Fairwork

The Fairwork Foundation is committed to highlighting best and worst practices in the emerging platform economy. Platform work (or 'gig work') provides essential income and opportunities to many. However, lacking protection from employment law or collective bodies, many platform workers face low pay, precarity, and poor and dangerous working conditions. In a partnership with the ILO, and drawing on the expertise of staff at the University of Oxford, the University of Cape Town, IIITB, the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Manchester, the University of the Western Cape, and WZB, we work to design principles of fairness in working conditions on digital labour platforms. We have five fairwork principles: 1. Fair Pay 2. Fair Conditions 3. Fair Contracts 4. Fair Management 5. Fair Representation We translate our principles into measurable context-relevant thresholds, conduct rigorous research to evaluate digital work platforms against those thresholds, and publish our results in a transparent manner. We currently work in India and South Africa, and are expanding to several new countries, including Chile, Ecuador, Germany and the UK.