Skill Specificity in the Online Labour Markets

Description

The gig economy, defined as freelancers who provide paid services in the form of ex-ante assigned tasks mediated by online platforms (Koutsimpogiorgos et al., 2020), is often perceived as an opportunity for workers. The gig economy can be accessed without needing any specific kind of ‘entry certificate’ (such as an educational degree), and the platform that is often cheap and easily accessible allows marginalised groups to enter the labour market. This holds particularly true for the online gig economy, where the tasks transacted are to be computer-based (such as programming, translation, or design tasks), which can therefore be completed by workers around the world. Online gig workers are not geographically bound but compete in a truly global labour market. This leads to the question whether national institutions still influence competition and worker opportunities in online labour markets. The labour-economic and the industrial relations literature teaches us that workers compete in distinct skill segments (e.g. Van Haeperen, 2005; Devillé, 2008). Importantly, this is not only the case for low-skilled as compared to high-skilled jobs. Even within the high-skill segment, the varieties-of-capitalism (VoC) literature illustrates that workforces in Western economies compete in different labour market segments, namely in jobs requiring high-skill general and high-skill specific skills (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001; Hall & Soskice, 2001; Herrmann & Peine, 2011). This literature also explains why workforces in economies with coordinated labour markets are more likely to acquire specific skills, whereas workforces in economies with liberal labour markets are more likely to develop generic skills. Given that online gig workers are still embedded within national institutions, despite working in a global labour market, we here seek to test the applicability of this literature on institutionalized skill specialization. Accordingly, we investigate whether specialisation effects between countries still exist in the online gig economy. If so, are these skill specialisation effects similar, or rather opposite, to the specialisation effects of traditional labour markets? To answer these questions, we use a dataset containing the profiles of 64.000 gig workers on one of the largest online gig economy platforms worldwide. Based on gravity models (Burger et al., 2009) and multilevel regression models (Hox, et al., 2017), we assess skill specialization patterns of gig workers between economies and link them back to the institutional contexts of gig workers. The results of these analyses shed light on the question whether the online gig economy is a complementary, or rather substitutive, labour market for gig workers.

Period	21 Jul 2020
Event title	SASE Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	AmsterdamShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International