By 2030, 50% of lower-level white-collar jobs will have been lost, the CEO of Anthropic, a leading AI company, warned a few days ago.
Economist Nouriel Roubini, known as “Dr. Doom” for his ominous predictions, is more sanguine. He estimates that within 20 years, job losses could reach 80% in some sectors, pushing unemployment to 20% and making a Universal Basic Income, instead of a salary, necessary.
But while much has been said about job losses due to AI, we know little about the jobs of those who “feed” AI. Millions of online workers around the world are paid by the piece by developing software, categorizing or annotating data, and shaping content to feed these AI platforms, for little money.
These largely invisible workers have been dubbed “cloudworkers” by the Fairwork project, an organisation for labour rights on digital platforms. The Fairwork Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University and the renowned Berlin Center for Social Research (WZB).
Cloud workers are mainly – though not exclusively – found in the global South, as the economically weaker countries are called. They are paid low wages even by their own standards and have almost no employment rights or recourse in the event of unfair treatment by their employers. Globally, according to the World Bank, there may be 435 million cloud workers. This is a huge number, corresponding to 5.4% of the world’s population, almost as many as 60% of the inhabitants of Europe.
The Fairwork Project annually assesses the working conditions prevailing on the most well-known online platforms for cloudwork – work in the cloud. Unfortunately, little progress has been made in recent years.
What is cloud work?
The term “cloud workers” refers to those who work remotely. as freelancers, on digital work platforms, as opposed to, for example, employees at Uber or on food delivery platforms, who transport customers or products.
“We are talking about a sector of the digital economy where workers are poorly paid and are not even covered by a basic framework of labor rights. And because they are competing with people from all over the world, it is a race to the bottom.”
Faced with this “planetary workforce,” as Fairwork calls it, not even Karl Marx could have imagined such a huge “reserve army of labor,” as he called the unemployed.
The endless supply of would-be programmers, data commentators, translators, or those who click on myriad other “micro-tasks,” says Valente, means there will always be someone willing to do that work for less.
So on the growing number of platforms, from Fiverr to Upwork to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, workers in lower-income, emerging, or developing economies tend to “undervalue” themselves in order to compete with workers in even lower-income economies.
The doubly invisible cloudworkers
At the European level, but also in Greece, there is a legislative framework for platform workers. However, it mainly focuses on “gig workers” who work mainly as distributors, couriers, drivers, technicians or care workers through digital applications. The European Union has also begun to consider legislative measures for the impact of artificial intelligence on work. However, there is no provision for the armies of “cloud workers”, who “build” and “train” AI applications.
Exploitative platforms
To overcome the lack of institutional protection of labor rights for cloudworkers, the Fairwork program has created a framework for the control of online work, putting pressure on platforms to meet some minimum conditions of decent work.
In its annual report, Fairwork rates platforms out of 10, based on how well they meet some basic standards of decent work: fair pay, reducing precariousness, having recourse mechanisms for punitive practices, ensuring that workers are paid for the work they have completed, and monitoring and addressing health and safety risks. A “perfect 10” simply means that the platform meets Fairwork’s minimum standards for workers’ rights and pay.
The platforms that were in the spotlight were chosen either for their global reach or for their popularity in local markets. They included platforms such as Egypt-based Elharefa or Spanish-speaking SoyFreelancer, as well as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, Freelancer and Upwork.
Mechanical Turk and Freelancer received a score of 0 out of 10. Fiverr received just 2 out of 10 and Appen only 3 out of 10. Only four platforms were found to pay their workers the equivalent of the local minimum wage.
Unpaid work
A very serious risk on these platforms is unpaid work. Some platforms like Freelancer.com operate on a “bidding” model, where workers must first complete their work and submit it to the buyer. The buyer then chooses the work and freelancer they are most satisfied with, while the others are not paid.
While the overall picture looks bleak, it is not all doom and gloom. Some platforms, like Appen, are working with Fairwork to improve pay and working conditions. A possible next step is to issue a certificate that companies can post on their platforms to prove they operate ethically. Something like Fair Trade certifications, but for digital supply chains.
According to Firework, this could be a positive development, both for gig work companies and cloud workers. If certified companies come out of hiding and prove that they treat freelancers fairly, more will move to these platforms and the companies that have them will earn more commissions – and profits.
