About Metro Girl

Metro Girl is a running dossier on independent work: how it is counted, how it is taxed, where it is done, and who organises it.

The site is organised as five sections rather than a feed. Classification holds the statutes and the judgments that decide whether a worker is an employee. The Count holds the surveys and statistical series that try to measure a category nobody has agreed to define. Organising holds the unions, guilds and lobby groups independent workers built. Coworking holds the rooms and the companies that rented them. The Trade holds the platforms that match the work to the worker.

Three standing pages sit alongside them. The chronology collects every dated event the pieces establish, in one sequence. The glossary sets out each defined category next to the body that defines it, including the cases where two bodies use the same word for different populations. The sources page names the primary material each piece rests on.

Each piece states its holding or its figure and names the body responsible for it. Where a number was commissioned by a party with an interest in its size, the piece says so. Where two counting systems produce different answers for the same workers, both answers appear.

Photographs are credited to their source under each figure. The dossier is edited rather than automated: the front page carries the pieces worth reading first, and the archive carries all of them.