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”Trade unions must organise people working though platforms”

The sharing economy represents a challenge to the labour market as we know it. In the face of this development, the Swedish trade union Unionen has just entered an agreement with German IG Metall. The aim is to find tools for how to organise the growing part of the labour force which works through online platforms.

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There are som 700,000 so-called crowd workers in Sweden – people who to various degrees work in an online platform-based labour market, also known as the sharing economy or ‘gig economy’. Twice that number have been visiting websites to check out the platforms.

The survey, published this spring, is one of the first to map how much of the Swedish labour force is involved in the online platform economy. 2,146 Swedes between 16 and 65 were interviewed between 25 February and 7 March this year.

Many of these online-based jobs are temporary. Four percent of the respondents performed such work once a month, and around three percent once a week. Unlike in the UK, where the majority of crowd workers are women, in Sweden most are men.

Two thirds of adult Swedes are active in the online economy, for instance through online sales or by hiring out rooms. 31 percent use online platforms to buy different types of services.

The survey was a cooperation between The Foundation on Progressive Economy and UNI Europe. It was carried out by the University of Hertfordshire and was partly funded by the European Union.

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”Trade unions must organise people working though platforms”