Abstract: The talk will address the possibilities and limits of decent work in the digital economy, especially in the context of digital labour platforms and artificial intelligence. In the first part, the talk will present the Fairwork project, and what has been done to pressure different stakeholders - such as companies, policy makers, governments and unions - to guarantee decent work on gig work platforms (e.g. Uber) and in relation to workers behind artificial intelligence, whether on “global” platforms (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk) or local business processing outsourcing (BPOs) (e.g. Sama, Kenya, whose workers train data for ChatGPT). In the second part, the talk will present how workers have learned to govern platforms and AI in order to guarantee decent work, through, for example, worker-owned platforms and platform cooperatives. The talk will present two cases, that of the Homeless Worker Movement, in Brazil, which created a Technology Division and is organizing tech workers, and workers in the construction and cleaning sectors through technologies, and the case of the Hollywood Writers’ strike, which is an example of worker-led AI governance, in an unprecedented case of agreement in relation to generative AI. The talk will end with the lessons learned in relation to academia and worker relationships towards ensuring decent work in the digital economy.
Rafael Grohmann is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (critical platform studies) at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is leader of DigiLabour initiative, and researcher of Fairwork and Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab projects. He is the PI of the SSHRC-funded project “Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP”, an action research with delivery and tech workers in Brazil and Argentina. He is one of the editors-in-chief of the journal Platforms & Society, launched by SAGE in March, 2024. Rafael is working on a book project on how workers are experimenting, failing and learning how to govern platforms and AI.
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