The ILO estimates that there were about 260 million home-based workers in the world in 2019, representing 7.9 percent of global employment.
The ILO in its maiden report ‘Working from home from invisibility to decent work’, indicated that the current number was before the COVID-19 pandemic and the numbers are expected to rise when the 2020 numbers are finally tallied.
“With the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, large portions of the world’s workforce shifted to homeworking, joining hundreds of millions of other workers who had already been working from home for decades”, the ILO said.
In most countries for which data were available, home-based workers made up less than 10 percent of all employed persons; but in 13 countries, home-based workers accounted for more than 15 percent of the workforce.
Asia and the Pacific accounted for close to 65 percent of all home-based workers (more than 166 million) in the world.
In low- and middle-income countries, most home-based workers were own-account workers, but in high-income countries, employees were the largest group.
According to the ILO, these differences are not surprising given the occupational differences across countries based on their level of economic development.
While managerial, professional, and technical occupations made up 53 percent of total employment in high-income countries, the corresponding percentages in the middle- and low-income countries were 31 and 12 percent, respectively.
Most home-based workers are women. According to ILO estimates, 147 million women and 113 million men worked from home in 2019, with women accounting for 56 percent of all home-based workers.
The propensity of women to work from home (11.5%) is much higher than that of men (5.6 %). The ILO said because it takes place in the home, it is no surprise that homework is a highly gendered form of production.
As women, the world over still shoulder the burden of unpaid care work, some turn to working from home as a way to combine care responsibilities with paid income opportunities, even if it often results in an extension of the working day.
Nevertheless, the opportunity to work from home is welcomed by women and men seeking flexibility, but also by workers with disabilities who may otherwise have fewer opportunities for paid work.
Homeworkers are a subgroup of home-based workers. In addition to working from home, homeworkers are defined statistically as employees or dependent contractors.
The ILO noted that though working from home has long been an important feature of the world of work, the institutions that govern the labor market are rarely designed with the home as a workplace in mind.
The sudden rise in homeworking brings renewed urgency to the need to appreciate the implications of homework for both workers and employers.
The report, therefore, seeks to improve understanding of homework and to advance guidance on policies that can pave the way to decent work for homeworkers both old and new.
According to the ILO’s Home Work Convention and Recommendation, homework involves “work carried out by a person; in his or her home or in other premises of his or her choice, other than the workplace of the employer; for remuneration; and which results in a product or service as specified by the employer, irrespective of who provides the equipment, materials or other inputs used”.
Homework, therefore, does not extend to persons who have “the degree of autonomy and of economic independence necessary to be considered independent workers under national laws, regulations or court decisions”.
Furthermore, those who only occasionally perform their work as employees at home, rather than at their usual workplaces, are not homeworkers within the meaning of the Convention.
The maiden report addresses three different types of homework: industrial homework (goods production undertaken by homeworkers); telework (employees who use ICT to perform their work remotely); and home-based digital platform work (service-sector tasks performed by “crowd workers”).
