How can we improve standards for digital gig workers: those undertaking micro-work and online freelancing via platforms like Upwork and Mechanical Turk?
The recent research paper – “Decent Work and the Digital Gig Economy” – explains why such standards are needed. With up to 70m workers worldwide registered for online work and growth rates of 20-30% per year, this is already a sizeable activity. It is especially popular with the c.80% of workers based in middle- and low-income countries, who often see online work as better than local alternatives. However, this ignores the chronic precarity and structural inequality associated with such work: damaging outcomes that will only spread if nothing is done.
But what should be done?
The paper develops an inventory of “Decent Digital Work” standards. This is a comprehensive set of guidelines that integrates two things: first, the global decent work standards set by the ILO; second, the actions needed to address specific digital gig economy problems.
A key value for this inventory is as a comparator with other decent work initiatives. For example, the paper analyses the way in which two major initiatives – SA8000, and the Ethical Trading Initiative – do and do not cover the requirements for decent digital work.
Below, a further comparison is undertaken, between the Decent Digital Work standards, and the criteria adopted by the FairWork Foundation; an initiative aiming to rate and certify gig economy platforms. The table indicates those elements which are the same in both standards; those where a completely-different element is included; and those where there is some variation in the element.
From this, three things can be concluded:
a) A number of Decent Digital Work standards are absent in the FairWork Foundation certification criteria. Several of these relate to the broader context for work, would be outwith the scope of an individual platform, and therefore are not relevant to platform certification. However, those identified under “Employment” and “Work Conditions” can form part of a further discussion to consider their relevance to certification.
b) Some elements (e.g. around access to digital work opportunities, and accounting for worker costs other than unpaid time) speak to the particular conditions of gig workers from the global South. This is the location for the great majority of gig workers: already for digital gig workers; increasingly for physical gig workers. As such, the FairWork Foundation must ensure its global North origins do not skew its focus.
c) The FairWork Foundation should review how prevalent the non-competition and non-disclosure agreement problems are, and whether they are worth including. (Human review of task instructions – something unlikely to be practicable for most platforms – appears to have been dropped from later versions of the certification criteria; hence, its inclusion in brackets.)
As noted in the Decent Work and the Digital Gig Economy paper’s action research agenda, next steps here would be:
– Survey of worker, client and platform views about identified standards.
– A multi-stakeholder dialogue to agree a minimum set of certification standards and evaluation methods.
– Parallel research on the impact of standards and certifications in the gig economy, and analysing the costs and benefits of interventions such as standards and certifications at micro- and macro-level.
This is just one example of the application of the Decent Digital Work standards. We hope you can identify other uses . . .
Follow @CDIManchester
ICTs for Development 