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In the final episode of this series of the Fairwork Podcast, we look back at the different stories we've heard, what lessons have we learnt? What can these stories tell us about the nature of work in planetary labour markets? What are the challenges workers face? And what does the future hold?
If you have any thoughts, comments or suggestions, you can reach me at [email protected]
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Research conducted by our colleagues at the Online Labour Index at the Oxford Internet Institute found that in 2020, Serbia had around 70,000 people finding work on digital platforms. That’s around 2% of the total workforce, giving Serbia the highest per capita concentration of freelancers working via digital platforms of any country in the world.
In this episode of the Fairwork podcast we return to Belgrade Serbia and look at the freelancer protests that swept the country in 2021. In this episode we start with the story of Tamara and her role within the organisation of these strikes, before going on to look back at what the campaign has achieved in the past 2 years.
You can check out the Online Labour Index here: http://onlinelabourobservatory.org/
If you have any thoughts, suggestions or comments, you can reach me on [email protected]
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In this series of the Fairwork podcast, we’ve looked at work in the planetary labour market, we’ve looked at the experiences and stories of workers who work via digital platforms, from Colombia, to Germany, the USA to the UK. But in each of these stories, not once have any two workers actually met. Think about that for a moment, none of the workers I’ve spoken to for this series have ever come into physical contact with their colleagues through doing their work. But in the final two episodes of this series, we'll to focus on an example of workers coming together to deny the isolation imposed on them, to look at an example of workers who have overcome the barriers placed between them to come together, organise and campaign for their livelihoods.
In December last year I was lucky enough to spend some time in Belgrade Serbia, where I met workers, journalists and researchers and spoke to them about the freelancer strikes and protests that occurred at the end of 2020 and throughout 2021, in which workers came together to protest against changes to how the government would tax income from overseas. Serbia has one of the highest proportions of workers working via digital platforms, with an estimated 2% of the national workforce using digital platforms, and as we’ll see, new government legislation threatened to shut the platform economy in Serbia down, forever.
In this two-part episode, we look at how freelancers from across the country came together to fight for their livelihood.
Here's the Wikipedia article about the parliment building (including some pictures of the horses we reference): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_National_Assembly_of_the_Republic_of_Serbia
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The history of the internet and of pornography are deeply intertwined, they mix and overlap that to see one without the other is to only capture half the picture. And the human desire for sex is often a desire that has driven the development of many of the technologies that underpin modern life. Sex workers have often been early adopters of digital technologies, but sex workers don’t just take advantage of technology, they are part of driving their creation and uptake.
In this episode of the Fairwork podcast we speak to Dr Heather Berg, an Academic and writer based in Washington state. Our conversation, recorded last year, looks at the platformisation of sex work, the radical restructuring of the porn industry that this has brought about, and the changing workplace conditions that platforms like OnlyFans have ushered in for workers.
For the introduction of this episode I took a lot of influence from this great website which I highly recommend you check out as it has loads of great articles and archive materials about sex workers early adoption and development of internet technologies: https://sexworkersbuilttheinter.net/
There's also this great article by Gabrielle Garcia and it was a lecture by Gabrielle that initially put me on to the story of Danni's Hard drive: https://decodingstigma.substack.com/p/cybernetic-sex-worker
Heather's book Porn Work is out now - definitely check it out as she's not just a brilliant speaker, but writer too: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469661926/porn-work/
For the academics in the room, I'd also highly recommend this great article by Dr Kate Hardy: https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/120/3/533/174127/Hustling-the-PlatformCapitalist-Experiments-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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In the summer of 2021, probably the world’s largest sex work platform, OnlyFans announced that it would be banning creators from posting sexual content. The platform which rose to prominence in the pandemic, allows people to monetise the content they produce, gathering payment in exchange for access to pictures, videos and communication channels. Today, there are around 1.5 millions creators on OnlyFans, and many of them are reliant on the platform to enable them to survive – to cover their everyday needs. The decision was ultimately reversed and OnlyFans remains the largest and best known remote sex work platform, but this example serves to highlight the precarious position of sex workers working online. The rug can be pulled from under your feet at any time, without any meaningful way for you as a worker to contest or shape decisions as to what kinds of content are allowed.
In the next few episodes of the Fairwork podcast, we’ll be exploring the world of online sex work. In this episode we start with an interview with a worker on OnlyFans. We’ll hear his story of making it on the platform, and the realities of make a living online. After that we’ll speak to Dr Helen Rand, senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Greenwich, where we discuss the broader implications surrounding the platformisation of online sex work.
You can play the brilliant OnlyBans game here: onlybansgame.com/play
Helen Rand's paper 'Challenging the Invisibility of Sex Work in Digital Labour Politics' can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0141778919879749
You can find info on UCU Strikes here: https://www.ucu.org.uk/rising
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If you’re making your living from YouTube, there’s no financial safety net, no contract, no sick pay, holiday pay. it’s a fierce popularity contest in which an individual’s earnings is largely determined by a set of black box systems; recommendation algorithms and demonetisation processes, which you, as a worker, don’t get any insight into. They are determined solely by YouTube, without consultation, even though they hugely influence the working experiences of content creators on the platform.
At the same time, the amount of content uploaded to YouTube is astronomical – equivalent to 400 hours of new content every minute. For every successful content creator, there is apparently a whole army waiting in the wings to take over should they miss a step, stumble or fall down. A seemingly endless pool of labour in a labour market without geographic barriers.
Understandably the pressure that this can take on YouTubers is huge.
In this episode we return to hear the conclusion of Jorge Sprave’s story. In part one of this two part story, we head his story of getting to YouTube with the Slingshot Channel, where he makes homemade weapons and launchers, how he left his well paying job to go full time on the platform and how his income collapsed following the implementation of a series of policies by YouTube – in a period that would be know as the Adpocalypse. We return to the story looking at what steps Jorge took to combat the changes.
Olga Kay's story for this podcast came from an interview for this book written by Chris Stokel Walker https://www.canburypress.com/products/youtubers-by-chris-stokel-walker
There's a lot of great stuff on YouTube itself about creator burnout that helped me with this episode. Here's a few things I wanted to share:
Great short documentary by the BBC with a focus on Latin American creators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUrNbl1lNV4&t=3s
Elle Mills' Burnout at 19 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKKwgq9LRgA
The Mental Health Struggles Of Being A YouTuber: Trolls, Jealousy, Burnout by Dr Ali ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq4YhMUvhjQ&t=920s
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In 2019 a poll found that 30% of children in the UK and the US would choose being a Youtuber as their preferred profession ahead of jobs like astronaught, musician, athlete, or teacher – making it the top rated profession amongst school age children. It’s a sought after job, apparently. But YouTube isn’t just a cultural phenomenon it’s also an economic and technological phenomenon as well, involving the use of a digital platform to manage a distributed workforce spread across the globe. And the practices and protocols that Google, the company that owns YouTube, employs have huge impacts on shaping the working conditions that YouTubers experience.
In this two part episode of the Fairwork podcast, we hear from Jörg Sprave, a German Youtuber who runs the slingshot channel, a channel where he makes homemade slingshots and launchers. We hear his story of getting into YouTube, what it is actually like making a living from YouTube, what happens when the platform on which you’ve built your livelihood starts to make seismic shifts, and how he formed the world’s first union, for Youtubers.
Here's Jörg's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVZlxkKqlvVqzRJXhAGq42Q
There's loads of good videos about the Adpocalypse on YouTube itself, but I found this one particularly informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7M7yyRDHGc&ab_channel=vlogbrothers
As always, you can contact me at [email protected]
Robyn Caplan has written a great academic article with Tarleton Gillespie on YouTube's demonetisation policies which you can find here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305120936636
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In this episode of the podcast, we hear the story of Lisa, a worker on Appen, based in the UK. We hear her story of struggling to make a living or Appen, or maybe more accurately, struggling to not make a living, in this epic tale of love, loss and unpaid wages.
Here's some of the resources that I used to write the introduction in case you would like to do some further reading:
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/04/google-ai-project-maven-figure-eight/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html
I originally read about the project and it's link with microwork in Phil Jones' book 'Work Without the Worker' which I'd highly recommend:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3869-work-without-the-worker
You can reach out to me (Robbie) at [email protected] in case you have any thoughts, reflections or comments on the podcast.
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Many members of Fairwork staff at the University of Oxford took part recently in 3 days strike action against falling wages, casualisation, pension cuts and increasing workload. The action was part of a nationwide strike across the university sector, coordinated by our union UCU. The strikes culminated in a demonstration in London's Kings Cross attended by thousands of our colleagues from around the country.
Robbie took his audio recorder down to the demo and asked members of the Fairwork team why they were striking.
As always you can contact Robbie at [email protected]
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Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence, one which underpins a huge amount of modern life. If you’re using a computer, smartphone and searching the internet, then you encounter machine learning. It's ubiquitous. And machine learning, doesn’t just emerge out of the minds of technologists – it’s a shared endeavour.
It works like this. If you want to develop, say a piece of software that can recognise animals in images for example, you need a whole bunch of existing images of animals. And these need to be captioned, segmented, and annotated to a really detailed level. Your software needs to know what animals look like, so it can tell the difference between a flamingo and a pink cushion. You then use these images – known as training data - to teach your software, so that when it encounters new images, it can tell the animals from the cars.
But the key question is, where does this training data come from?
In this episode of the Fairwork Podcast, we look at the curious case of Scale and Remotasks, and the relationship between these two platforms. We talk to Juan, a worker on Remotasks, and Dr Kelle Howson, looking at the ways in which digital infrastructures can work to obscure working conditions on labour platforms.
Here's a few links for those interested in diving deeper:
The Scale website: https://scale.com/
The Remotasks website: https://www.remotasks.com/en
The theme in focus for this years Cloudwork report focuses on the relationship between these two platforms and you can read it here: https://fair.work/en/fw/publications/work-in-the-planetary-labour-market-fairwork-cloudwork-ratings-2022/
Here's the link to the video me and Kelle discuss in the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuGBwQ7sQac&t=5s&ab_channel=ScaleAI
As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions, thoughts or feedback, and you can reach me at [email protected]
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Let's say you’re on Twitter, browsing through your news feed. The reason why the feed you get is devoid of content that might be violent, racist or potentially upsetting, is because people spread across the globe, are on hand to sort through anything that might be deemed as dangerous or harmful. These are people you will never meet, who you probably don't even know exist, but they are deeply interwoven into the digital infrastructure that you use every day. Behind the facade of modern AI lies an army of workers, creating data sets to train machine learning, and quietly filling in when it falls down.
In the first of three episodes, we turn to the world of Microwork platforms, looking at the story of one worker performing content moderation on the platform Appen. We hear from Dr Kelle Howson to provide some context and hear the story of Dr Fei Fei Lee, who transformed the way in which AI is made forever.
You can contact Robbie via email with any thoughts, questions or suggestions at [email protected]
Fei Fei Lee gave a fascinating and quite brilliant Ted Talk about the Image Net project which you can view here: https://www.ted.com/talks/fei_fei_li_how_we_re_teaching_computers_to_understand_pictures?language=en
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We exist in a world where Information Communication Technologies, have made a remarkable number of tasks independent of distance. In is no longer necessary for many workers to share the same geographic location as their colleagues, or employer. Clerical work, transcriptions, video editing, copywriting and a huge raft of other types of work can be done from nearly anywhere on the planet, communicating, sharing files and transacting payment, via their computers. Of course, the majority of physical skills – manual labour, driving, cleaning – require a person to be in a specific place, but for an increasing number of different types of work, this is no longer the case.
This series of the Fairwork podcast is about this change. It’s about what happens when work goes global and the emergence of platforms that manage the transactions between workers and employers scattered across the 4 corners of the globe. It’s about the creation of labour markets that exist at the planetary level, and the social, political and economic questions that this poses for workers.
You can contact me via email: [email protected]
You can find the full video of Arthur C. Clarke's interview on the BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwELr8ir9qM&t=484s&ab_channel=BBCArchive
I got the idea to include the sound of the dial up internet after looking through the brilliant Archive of Endangered Sounds: http://savethesounds.info/
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The internet is radically reconfiguring the geographies of work, making it possible for workers to connect with employers based anywhere on the planet. Around the world, millions of people are piecing together a living on digital platforms. From labelling data sets to train AI, to content moderation, online sex work to content creation, digital platforms are becoming a major means by which people are accessing paid work, allowing them to pay their rent and send their kids to school. The internet gig economy is radically changing the frontiers of work, where it takes place, who does it and what we consider it to be.
Welcome to the Planetary Labour Market,
This is a podcast series about the workers making a living in the online gig economy, a selection of stories from those on the frontlines. We speak to workers and researchers from around the work, completing work in all four corners of the globe. We’ll hear stories of workers who are navigating precarity and the constant threat of deactivation. Those who are thriving against the odds, and those organising for a better world.
We dive into what it’s like working in the gig economy, what it’s like being managed by algorithms, rated on every job and monitored every step of the way. We ask the big questions, looking at the political and the personal – exploring the radical changes to our world of work through the eyes of those at its centre.
New episodes every Monday starting the 14th of November.
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It hardly needs stating, but the world faces some grave challenges in the 21st century. From the dismantlement of workplace security replaced by an increasingly precarious model of work, to the threats to our biosphere posed by climate change and biodiversity loss. In the face of the enormity of these challenges we often feel lost, a tiny individual unable to stand up against the whims of global capital. Amidst this, we have seen the huge reduction in the power of trade unions since the 1980s as their power has been systematically undermined by governments around the world. But what role is there for Unions within the 21st century and what does their future hold?
On this week's episode of the Fairwork podcast we welcome Eve Livingston. Eve is a writer based in Glasgow, whose book ‘Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions’ was released by Pluto Press in Autumn 2021.
Our conversation looks at contemporary trade unionism, it looks at what is holding unions back, as well as what they could achieve. It looks are the power and opportunity within collective organising to solve a range of the social, political, economic and environmental issues faced by our global community; but it also looks at where we’re going wrong and what we can do about it.
You can find out more about Eve's book here: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341620/make-bosses-pay/
You can contact Robbie Warin at [email protected]
You can find out more about Fairwork: https://fair.work/en/fw/homepage/
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This week on the Fairwork Podcast we head to Ukraine, to hear the story of a rider for the food delivery platform Glovo. We explore what it's like working in the Gig Economy in Ukraine as well as exploring the historical and political context which shaped the emergence of the Gig Economy.
This episode was co-produced by Labour Initiatives, an NGO and legal clinic based in Kyiv and was written and produced by Robbie Warin and Svitlana Iukhymovych.
You can contact Robbie at [email protected]
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Karnataka, located in the South West of India is home to around 64 millions people. It’s known as the tech hub of India, home to many of the countries largest technology companies. But it is a city marked by huge inequality and beyond the high rise offices, lives a huge number of people using their smartphones and computers to make a living in the gig economy.
In this episode of the Fairwork podcast, we hear from Vinod, a gig worker based in Bengaluru. We hear his story of working for the gig economy platform Swiggy. What’s it like moving to the city to work as a courier? How do you navigate providing for your family and the costs associated with your work? And what happens when a global pandemic brings your work to a standstill?
In addition, we hear from the Principal Investigators for Fairwork India, Janaki Srinivasan and Balaji Parthasarathy, as they outline the history and context of the gig economy in India.
As always, you can contact Robbie, with any thoughts, suggestions, comments (or just to say hello) at [email protected]
This episode was written and produced by Pradyumna Taduri, Mounika Neerukonda and Robbie Warin.
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Last month Gorillas riders in Berlin went on strike, blockading warehouses around the city and stoking international media coverage. The company which, in under a year of operating, has managed to achieve a market valuation of a billion US dollars finally started to come up against the collective will of riders.
This week on the Fairwork podcast, we are exploring the company Gorillas Technologies - one of the fastest-growing startups in Europe. It’s a company with massive plans for expansion and is growing at a breakneck speed. We’ll hear from two Gorillas riders - Zeynep and Jakob - about their own experiences of the strikes, as well as catching up with Oğuz Alyanak to look at what the rise of these companies says about the way in which technologies are reshaping labour markets.
You can (and are actively encouraged to) get in touch with Robbie via email: [email protected]
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Last month, Fairwork released our first ever round of scoring for the UK. We gave 11 platforms a fairness score out of 10, based on their ability to provide fair and decent work. Scores ranged from 8 all the way down to 0, showing a massive variation in the types of work being provided by different platforms. But the conditions present within the gig economy, do not arise in a vacuum, but emerge out of specific social, cultural, economic and political contexts.
To mark the release of the first round of UK scores, this week on the Fairwork podcast we are joined by Alessio Bertolini – a post-doctoral researcher at Fairwork.
Alessio is here to help us understand the gig economy in the UK, where did the gig economy comes from? What decisions led us to this point? And what does the future holds?
Check out how we scored gig platforms in the UK here: https://fair.work/en/ratings/uk/
Read the full UK report here: https://fair.work/en/fw/publications/fairwork-uk-ratings-2021/
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Many of us take for granted the minimum wage. It’s just there, hovering in background, the floor that sits beneath us, ensuring the minimum we will take home at the end of a day’s work. But for workers in the gig economy, it’s a luxury they rarely know, as they piece together a living task to task, never knowing what a days work will be worth at the end of it.
This week on the Fairwork podcast, we hear the story of Ethan Bradley, a Deliveroo courier based in the North East of England. We look at issues related to pay, what it is like working under a piece rate system, the mental stress attached to this, and how it shapes your experiences of your work. We hear from Matt Cole, a researcher at Fairwork and from Emiliano Mellino of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about their recent investigation into hourly pay for Deliveroo riders across the UK.
You can read the Bureau's full report here.
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Francis Scaife works as a courier in the North East of England, in their home town of Teesside, a town heavily effected by deindustrialisation. Working as a courier for the gig economy platform Stuart provides Francis with a vital source of income in a time of huge national economic insecurity, but more than this it gives them a sense of purpose, drawing them out their house and into their community.
Stuart is a multinational business operating across Europe, it runs the online platform through which Francis works, shaping their working life in important and profound ways. As a company, it is everywhere and nowhere, operating at huge scales, but without the fixed infrastructure and offices that characterised the traditional courier companies that preceded it.
This episode looks at management, what’s it like working through a platform, where the principal colleague you’re working with is your smartphone? And how do you deal with the problems you encounter in your working day when you have no human manager to turn to?
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