GCRF Decent Work: FAIRWORK in the Platform Economy in the Global South

There are millions of platform workers who live all over the world, doing work that is outsourced or organised via digital platforms or apps in the gig economy. This work can include jobs as varied as taxi driving using Uber, translation on Upwork, or the training of machine learning algorithms through Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Despite the potential of such work to give jobs to those who need them, platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages and working conditions with their employers, who are often on the other side of the world. Our previous research has shown that platforms often operate in relatively unregulated ways, and can encourage a race to the bottom in terms of workers' ability to defend existing jobs, liveable wages, and dignified working conditions.

The potentials and risks of platform work touch down starkly in South Africa. A country that, by some measures, has the world's highest income inequality, and 28% unemployment rates. At the same time, the country has relatively well-developed internet infrastructure, and a relatively stable political climate and state/legal institutions. These factors make the country a site in which the platform economy is nascent enough to allow us to co-develop solutions with a multi-disciplinary team from Law and the Social Sciences that will offer tangible opportunities to influence policy and practice surrounding digital work. As other middle- and low-income countries quickly develop their internet infrastructures and millions of more potential digital workers rush online in search of opportunities, the interventions that this project proposes will be of crucial need if we are to avoid some of the 'race to the bottom' that the current world of digital work is bringing into being.

Our project will culminate in two key initiatives. First, building on a work package of legal research, a Code of Practice will be developed to serve as an interpretive tool to outline the ways that existing regulations can be made applicable to platform workers. Second, we will develop a 'Fairwork Foundation.' Much like the Fairtrade Foundation has been able to certify the production chains of commodities like coffee or chocolate, the Fairwork Foundation will certify the production networks of the platform economy, and therefore harness consumer power to significantly contribute to the welfare and job quality of digital workers. This programme of work aims to not just uncover where fair and unfair work takes place, but also seeks to codify that knowledge into both a 'Fairwork certification scheme' and an annual ranking of platforms. These two initiatives will ultimately allow for the development of an international standard for good-quality digital working conditions.

These objectives will be achieved with 5 project stages. First, the Law team will analyse S. African labour laws, social security laws, and other legal and policy regulations relating to the platform economy, and ask how those laws might be adapted to provide decent work standards for digital platform workers. At the same time, the Social Science team will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to map the key issues faced by S. African platform workers: developing a rich understanding of how platform work may be failing to live up to decent work standards. Third, we develop meaningful decent work standards for platform work that happens outside of the Global North. Fourth, we take those standards and use them in a process of action research in which we seek to certify the digital work platforms: assigning them a Fairwork certification if they pass. Finally, through an extended process of stakeholder engagement and outreach with workers, platforms, and policy makers, we plan a short-term strategy of pressuring platforms to change their policies to improve working conditions and a longer-term strategy of influencing the direction that regulation takes in a currently highly unregulated sector.

Workers, customers, platforms, and labour sector organisations are all key beneficiaries. The primary aim of this transformative project is to generate social and economic benefit for some of the millions of workers who perform digital work. Many platform workers in South Africa and elsewhere have little individual or collective bargaining power, and they often lack the protection of existing rules and regulations of other kinds of workers, and existing laws are inconsistently applied. As ever more people come online looking for jobs, the prospects for workers collaborating instead of competing looks bleak.

This project offers viable strategies to change that by providing a route to pressure employers to improve wages and working conditions. It does so by understanding the problems faced by workers, the legal contexts that they face those problems in, developing a Code of Practice and a 'fair work' certification scheme, and ultimately rating platforms against those criteria.

This action-research project will provide demonstrable impact for digital workers, customers, and platforms. Digital workers will benefit, in the first instance, from our legal research that will outline the ways that existing regulations can be made applicable to platform workers. That strand of work will also develop longer-term relationships for policy changes. Second, our certification process provides an important means to address the weak bargaining power that platform workers have by pressuring platforms to meet key minimum standards for the work that they do.

For customers, the project offers easily accessible information about the platform and whether it provides fair pay and conditions to workers. This is analogous to the Fairtrade logo, indicating whether the platform has met standards across the supply chain. For platforms, it provides a way to clearly indicate whether their own practices have achieved the certification for fair work and compare with other operators. The rating system allows platforms to display this to potential clients and customers on their websites, products, and through associated social media campaigns.

We will run annual multi-stakeholder workshops at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that bring together platforms, workers, unions, and scholars in order to ensure that the rating criteria are constantly adapted to current conditions. The purpose of our funded research will then be to apply the criteria to a selection of platforms. This data will be used to assign a certification to 12 sample platforms, resulting in detailed documentation that will appear on our website and a final report. These meetings, and the outreach of research will benefit other national and international bodies involved with labour policy such as the WTO, the UK Department of Trade and Industry, and international development organisations (e.g. DFID, USAID, GIZ). Furthermore, because this project emerges from an existing GCRF funded network on the "Development Implications of Digital Economies" (DIODE), and will feed back our work into the network in a final workshop (with representatives from development practice in 11 developing countries), our ultimate goal is to allow the Fairwork concept to scale beyond South Africa. Some of the specific details will necessarily need to be tailored to different local contexts (for instance minimum wage rates). However, scaling will still be possible once we both establish core criteria (for instance, the need for minimum wage rates), and best-practices for engaging with multiple stakeholders and running the rating system itself. In the final months of the project, we will work with our DIODE partners and UNI (the global union federation for services that have 900 affiliated unions worldwide), expand the project internationally by promoting use of the Fairwork criteria and logo.