Digitalisation and the Future of Work: The Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (CBR project)

Overview

Background

The Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit) has been established with an investment from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) equivalent to £8 million commencing in January 2020 for 5 years. It aims to advance understanding of how digital technologies are reshaping work. It examines the impact and interaction of these technologies for employers, employees and their representatives, job seekers and governments. It will provide theoretically informed, empirically evidenced and policy relevant analysis of the benefits, risks and challenges for companies operating in the UK and abroad. This analysis draws on international, interdisciplinary and innovative mixed methods approaches. Further details are contained on the Digit website.

The centre is co-directed by Professor Jacqueline O’Reilly (University of Sussex Business School) and Professor Mark Stuart (Leeds University Business School). Additional partners include the Universities of Aberdeen, Cambridge and Manchester in the UK and Monash in Australia. The CBR’s contribution is part of Digit’s Research Theme 1, which is looking at the impact of digitalisation on work an employment. This work is being led by Simon Deakin.

The ESRC has awarded a second round of funding to the Digit team, and a new 5-year programme of research, under the title of the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work, began work in January 2025.

Aims and objectives

The overall aim of the Digit Research Centre is to generate new knowledge to inform the development of an analytical framework around the concept of the ‘connected worker’ and the ‘connected economy’. To this end it will maximise knowledge exchange and co-produced research with relevant communities; establish a new Data Observatory as a one-platform library of national and international resources for decision-makers connecting with UK Industrial Strategy and welfare policy; initiate an Innovation Fund providing financial support for new research initiatives and methodological approaches, enabling international exchanges and extensive dissemination; provide a strong career development programme for mid and early career researchers through mentoring and staff development, internships and summer school; and ensure the long-term sustainability of the centre by developing an MSc in People Analytics informed by Digit research.

From January 2025, the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work (‘Digit II’) inaugurated a new 5-year programme of work. The Centre examines the challenges, opportunities, risks and benefits of the ongoing digital transformation of work. It aims to understand the emerging digital work ecosystem and generate new knowledge about the impacts of the transition on employers, workers, jobseekers and governments. It addresses the following questions: how can key actors shape the evolution of an inclusive, healthy and sustainable digital ecosystem in the UK? Why do firms adopt, or not, new digital technologies, and what are the consequences for work and employment? How is the demand for digital skills evolving in the workplace, and what are the implications for employee rewards and career progression? How does the digitalisation of work affect access to healthy working lives? How will digitalisation affect the location of jobs, regional development, and the environment? Visit the Centre’s website to find out more about its research.

Methods

As part of the Digit research programme, the CBR will conduct socio-legal analysis aimed at studying how how the employment/self-employment binary divide is legally and statistically constructed in countries with different legal traditions and levels of development, how digitalisation is changing traditional legal conceptualisation of work, and whether correlations exist between the growth of the digital economy and employment regulation in selected countries. This will involve the collection and analysis of legal data, using ‘leximetric’ coding techniques to create a dataset of national employment laws and in sectors affected by new digital platforms and automation. We will estimate econometrically, using time-series and dynamic panel data analysis, the impact of the legal framework on employment growth and outcomes in light of trends in digitalisation.

Progress

During 2020 work began developing a conceptual framework for studying the impact of digital technologies on issues of employment law including the classification of workers as employees and independent contractors. In addition, preparations were undertaken for the coding of labour law data with a view to constructing new dataset of laws affecting work carried out through platforms and other types of digital intermediation. This work was completed in the summer of 2023.

During 2023, Simon Deakin, Bhumika Billa, Louise Bishop and Tvisha Shroff completed an updated version of the Centre for Business Research Labour Regulation Index (CBR-LRI) dataset covering labour laws in 117 countries for the period 1970-2022. This was published in December 2023. The appearance of the 2023 update of the dataset was marked by a launch event in Cambridge and a related Digit data commentary.

In addition, Louise Bishop, Christine Carter and Simon Deakin constructed a new dataset, the CBR Platform Work Index (CBR-PWI) tracking changes in the law relating to platform work and precarious employment in over 90 countries between 2016 and 2025. This dataset was published in 2025.

Kamelia Pourkermani joined the project in 2022 to carry out time series econometric analysis of the CBR-LRI dataset. Kamelia’s analysis has been incorporated in a working paper jointly authored with Bhumika, Louise and Simon, which will be published by the ILO in 2025, and a paper analysing the impact of labour laws on productivity and economic growth in the UK and China, which was published in Global Law Review, a journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 2024. Simon and Kamelia wrote up their results for the UK in a Digit blog and gave a presentation to policy makers at Somerset House, London, in April 2024. Also in April 2024, Simon took part in a session of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Future of Work, held at the House of Commons. In December Simon gave evidence to a House of Commons Committee reviewing the Employment Rights Bill, a major labour law reform introduced by the Labour government shortly after taking office in the summer of 2024.

During 2021 Simon Deakin commented on the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Uber case in an Industrial Law Society webinar and in his contribution to the 7th edition of the Deakin and Morris textbook on Labour Law. In the course of 2022 Simon published 2 law review articles on themes related to law and computation and gave lectures on labour law and research methods on 2  overseas visits, one to the University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay, and the other at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advance Study, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. In the spring and summer of 2024 he gave 2 online presentations to labour specialists in Brasilia, Brazil, and an online presentation to a conference on labour law reform in Sri Lanka organised by the ILO, and in December 2024 he gave a presentation at the ILO in Geneva, outlining results of the econometric analysis of the updated CBR-LRI index.

In the course of 2024 and 2025, the CBR team had a series of opportunities to extend the analysis of the CBR-LRI and related datasets in work commissioned by policy makers and stakeholders. In August 2024 Simon Deakin and Irakli Barbakadze completed a study for the TUC benchmarking UK labour laws against those in other OECD countries, in the light of proposed changes to UK labour law in the government’s Employment Rights Bill. In April 2025 the government department sponsoring the Employment Rights Bill, the Department of Business and Trade, commissioned the CBR to carry out a study benchmarking the changes proposed in the Bill and the related Make Work Pay Plan against trends in other countries, and to conduct an econometric analysis which would, among other things, forecast the impact of the implementation of the Bill and Plan on the UK economy. In addition, the ILO commissioned the CBR to carry out an assessment of the methodology of the World Bank’s new Business Ready Index, and to carry out a study exploring the scope to construct new indices, extending the CBR-LRI, in the areas of minimum wage law and migration workers’ rights. In the summer of 2025 Ollie Bacon joined the team to work on the new minimum wage index; Dovelyn Mendoza and Daniel Kirby worked on the new migration law index; and Hanna Sitchenko worked on related aspects of the CBR’s indices on shareholders’ rights and creditors’ rights. Outputs from these studies will be reported in next year’s annual report.

Findings

The 2023 update of the CBR-LRI index shows that the steady and incremental improvement of worker protections over time, which was previously reported in iterations of the index, has been maintained. Findings specific to the 2023 update include data on the impact of COVID-19 and the rise of gig work. The COVID-19 emergency led numerous countries to impose controls over dismissals, some of which were temporary, while others have persisted. Efforts to normalise gig or platform work, by extending certain labour law protections to cover the new forms of employment associated with the platform economy, are also identified in the 2023 update.

Using the new index, we conducted a time series analysis which aimed to understand the dynamic interaction of labour laws with the labour share of national income, productivity, unemployment and employment at country level. In virtually all of the countries we analysed, worker-protective changes in labour laws are positively correlated with increases in the labour share, and in a majority of them they are also positively correlated with productivity. The positive productivity effect is evidence that labour laws have efficiency implications: by redressing asymmetries of information and resources between labour and capital, they help overcome barriers to coordination and promote cooperation, enabling the sharing of knowledge and risk between workers and employers. However, we also find that productivity improvements do not always translate into higher employment or reduced unemployment. Productivity is inversely related with employment in some systems, mostly liberal market and common law countries. In others, mostly coordinated market and civil law countries, productivity and employment are positively related, suggesting that firm-level improvements in efficiency have beneficial second-order effects, leading to employment gains and unemployment reductions. Our results suggest that labour law rules promoting distributional fairness and worker voice may need to operate alongside complementary institutions in capital markets and training systems if firm-level efficiencies are to translate into employment growth.

The new Platform Work Index (2025) tracks statutory initiatives and decisions of courts on platform work in 95 countries over the decade between 2016 and 2025. The PWI has been deposited in the University of Cambridge data repository, Apollo, and is available for downloading and use in research under the terms of a CCBY licence. The index shows that there has been a steady increase in the level of protection over time. The average score for all countries rises from 0.06 to 0.27 on a 0-1 scale, while that for OECD countries rises from 0.13 to 0.46 (after rounding in each case). The higher score for OECD countries indicates that the trend towards the inclusion of platform workers within the scope of labour law protection is most marked in developed economies. Comparing trends in the PWI to those in the wider LRI, which covers the substance of labour law rules more widely, show that over the period 2016-2025, protections for platform workers were being significantly extended at a point when labour laws more generally changed relatively little. However, while average increases in the PWI were sizable, by no means all countries experienced a change. Of the 94 countries in the index, over half, 52, were assigned a zero score at the start of the period, indicating no legal intervention for the protection of platform workers, and also at the end of it. Only around a third of countries had a score at or above 0.5. Eleven countries in total were assigned the highest score.

The index shows that the legal position asserted by many platforms, namely that platform workers are self-employed, has come under significant challenge over the past 10 years, and in particular the last 5. Courts have been at the forefront of this process, determining that platform workers subject to remote surveillance and performance rankings are sufficiently subject to control to make them employees. The ‘ABC’ test, beginning in the USA and increasingly influential elsewhere, has focused attention on the business model of the larger platforms, treating this as a signifier of employer status. Legislatures have also intervened, in some cases using a preexisting or newly created ‘third category’ to confer certain labour protections on gig workers, in others establishing a presumption of employee status which would more fully assimilate the platform sector to the rules governing work relations in the economy at large. At the same time, the index reports platforms pushing back against efforts to regulate their activities. This takes the form, on the one hand, of strategic litigation to reverse or circumvent court rulings on the employee status, and, on the other, of attempts to block legislative initiatives for the protection of gig workers, or to water them down.