the workforce labor index: a transaction-anchored, iosco-aligned benchmark for the commodifiable outputs of artificial labor
we present the workforce labor index (wli), an iosco-aligned, transaction-anchored benchmark for the commodifiable outputs of artificial labor. the index is designed to publish weekly closing figures across its task categories, each with a bootstrap confidence interval and an n-count of tier-a-admitted transactions. the methodology adopts five principles from the iosco final report fr-08/13 (2013) for financial benchmarks — governance (p3), data sufficiency (p7), methodology transparency (p13), methodology review (p15), and audit (p19) — and adapts the remaining principles where ai labor diverges from financial-instrument inputs.
reproducibility is defined as a published standard: an independent computation, given the same tier a corpus and the same methodology version, must reproduce the published figure within one ci half-width. the methodology, the rubric, the sealed test banks, and the audit protocol are released under cc-by-4.0. this document is a v1.0 working draft published ahead of the first verified transactions; the figures shown throughout are illustrative sample data and are labeled as such. the artifact is built to be cited and to survive citation.
1.introduction
the rapid commodification of artificial-labor outputs has outpaced the development of a citable, third-party benchmark for their market price. existing references are either vendor-supplied — and therefore not independent — or based on small-sample survey methods[1]. neither survives the scrutiny applied to financial benchmarks in the post-libor era.
we present the workforce labor index: a transaction-anchored consensus price for the commodifiable outputs of artificial labor, calculated weekly under an iosco-aligned methodology. the index is designed to function in the same citation chain as sofr[2] and the bloomberg short-term bank yield index[3].
1.1 contributions
this document makes four contributions: (i) an iosco-aligned methodology for ai-labor benchmarks; (ii) a published, versioned weekly index; (iii) an open task-bank protocol — the workforce eval — that admits transactions to the corpus; (iv) a reproducibility standard with an independent weekly audit.
1.2 foundations
the institution that publishes this index is itself organized under the interpretable context methodology (icm), in which folder structure is the agentic architecture[8]. the full icm paper — van clief & mcdermott (2026) — is the architectural substrate beneath the editorial, eval, and audit machinery described here, and is available in full below.
2.data
the wli corpus is built from transactions captured through the workforce marketplace and from partner vendors that submit signed transaction records under the spec at /spec/v1.0. table 1 summarizes the active corpus by category using the current illustrative sample.
2.1 admission criteria
a candidate transaction is admitted as tier a only after all of: (i) the signature validates; (ii) all required fields are present and conformant to /spec/v1.0; (iii) the buyer-confirmation marker is present and non-revoked; (iv) the output passes three-reviewer scoring with cohen’s κ ≥ 0.85.
| category | n · 7d | wli | 95% ci |
|---|---|---|---|
| CS Ticket Resolution | 247 | $1.32 | [1.18–1.46] |
| Code Review (PR) | 183 | $2.84 | [2.61–3.07] |
| Structured Data Entry | 412 | $0.67 | [0.58–0.76] |
| Short-form Content | 294 | $1.18 | [1.04–1.32] |
| Legal Document Review | 91 | $4.20 | [3.87–4.53] |
3.methodology
the wli closing figure for a category in week w is the trimmed mean of tier-a-admitted prices over the rolling 7-day window ending at week-close, with 5% winsorization at both tails. let Pw be the set of admitted prices in week w:
the per-transaction unit aggregated here — the adjusted quality-outcome (aqo), cost divided by eval × outcome — is specified in full in the companion aqo methodology paper.
3.1 confidence intervals
the bootstrap confidence interval is computed across 10,000 resamples drawn with replacement from Pw. the ci half-width is published alongside each weekly figure — a figure without an interval is a claim, not a measurement.
3.2 n-suppression
if |Pw| < 50, the figure is suppressed and a suppression flag is published in place of the value. this prevents low-power weeks from generating publishable noise.
4.iosco mapping
table 2 maps the iosco principles fr-08/13 (2013) to the corresponding layer of the wli methodology. the mapping is updated at each methodology version increment.
| iosco | principle | wli layer |
|---|---|---|
| p · 3 | governance | editorial board · §6 |
| p · 7 | sufficiency | n ≥ 50 · §3.2 |
| p · 13 | transparency | open spec · §3 |
| p · 15 | review | versioned · §6 |
| p · 19 | audit | weekly · §5 |
5.reproducibility
reproducibility is verified by a sealed third-party computation. the third party receives the tier a corpus, the methodology version, and the equation set; it computes the figure independently and submits its result. a pass is recorded if the third-party figure is within one published ci half-width of the workforce-published value. the standard, the audit cadence, and the logs are public.
6.governance & legal
the workforce labor index editorial board governs the methodology. board composition and conflict-of-interest disclosures are public. methodology changes require a public comment period and a board vote. version increments produce a new citation; prior versions remain accessible. the methodology and tooling are released under the cc-by-4.0 license; terms of use and data-licensing govern reuse of the published figures.
7.availability
the index, the methodology spec, the iosco mapping, the reproducibility protocol, the weekly reports, and the citation tools are published at workforce.griffain.com/methodology, released under cc-by-4.0. machine-readable access is documented for developers; the embed widget exposes any figure with its interval and n-count.