Umthombo 4 - Magazine - Page 7

Fair
work
in the
GIG ECONOMY
PHOTOGRAPH: RAWPIXEL.COM
Two months after launching the first-ever international ranking of working
conditions and standards in the platform economy, Fairwork released four
new ratings for South African digital labour platforms.
airwork is a collaboration
between the University of Cape
Town (UCT) and the University
of the Western Cape in South
Africa, and the universities of Oxford
and Manchester in the United Kingdom.
The rating system offers a comparison
of the best and worst working standards
in the digital or gig economy.
As part of a 30-month project
funded by the Global Challenge
Research Fund, UCT’s Professor JeanPaul van Belle and Dr Paul Mungai
(Department of Information Systems)
measured digital labour platforms’
levels of adherence to five Fairwork
principles: fair pay, fair contracts, fair
conditions, fair management and
fair representation. These include
evaluating whether a company pays
the minimum wage and ensures the
health and safety of its workers.
“Fairwork aims to encourage
platforms to be transparent about the
work that they provide and to ultimately
create better, and fairer, jobs,” said
Van Belle.
Ratings: a useful measure
Fairwork scores are useful to companies
that want to highlight how the jobs
they create are better than those of
their competitors. They are also useful
to regulators who seek benchmarks
against which to evaluate platforms.
“They are useful to consumers
and clients who seek to make more
informed decisions about how they
spend their money,” added Van Belle.
“And they are also useful to workers
as they seek to achieve better working
conditions.”
The ratings help consumers to make
ethical and informed choices about the
platforms they choose when ordering
commodities and services such as food,
cleaning services and transport – or
outsourcing a simple task.
Oxford’s Professor Mark Graham,
lead researcher on the Fairwork
project, said the addition of these
new platforms will allow for greater
comparison among companies with
similar missions.
“This is critical in the development
of international standards in the gig
economy, as workers, clients and
managers will now be able to draw
direct comparisons between competing
platforms,” he said.
The platforms evaluated in the
survey were Wumdrop, Domestly, Uber
Eats and Nomad Now.
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