Fairwork Podcast
24 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago -From online freelancing to couriering, domestic work to beauticians, digital platforms are radically changing the frontiers of work. This is a podcast series about the workers who make up the gig economy. Each episode we speak to workers who have made headlines with legal cases, taken part in strikes and those just quietly getting on with trying to put food on the table. 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. Written & Produced by Robbie Warin. Music by Louis Borlase. Fairwork is an action-research project based at the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre that evaluates and rates the working conditions of digital platforms across the world.
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Episodes
011: Coda
April 12, 2023 09:00 - 4 minutes - 10.8 MBIn 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] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
010: A Roof Over My Head
April 11, 2023 09:00 - 23 minutes - 32 MBResearch 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 ...
009: A Guide to Making Friends as a Freelancer
March 28, 2023 09:00 - 26 minutes - 263 MBIn 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...
008: A Platform Named Desire
March 07, 2023 15:05 - 28 minutes - 65.9 MBThe 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 th...
007: OnlyBans
February 13, 2023 13:38 - 49 minutes - 112 MBIn 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 ...
006: YouTube Gets A Union Part 2
January 23, 2023 11:00 - 30 minutes - 41.2 MBIf 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 platfor...
005: YouTube Gets A Union - Part 1
January 16, 2023 11:00 - 28 minutes - 39.5 MBIn 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 ...
004: Love, Loss and Unpaid Wages
December 12, 2022 10:00 - 29 minutes - 68.3 MBIn 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/tec...
Bonus Episode: UCU Strike
December 08, 2022 10:21 - 6 minutes - 15.9 MBMany 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 t...
003: The Strange Case of Dr Scale and Mr Remotasks
December 04, 2022 11:00 - 41 minutes - 95 MBMachine 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 ani...
002: Unsung Heroes
November 21, 2022 11:00 - 43 minutes - 100 MBLet'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 lie...
001: An Incomplete Prediction
November 21, 2022 11:00 - 9 minutes - 20.8 MBWe 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 phys...
Welcome to the Planetary Labour Market
November 08, 2022 17:11 - 1 minute - 29.1 MBThe 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 inte...
010: Kids These Days...
October 19, 2021 09:00 - 52 minutes - 71.6 MBIt 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 1980...
009: Ukraine
September 08, 2021 16:40 - 39 minutes - 54.9 MBThis 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 robbie.warin@oii....
008: India
August 05, 2021 19:08 - 42 minutes - 96.5 MBKarnataka, 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 th...
007: Gorillas
July 22, 2021 08:54 - 47 minutes - 109 MBLast 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 expansi...
006: The UK Gig Economy
July 06, 2021 09:16 - 26 minutes - 61.2 MBLast 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...
005: Pay
April 06, 2021 10:18 - 29 minutes - 66.9 MBMany 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 lo...
004: Management
March 16, 2021 09:58 - 15 minutes - 35.8 MBFrancis 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 thr...
003: Contracts
March 02, 2021 13:56 - 36 minutes - 83 MBOn Friday the 18th of February, the UK Supreme Court announced its judgement on the case Uber V Aslam, rejecting Uber's appeal and declaring that two of its drivers, Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar must be classified as workers. This was the end of 5 years of legal challenges, with Uber taking their appeal to the highest court in the country. For Yaseen Aslam, it was 7 years in the making and took him on a journey that would dominate his life in ways he never would have imagined. This episod...
002: Conditions
February 23, 2021 12:00 - 10 minutes - 22.9 MBAs the world went into lockdown for the first time last year, there was a new focus on the people that keep our society running. Many gig workers found that the services they provide were now an essential, helping to keep people fed and allowing them to move around the city. Without many of the workplace protections commonplace across the rest of society, many workers found themselves forced to carry on working regardless of the risk, in sickness and in health, or face financial ruin. In t...
001: Representation
February 16, 2021 08:00 - 33 minutes - 76.6 MBIn 2016, the headlines erupted with news that Deliveroo riders in London were on strike. This was the first time that workers in the gig economy had mobilised in the UK, taking to the streets to make their voices heard. The events that took place that summer shaped the lives of workers in the gig economy to this day and we’re still coming to terms with the ramifications of its successes and failures. In this episode, we hear from Mohaan Biswas about his first-hand experience of the strikes. ...
Introducing the Fairwork Podcast
February 15, 2021 11:41 - 1 minute - 30.5 MBWhat 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? Millions of people are piecing together a living in the gig economy. From online freelancing to couriering, domestic work to beauticians, digital platforms are becoming a major means by which people are accessing paid work. The Fairwork podcast looks at the stories of people within the gig economy, exploring the intersection between precarity and tec...