Crowdworkers' Rights
In the US, all eyes are on the gig economy, the section of the contemporary economy based on small jobs and contingent labor: the attention of experts is caught by the labor issues raised by operations performed through platforms and applications such as Uber, Taskrabbit, and Amazon Mechanical Turk. The winning formula of the popular ridesharing service is well known: regular citizens who turn into paid drivers. Taskrabbit is the Uber of manual labor: repainting the home, running errands or cleaning. Amazon Mechanical Turk is the most important platform of crowdwork.
What do these smartphone apps have in common? They enable users to have an on-call workforce available at the tap of a screen and offer very high flexibility and very low transaction costs: a boon for consumers and firms alike. Also, workers stand to gain, because people now have access to an enlarged set of job opportunities. Some use it to supplement their wages, students use it as a form of part-time employment, but there are also those who make their living through the payments received for doing these micro-tasks.
There is no lack of critical points and heated debate, however. Besides regulatory issues, such as whether companies have the operator licenses to provide certain services, there is the issue of labor protection for the workforce mobilized via these apps. Crowdworkers are usually treated as self-employed free-lancers, deprived of any rights or protections vis-à-vis their employers. In several national welfare systems this translates into lack of social security or health coverage. In the United States, many crowdworkers have sought redress in courts or labor boards, in order to be legally recognized as employees, entitled to the rights federal law prescribes for them, such as minimum wage requirements, unemployment benefits, reimbursement of working expenses. Some legal fights have already ended with settlements in excess of $500,000 (it was the case of a recent US class-action suit against a crowdworking platform).
How to prevent the exploitation of online labor on a global scale, also in violation of laws forbidding forced and child labor? What about the freedom of workers' association? How to react to the risk of discrimination based on the profiling of candidates and IP addresses? Is there a way to make more transparent the constant monitoring of workers by these businesses, also on the basis of user ratings? How to avoid opportunistic behavior by customers who refuse to pay while retaining the output of the work done, as some platforms entitle consumers to do? Beyond the enthusiasm generated by the sharing economy, some could argue that under these new digital forms are at work exploitative tendencies similar to those prevalent a century ago, which should then be countered by making use of the traditional principles defending labor. Unfortunately, there are no ready-made answers to these questions, for we are in uncharted territory, and international debate is still raging.