News

Over the past months, we have launched data from various European countries, showing the growing platform or gig economy in Europe. Now, that information is compiled in one handy report that UNI Europa's Aileen Körfer presented at a Smart Society Project event on smart platforms in Brussels today.

The report investigates how crowd workers use online platforms in order to generate an income and secondly, identify their characteristics. The analysis shows that the gig economy is on the rise , offering new employment structures and different types of work to various age groups. The report outlines the challenges in collecting and evaluating data but also confirms that on the basis this first representative snapshot of crowd workers in Europe it is possible to conclude that crowd work is an important phenomenon, most crucially involving some 5-9% of the online population. There is also evidence that, for a small but important minority, it constitutes the major part of their income. The fact that the majority of crowd workers engage in multiple types of work rather than specializing in a single form and are also actively seeking more regular types of work indicates that they are piecing together a livelihood from different activities and choose that from a desperate point to find any source of income, rather than as an active career choice.

Read the full report ‘CROWD WORK IN EUROPE - Preliminary results from a survey in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands’ here

Read our press releases on the launch of the data from the UK, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany

Check out the digital footprint project here