This is a seminar organised jointly by the Business & Industrial Section (BIS) & the West Midlands Local Group (WMLG) of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and it is supported by the Productivity and the Future of Work GRP.

Speakers include:

Dr Sally Wright, a senior research fellow from the Warwick University Institute of Employment Research,will talk about the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) COLLEEM III survey to explore the impact of digitalisation on work and how it is impacting the way work is organised and the working conditions of workers in ‘regular’ employment (i.e. ‘platformisation’). Digital content produced by an army of unpaid digital labour is also being monetised by platforms blurring the boundaries between paid and unpaid digital labour. She will talk about how the COLLEEIM survey was extended to capture these dimensions and other methodological issues. The European Commission’s Directorate for Growth and Innovation, Human Capital and Employment Unit of the JRC, has a programme of work exploring the impact of digital labour platforms on employment.

Prof Neil Spencer, the vice chair of the Business and Industry Section of the RSS from Hertfordshire University will talk about measuring platform work in 13 European countries and the associated challenges, solutions and bias assessment. This talk draws on the experience of undertaking 14 surveys in 13 European countries between 2016 and 2019. Funded by the European Foundation for Progressive Studies (FEPS) in collaboration with UNI Europa and with co-funding at the national level in each country, the surveys were designed to explore the extent and characteristics of platform work across Europe. With no definition of platform work universally agreed upon, and certainly no gold standard for measuring such work in existence, the challenge of creating a suitable survey instrument had to be addressed. This talk will describe the approach taken in this research (which has since been adopted by a number of other researchers) and also outline the efforts that were made to assess any bias introduced, via the parallel use of alternative survey modes.