Freelance and Microwork Platforms Not Fair to Workers

Oxford researchers examine labour practices across ‘cloudwork’, like crowdsourcing, and revealed that these freelance and microwork platforms do not provide minimum fairness standards for their workforce.

Freelance and Microwork Platforms Rated by Fairwork

Millions of people in the world are working remotely for freelance platforms, often based in low-income countries, that offer outsourcing services to international clients and help power AI systems.

This report by the Oxford Internet Insitute, reveals that these “ghost workers” often see low pay, risky and exploitative conditions, strict disciplinary systems and little to no bargaining power, the report calls for better standards. This Cloudwork is gig work that can be done remotely and workers are classified as self-employed or independent workers, drawing them out of the purview and protection of national labour regulations.

The Fairwork Foundation report, ‘Work in the Planetary Labour Market: Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings’ 2021 rates the labour conditions of 17 cloudwork platforms based on research including surveys with 792 workers in 75 countries. The report assesses each platform against the five Fairwork principles of Fair Pay, Fair Conditions, Fair Contracts, Fair Management and Fair Representation.

They are rated out of ten, in the report, Jovoto and TranscribeMe top the league table jointly, given 7/10 by the Fairwork team, whilst major English-language platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Rev, PeoplePerHour, and freelancer.com were al of the worst, scoring 0 or 1 points for the safety of microwork and freelancers.

The key findings of each category will be detailed as follows, Fair pay – only 2 out of 11 platforms, Workana and Appen had policies to ensure that the vast majority of workers earned at least their local minimum wage. Fair conditions – 12 out of 17 platforms provided protection from the task-related risks in their daily work, Fair contracts – only 5 of 17 platforms provided evidence of clear contracts or terms of service that did not require workers to waive their key rights to legal challenges like class-action lawsuits.

Fair management – over half of all platforms, 9 out of 17 had a formal due process in place enabling workers to appeal decisions like job rejections and account suspension. Fair representation – only 3 platforms, Appen, Clickworker and Jovoto could demonstrate that workers had access to fair representation in their remote and microwork roles.

The study also found some platforms are committed to improving the conditions of their freelancers and people in microwork.  Six platforms in the study made changes to their practices and policies as a result of engaging with the research team, one platform, Workana, committed to ensuring workers earn above their local minimum wage.

Lead author of the report Dr Kelle Howson, Research at Oxford Internet Institute said “As more and more workers from a large variety of sectors and professions become subsumed into the cloudwork labour market, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, they fall through the cracks of national labour protections.  As a result of this, all too often workers end up losing their right to a minimum wage, a collective voice and protection from discrimination and unfair dismissal. Regrettably, the scores in our report show that unfair and insecure work is the norm on most cloudwork platforms – a situation that calls for regulatory responses on a national and international level.”

Dr Howson said, “As our report shows, online work on digital labour platforms can exacerbate labour market inequities, especially for workers who reside in lower-income countries who can experience location-based discrimination from platforms and clients based in the global north.”

Nathan Pikover, Chief Operating Officer, TranscribeMe said, “It’s important to think about contractors as real people and not just numbers, and at TranscribeMe we believe that a community-focused worker management approach delivers better quality products while fostering a positive environment for the workers. The Fairwork team has helped us improve our processes in a way that is quantifiable and we appreciate the opportunity to participate in the rating report.”

Katia Cosic, Team Leader, Freelancer Services, Workana said, “Working together with Fairwork helped us a lot to make visible our opportunities to offer fairer conditions to the freelancers. Their support in recommending possible actions, many of which we have already undertaken, was also very helpful for us.”

Professor Mark Graham, Professor of Internet Geography at Oxford Internet Institute, said, “In our study, we present a snapshot of selected cloudwork platforms, to establish a baseline understanding of fairness in cloudwork, which we will build upon in future annual reports. Just as cloudwork platforms can nimbly enter and exit markets, and can nimbly evade regulations, they can also easily do better. It will take a broad coalition of stakeholders, including platforms, workers and legislators to bring about a fairer future of platform work, but the actions taken by platforms in response to Fairwork scoring show it remains within reach. We commend those companies who are stepping up but the prevalence of low scores in our report also demonstrates the urgent need for governments to intervene and find ways to protect workers in the digital labour market.”

Professor Graham adds “As part of our vision for a fairer future of work, we’re setting out a pathway to realise that ambition and one of the ways we’re doing that, in addition to calling for tougher regulation, is through the launch of the Fairwork Pledge.  We urge others to sign up to the pledge today and help our vision of fair work become a reality for all platform workers.”

Fairwork also launched Fairwork Pledge, which aims to encourage other organisations who regularly make use of these invisible workforces to support best labour practices in the platform economy.