Over the past two years, Uber has taken center stage in public debates about the future of work, driven by our collective anxiety about technology and growing economic insecurity. The concern is that workers increasingly do not have employers anymore and are facing lower wages, no access to health and pension benefits, exclusion from safety-net...

Introduction This guide provides a brief overview of underemployment, an introduction to the key concepts and terminology, and lists relevant data sources. This is one in a series of quick guides, designed to provide a basic understanding of Australian labour market data. In the labour force framework, the labour force is the sum of the...

Increasingly, unemployment rates tell only part of the story of young people’s jobs challenge. Underemployment, at 18 per cent of the nation’s youth labour force, is the highest in the 40 years since the ABS count officially began. And unemployment – at 13.5 per cent for 15–24 year olds – has remained stubbornly high since...

The growing prevalence of alternative work arrangements has accelerated with the rapidly evolving digital platform transformations in local and global markets (Kenny and Zysman, 2015 and 2016). Although traditional (offline) informal paid work has always been a part of the labor sector (BLS-Contingent Worker Survey, 2005; GAO, 2015 and Katz and Krueger, 2016), the rise...

This survey of American adults finds that a relatively substantial share of the public has earned money recently from a digital commerce platform. In the context of gig employment, nearly one-in-ten Americans (8%) have earned money in the last year using digital platforms to take on a job or task.