What Are Online Labour Platforms?

Words: Robbie Warin

Image: Saskia Hughes

Online platforms play an ever increasing role in our daily interactions. Facebook and its subsidiaries mediate our social lives, Amazon mediates how we shop, and so it was inevitable that platforms would begin to mediate how we access paid work. Simply put, a platform is any space which facilitates different groups and individuals to come together for a shared purpose. They’ve existed in the offline world for as long as we have, a market being the most obvious example. As enough of us have come to rely on our phones and computers to shape how we access goods and services, platforms have moved online and increasingly shape how some of us access paid work. Whilst you might not have ever heard of labour platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Upwork, you certainly have heard of another labour platform — Uber.

What connects these 3 platforms is that they position themselves not as employers, but as the providers of a technology to connect a pool of self-employed workers with employers for short-term gig work. But whilst these three platforms share a number of similarities, the critical difference between the model of Uber, or say the food delivery service Deliveroo, is that if you want someone to give you a lift to the station, or bring you a pizza, they at least need to be in the same country as you. Whereas if you want someone to design you a new website, fill in a survey, or transcribe audio, it doesn’t matter if they live next door or a thousand miles away. Whilst they share a lot in common, platforms where the only communication is online, and where there is no need for employer and worker to share the same geographic space — defined in this issue by the term Online Labour Platforms — have their own specific set of issues and implications for the wider world of work.

It is these platforms that this issue will focus on, the platforms facilitating the connection of employers with workers spread across the globe, in countries with endless different social, political and economic landscapes. You’ll hear a number of names throughout this issue of the different platforms, and countless exist to cater for various different industries and markets. The top five biggest by web traffic are:

1. Upwork

2. Freelancer

3. Amazon Mechanical Turk

4. People per Hour

5. Guru

Work on Online Labour Platforms is not all alike and can usefully be categorised into two categories:

Microwork: low skill level requiring little other than a basic mastery of a computer and no communication between employer at worker.

Example: Filling in surveys, labelling datasets, writing short blog articles.

Macrowork: the completion of complex task requiring particular skillsets and a level of communication between employer and worker.

Example: Graphic design, website design, copywriting.

Together, this ecosystem of platforms makes up the side of the gig economy that tends to be left out of mainstream discussion of worker rights, involving the offshoring of work from the global north to self-employed workers based predominately in the global south.