A review on the future of work: online labour exchanges or crowdsourcing: Implications for occupational health and safety

Since the 1970s it has been recognised that the combination of information and communication technologies has the potential to enable the relocation of work. In the 1980s, attention focussed on ‘teleworking’, involving the relocation of work from a traditional office to the worker’s home. In the 1990s it became apparent that work could be shifted internationally, in a development that became known as ‘offshore outsourcing’. The next decade saw the emergence of large international companies supplying telemediated services, increasingly using practices described as ‘global sourcing’, in which workers from different parts of the world could be brought together on a just-in-time basis to deliver particular services, regardless of location. In the present decade, these developments have reached critical mass, enabling the emergence of entirely new forms of work organisation, co-ordinated by online platforms.