This study combines market-level data about changes in jobs offered via online labor platforms and interviews with online freelance workers to highlight how freelancers are responding to the novel coronavirus’s presence. We pursue this work recognizing that as the scope and breadth of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grow, the implications to workers and labor markets are profound. Our focus on online labor markets and workers reflects our enduring interest in knowledge work, with a particular attention to precarious work. Market data show the dramatic shifts in work availability (supply) and the changes in worker availability (demand) as the United States’ economy struggles with the initial burst of effects of a pandemic. Interview data reveal that freelance workers are aware of these shifts. These changes to already- precarious and market-driven work arrangements are magnified by the realities of balancing family members’ changes in job status, working around children who are home from school, and re-organizing work and lives to account for the rapid onset and confusion of stay-at-home requirements and the uncertainty that is the core of the pandemic. Findings suggest work flexibility, which seems central to freelancer’s motivation to pursue such work, is diminishing and instead freelancers are being driven by desperation rooted in the acknowledged precarity of their situation, magnified by the constellation of events reshaping their working arrangements. We further observe that these effects vary by occupation and are more keenly experienced by women freelancers, both of which warrant additional attention.

We draw on data from the Online Labour Index and interviews with freelancers in the United States securing work on online platforms, to illuminate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic’s global economic upheaval is shuttering shops and offices. Those able to do so are now working remotely from their homes. They join workers who have always been working remotely: freelancers who earn some or all of their income from projects secured via online labour platforms. Data allow us to sketch a first picture of how the initial month of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the livelihoods of online freelancers. The data shows online labour demand falling rapidly in early March 2020, but with an equally rapid recovery. We also find significant differences between countries and occupations. Data from interviews make clear jobs are increasingly scarce even as more people are creating profiles and seeking freelance work online.