Crowd employment is a new form of employment, defined in a 2015 Eurofound report on the subject as employment that ‘uses an online platform to enable organisations or individuals to access an indefinite and unknown group of other organisations or individuals to solve specific problems or to provide specific services or products in exchange for payment’. Crowd employment is also known as crowd sourcing or crowd work, and aims to organise the outsourcing of tasks to a large pool of online workers rather than to a single employee. Technology is essential in this new employment form, as the matching of client and worker, as well as task execution and submission, is mostly carried out online. This form of employment is based on individual tasks or projects, rather than on a continuous relationship. A larger task is divided into smaller subtasks that are relatively simple or standardised, can be done independently of the other tasks and have a specific output. The term crowd employment is now considered to be outdated and has been replaced by platform work.
Platform work; Adaptability; Casual worker; Fragmentation of the labour force; New forms of work; Quality of work; Work-life balance
Eurofound (2020), Crowd employment, European Industrial Relations Dictionary, Dublin
https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/en/european-industrial-relations-dictionary/crowd-employment