Chapter 5 - Labor Relations in the Platform Economy

Summary

SECTION I. DEFINING LABOR PLATFORMS AND WORKER EVALUATION SYSTEMS

TYPES OF ONLINE LABOR PLATFORMS

Online labor platforms are primarily focused on the service sector. The specialized literature generally labels them under two distinct categories: professional crowdsourcing platforms and on-demand work platforms. On the one hand, both models use the internet to create a marketplace where workers and hiring entities can meet; on the other hand, they provide different types of services and working methods.

Journalist JeffHowe fi rst used the word “crowdsourcing” in 2006 to describe “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent, usually an employee, and outsourcing it to an undefi ned generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” In other words, crowdsourcing platforms allow third-party companies to fragment a particular chore and assign it to a community of crowd workers. The content of crowd tasks range from creative to repetitive work, including the creation of marketing campaigns, coding, proofreading academic pieces, designing, and human intelligence tasks (HITs), such as data entry. Considering the nature of the crowd tasks, crowdsourcing platforms may have a geographic global dimension in which workers may provide their work remotely. Moreover, the payment system may be performed according to the output or based on hours worked.

Amazon Mechanical Turk and Clickworker are two prominent examples of crowdsourcing platforms. Both platforms facilitate outsourcing work to a distributed workforce that can perform tasks virtually. They typically offer micro-task jobs related to cleaning online directories, testing new software, categorizing items, transcribing audio documents, editing texts, managing surveys, detecting images with obscene content, or detecting images in general, such as “identifying the red apple in this image of a fruit basket.” The numbers are not negligible. The platform Clickworker is based in the United States and Germany, but its workforce – more than 1.8 million individuals – is located in 136 countries. Clickworker highlights its importance in offering micro-tasks to hundreds of thousands of workers to help optimize AI-based searches, for instance.