Remote work has become rapidly normalised as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The growth of online work or ‘cloudwork’ has come with new opportunities for workers from all over the world to participate in a planetary-scale labour market. However, many digital labour platforms that mediate remote work are characterised by unfair and unjust working conditions, and workers have experienced vulnerability, precarity, and an erosion of their structural power to challenge poor conditions. While work in the planetary labour market is detached from the geographies that workers are enmeshed in, risks, harms, and vulnerabilities continue to be geographically uneven, mapping on to colonial and extractive economic legacies.

The first Fairwork cloudwork ratings establish a baseline understanding of labour standards on prominent cloudwork platforms. Drawing on desk research, dialogue with platform managers, and a survey of 792 workers in 75 countries, we have given 17 platforms a score out of 10 based on their fairness towards workers.

We would like to invite you to this one-hour-long webinar in which we will present the main findings of the report and discuss the labour conditions in the global cloudwork economy with a panel of distinguished experts. During the session, there will be the opportunity to ask questions to the authors of the report.

This webinar is organised by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre.

Presenters:
Dr Kelle Howson, Fairwork and University of Oxford
Dr Hannah Johnston, Fairwork and Northeastern University

Panellists:
Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation
Dr Uma Rani, Senior Economist at the International Labour Organization
Prof Jack Linchuan Qiu, Fairwork Singapore and National University of Singapore

Moderator:
Prof Mark Graham, Fairwork and University of Oxford