Brokering Labor in the Local Platform Labor Economy:
Towards Fairer Work Conditions
Project Director: Cheryll Ruth R. Soriano
Funding Agency: The University of Oxford
This project will examine the conditions of workers engaged in on-demand service and cloudwork platforms, and the socio-technical infrastructure underlying them, and will assess the labor arrangements facilitated by labor platform design using five fairwork principles: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management, and fair representation. The project aims to arrive at policy and program interventions for shaping fairer local labor standards and structures for gig and freelance workers (specifically) and for the global digital economy (broadly). For Phase 1, the research will involve the analysis and scoring of the labor conditions on eight platforms operating in the Philippines, to run for approximately six months. The review will engage three methods: 1) desk research (platform design and contract analysis); 2) interviews/ FGD with workers; and 3) interviews with platform managers.