2022 Fairwork Annual Report

This 2022 annual report presents an overview of Fairwork’s impact over the past year.

In it, we summarise our rating process, the ratings we released in 2022 along with our new AI project, and examples of our outreach and partnership work that have expanded our reach. These demonstrate our commitment to promoting fair working conditions for workers on digital labour platforms around the world. Thank you for your interest in our research, and solidarity with all workers.

Editorial: Expanding Fairwork’s Research Network and Influence

Even as the world starts to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, a number of important new challenges are affecting the labour market. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the inflation-driven cost of living crisis have further deepened economic and political rifts that extend into the platform economy. Platform workers across the world are seeing their costs rising and their real income squeezed, at the same time as many platforms are seeing their share prices plummeting and their growth prospects deteriorating as a result of both the cost of living crisis and demands from shareholders to become profitable.

For Fairwork, however, 2022 has been a year of reorganisation and growth. Thanks to the efforts and commitment of our central team in Oxford and Berlin, and the over 150 researchers in our network that reaches 38 countries across the world, we have undertaken 164 platform ratings in 2022 – with 353 ratings undertaken and 33 country reports released since the project was launched in 2018. We have also run a number of successful campaigns on “cloudwork” (i.e. platform work undertaken wholly online), ride-hailing and domestic work to extend our reach to platforms in countries that are not yet part of our network.

We have continued shaping public debates over working conditions in the platform economy around the world, having written 13 op-eds and newspaper articles, 9 academic articles and chapters and having been mentioned by over 220 media pieces this year alone.

Of course, our fundamental aim is to shed a light on working conditions in the platform economy. Thanks to our continuous engagement with the platform managers, platforms have made 67 changes to their policies and practices in 2022, helping improve the working conditions of hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide. Since we first started to engage directly with platforms in 2018, there have been 144 changes made to platform policies across our five principles of fair work (fair pay, conditions, contracts, management and representation).

Explore platform changes

Governments and public institutions in many different countries have been made aware of the many issues that platform workers face through campaigns from trades unions, international labour organisations and other NGOS. Fairwork has added its own voices to this chorus, pushing for stronger regulations and advocated for the introduction of fairer labour standards across the world. We have influenced and contributed to several policy initiatives, including the current European Commission’s proposal for a directive on platform work, legislative proposals to regulate platform work in Ecuador and Chile, and the Greater London Authority’s proposal for a Gig Economy Charter, among others.

We have also supported the efforts of unions and workers’ organisations fighting for more rights and protections for platform workers, as evidenced in our UK, Bangladesh, India, and Germany reports as well as through our workers’ centre activities.

We continue to emphasise that the experiences of workers are central to our methodology. As such, this year we experimented with new methods of worker engagement. We have promoted four visual campaigns in Colombia, Brazil, the UK and Germany, including coproducing street art with an artists’ collective in a busy district of Bogotá, Colombia.

Finally, as the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided, we have been able to organise our first in-person Fairwork Annual Summit, hosted by the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia. After years of working together online, we were able to bring together 41 researchers in person from our network, as well as many online participants to discuss challenges and build a common vision to promote fairer platform work in the future.