveyed said gig work was one of their main sources of income, but nearly half said they felt easily replaceable. One major gig work platform had 1.75 million worker profiles, but only 200,000 of them had completed an hour’s work or earned at least US$1.

The researchers suggest demand for such work will get higher, because a billion more people are expected to get online by 2020, the majority of whom will come from low- and middle-income countries where online gig work is most common. “There will be a huge surge in demand for online jobs, and unless strategies and policies are put in place it will be a race to the bottom,” says Graham.

At the moment, these gig workers don’t have employee protection in the country where the work is generated or where it is being carried out. The websites have no mechanisms in place to offer benefits like holiday pay or sick leave, and as the work they offer is computer-based and can theoretically be done anywhere, workers are easily replaced.

If workers in one country demanded better pay, for example, workers in other countries could simply lower their rates to get more jobs. The same goes for if one country tightened regulations.

Who protects the workers?

“People are undercutting each other on pay and conditions. But we don’t know whose job it is to protect worker rights,” says Eddie Keane at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

The report argues that because only a handful of countries are responsible for the demand in digital work, concentrated mostly in North America and western Europe, it should be these countries that enforce a minimum standard. That way, workers would have their rights protected regardless of their location.

“If people are relying on this work to survive, we need mechanisms to protect them if they get sick, pregnant, or if an employer doesn’t pay up,” says Graham. “At the moment we don’t have that.”

But this would be incredibly hard to enforce, says Andrea Broughton at the Institute for Employment Studies, UK. “A lot of work goes under the radar, not registered by any regulators. It’s very messy and difficult to manage. How do you even start to work out what to regulate?”