The global gig economy: Towards a planetary labour market?

We are witnessing the emergence of a ‘planetary labour market’ for digital work. Building on a five-year study of digital work in some of the world’s economic margins, we show a planetary labour market does not do away with geography, it rather exists to take advantage of it. Digital technologies have been deployed in order to bring into being a labour market that can operate at a planetary scale, and has particular affordances and limitations that rarely bolster both the structural and associational power of workers.