The Rise of the Digital Worker: How Digital Labour Platforms are Changing the Future of Work
Guest Post by Olenna Hardie
Imagine you’re browsing the internet, looking for a job, and an ad catches your eye: Be your own boss! Choose your hours! Work from anywhere! You click through and end up on a site that lists all sorts of small gigs like data entry and copywriting. You can find a task, complete it, and get paid—all online. You’ve just stumbled across a digital labour platform.
What are Digital Labour Platforms?
Digital labour platforms offer web-based gig work like photo tagging, transcription, translation, content moderation, and survey participation. Most of the jobs on these sites are small units of work called microtasks. Some of the most popular platforms are Clickworker, Microworker, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Who Makes up the Digital Workforce?
The digital workforce uses digital labour platforms, so they differ from digital nomads [12] and people who work more conventional jobs from home [2]. Tens of millions of workers have sought work on digital labour platforms [10]. According to a 2017 estimation, the largest share of digital workers is in India, followed by Bangladesh, the United States, and Pakistan [13]. The majority of workers are under 35 years old and have pursued some higher education [11]. People may seek digital work because they face unemployment locally [6][16], need to supplement other income [1], or prefer a flexible schedule due to factors like childcare [10].
What are the Issues with Digital Labour?
Labour Precarity
Digital workers tend to be brutally underpaid. Mechanical Turk pays as little as one cent for some tasks [8], and average hourly pay across all major platforms ranges from USD 2.00 USD to USD 6.00 [1]. Some platforms even pay workers with gift cards [16]. Workers also spend an average of 20 minutes per hour doing unpaid work such as searching for jobs or performing qualification tests [1]. Digital workers are classified as independent contractors or freelancers rather than as employees. This classification means that digital workers don’t qualify for labour standards protections like minimum wage, sick leave, or unemployment insurance. Digital workers also lack access to employer-based health insurance, paid parental leave, and employer pension contributions [14].
Algorithmic Management Systems
Algorithmic management systems moderate work on digital labour platforms, accepting and rejecting completed tasks. Nine out of ten workers have had their work rejected by algorithmic management without explanation, leaving them unpaid and often without recourse [11]. Algorithmic management systems also distribute tasks based on metrics like client feedback and algorithmic evaluation of completed tasks. Algorithmic filtering suppresses access to gigs for users with poor metrics [15]. In response, workers perform lower-paid tasks or even work for free to try to improve their ratings. Some systems also require that workers install productivity monitoring apps on their devices [10]. This measure contributes to the constant surveillance of workers [9].
Blurred Ethical Boundaries
Digital workers rarely know what larger project their work contributes to or who they’re working for [4]. Very often, digital labour helps develop, train, and support artificial intelligence (AI) [7]. Sometimes such labour is used for morally dubious projects. For instance, a Pentagon project used digital labour to improve drone-targeting AI technology. In this case, workers labelled objects in photos, unaware that their work was being used to train contentious warfare technology [3].
Barriers to Labour Organizing
Digital workers face barriers to demanding better working conditions and higher wages. Workers are dispersed worldwide and often lack the means to communicate with one another, so unionizing is a challenge. In some countries, collective bargaining is illegal altogether [10]. As well, the competitive nature of the platforms may stifle worker solidarity [6]. These obstacles to labour organizing, combined with a lack of labour law protections, makes workers extremely vulnerable to the poor working conditions of digital work.
Why Should I Care?
Digital work is often cheerfully marketed as an opportunity to start a flexible, entrepreneurial side hustle. Yet, it’s incredibly precarious work lacking regulation or labour protections. The digital labour market is expected to grow enormously in the coming decades [5]. If this is the future of work—where labour rights and working conditions are essentially determined by a digital labour platform’s Terms and Conditions agreement—we should be worried.
Questions to Consider
Have you ever considered seeking work on a digital labour platform? Would you in the future? What changes can you imagine that would improve the conditions of this emerging global workforce?
References
[1] Berg, J. (2020). Digital Labour Platforms Impact Working Conditions. Here’s How. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/digital-labour-platforms-working-conditions/
[2] Choudhury, P. (Raj). (2020, November 1). Our Work-from-Anywhere Future. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/11/our-work-from-anywhere-future
[3] Fang, L. (2019, February 4). Google Hired Gig Economy Workers to Improve Artificial Intelligence in Controversial Drone-Targeting Project. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2019/02/04/google-ai-project-maven-figure-eight/
[4] Fussell, S. (2019, April 15). Behind Every Robot Is a Human. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/amazon-workers-eavesdrop-amazon-echo-clips/587110/
[5] Graham, M. (2016, May 25). Digital work marketplaces impose a new balance of power. New Internationalist. https://newint.org/blog/2016/05/25/digital-work-marketplaces-impose-a-new-balance-of-power
[6] Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2016). Spike in Online Gig Work: Flash in the Pan or Future of Employment? Data & Society. https://points.datasociety.net/spike-in-online-gig-work-c2e316016620
[7] Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2017, January 9). The Humans Working Behind the AI Curtain. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-humans-working-behind-the-ai-curtain
[8] Hall, M. (2017). The Ghost of the Mechanical Turk. Jacobin. https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/middle-east-digital-labor-microwork-gaza-refugees-amazon
[9] Huws, U. (2016). Logged In. https://jacobinmag.com/2016/01/huws-sharing-economy-crowdsource-precarity-uber-workers/
[10] International Labour Organization. (2021). The role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work [Full report] [Report]. International Labour Organization. http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/weso/2021/WCMS_771749/lang–en/index.htm
[11] International Labour Organization. (2018). Digital labour platforms and the future of work: Towards decent work in the online world [Report]. http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/WCMS_645337/lang–en/index.htm
[12] Lufkin, B. (2021, June 15). Is the great digital-nomad workforce actually coming? https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210615-is-the-great-digital-nomad-workforce-actually-coming
[13] Lehdonvirta, V. (2017). Where are online workers located? The international division of digital gig work. The iLabour Project. https://ilabour.oii.ox.ac.uk/where-are-online-workers-located-the-international-division-of-digital-gig-work/
[14] Molla, R. (2021, September 3). A huge number of Americans just became gig workers and we’re not ready. Vox. https://www.vox.com/recode/22651953/americans-gig-independent-workers-benefits-vacation-health-care-inequality
[15] Rani, U. (2021, July 20). The role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work. RLS Geneva. https://rosalux-geneva.org/world-employment-and-social-outlook-2021-the-role-of-digital-labour-platforms-in-transforming-the-world-of-work/
[16] Semuels, A. (2018, January 23). The Internet Is Enabling a New Kind of Poorly Paid Hell. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/
Written By: Olenna Hardie, UBC, School of Information
Edited By: Brittanny Dzioba & Kathleen Scheaffer
Featured Image: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-white-shirt-showing-frustration-3807738/
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