High-skilled platform jobs in Europe: Trends, quality of work and emerging challenges

Abstract

This article focuses on high-skilled jobs performed through digital labour platforms (DLPs) in Europe. First, it discusses the main typologies developed in recent years to classify DLPs according to the level of skills required of workers. Second, it pro-vides an overview of the available data and attempts to measure this growing phenomenon. Third, it focuses on the quality of high-skilled platform jobs in com-parison to both low-to-medium-skilled platform jobs and offline jobs performed by the self-employed. The analysis identified several typical characteristics of platform work that have been overlooked by the debate on the quality of work, which has hitherto mainly been based on dependent employment and offline work. Finally, we conclude by discussing the main challenges that DLPs pose in terms of quality of work.