Photo: Chris Young / PA Archive/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.We live in a world in which it is increasingly possible to use online labour markets to outsource work directly to any corner of the planet. Millions of new jobs are thus available for workers in some of the poorest parts of the planet. But the fact that we now have millions of people around the world all competing for the same jobs threatens to undermine a range of working standards.
This situation in which we find ourselves is largely possible because of the rapid spread of the internet to relatively low-income populations. Ten years ago, less than 20% of the world’s population was connected to the internet; and next year we’ll probably have more connected people in the world than disconnected ones. Many of these new internet users live in parts of the world in which well-paying jobs (or indeed any kinds of paying jobs) are hard to come by.
So it makes sense that so many people turn to online work marketplaces do to tasks like virtual assistance, translations, transcriptions, computer programming, graphic design, writing, and other such intellectual and digital forms of work. This system is often organised as a cut-throat bidding process: clients lists jobs on those marketplaces, and workers then try to outbid each other for contacts by offering a lower price or better service.
