Descripción del proyecto
Estudiar la política y las instituciones de los mercados de trabajo en línea
Hoy día, los mercados de trabajo tradicionales están estancados. El rápido crecimiento de los mercados laborales en línea ha llamado la atención de organizaciones mundiales como el Banco Mundial y el Centro Común de Investigación de la Comisión Europea. Las plataformas virtuales, que conectan a empresarios con trabajadores cualificados a través de las fronteras, han registrado un asombroso índice de crecimiento anual de hasta el 60 %, lo que justifica un estudio más detallado. En este contexto, el proyecto iLABOUR, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, tiene por objeto arrojar luz sobre las políticas e instituciones que rigen estos nuevos mercados laborales. En concreto, su equipo examinará la aparición de movimientos laborales transnacionales en línea. Para ello, efectuará investigaciones en puntos de estudio virtuales y físicos, encuestas, entrevistas y observaciones con diseñadores y trabajadores, además de recopilar datos en línea.
Objetivo
"World Bank, EC Joint Research Centre, and other bodies have recently highlighted the potential of online labour markets to boost employment and economic growth. While national job markets have stagnated, online labour markets that connect firms with knowledge and service workers around the world have grown up to 60% a year.
An overlooked aspect of these markets is that they extricate workers and employers from national institutional frameworks, such as employment law and collective bargaining, and instead impose their own, technologically enforced institutions. For example, a leading marketplace recently instated a global minimum wage of 4.00 USD/h. With over 540,000 employers and 4,000,000 registered workers in 180 countries, this Californian company is making critical labour policy decisions that influence businesses and individuals from Berlin to Manila.
The objective of this project is to lay bare the politics and institutions of these next-generation labour markets promoted with discourses of technological progress. Whose interests find expression in their institutions? Some online workers have begun to organize transnationally with the help of digital media. How do online labour movements emerge and assert power on these markets? And finally, to what extent are these relations still reducible to struggles between capital and labour, rather than more ambiguous networked models of production?
We will tackle these questions through a combination of conventional social research methods and innovative Internet research methods, on both virtual research sites (online labour markets and workers' online communities) and physical research sites (market operators' premises and worker gatherings). We survey, interview, and observe designers and workers to reconstruct processes through which online markets, institutions, and movements are shaped, and ""scrape"" online data to quantify their influence. The results will open up important new vistas in labour policy debate."
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
OX1 2JD Oxford
Reino Unido