Worker Profile: Rochelle

April 30, 2017

First in our series of crowdworker profiles is Rochelle. She lives in Los Angeles and on Twitter as @Rochelle. She works on Amazon Mechanical Turk as a worker and also co-owns and moderates a public forum for Mechanical Turk workers and requesters called MTurkCrowd.com. How did you find out about Mechanical Turk? I first heard about the platform in 2007 from a friend who went to a tech conference where… Read More

Foodora couriers found works council

April 28, 2017

Bicycle couriers working for the app-based restaurant delivery service Foodora in Vienna have founded a works council (“Betriebsrat” in German), the Austrian transport and services union vida announced on April 12. vida supported the efforts of the couriers to form the works council. To our knowledge this is the first works council in the world to be founded for an app- or platform-based business. As in some other European countries, works councils… Read More

Eight German labor platforms sign “Crowdsourcing Code of Conduct 2.0”

March 17, 2017

Eight Germany-based platforms have signed a document in which they agreed to include “local wage standards” as a factor in setting prices on their platforms. The document, the “Crowdsourcing Code of Conduct“, is a revised and expanded version of a document first published in 2015 under the same name, with three platforms as signatories. The Code was first initiated by Munich-based software testing platform Testbirds and is officially supported by the… Read More

content.de and IG Metall host joint workshop

March 17, 2017

On March 19, German writing platform content.de and IG Metall (the German Metalworkers’ Union) hosted a joint workshop in Dortmund. Workers, platform operators, and unionists discussed workers’ experiences and working conditions on the platform. Herford-based content.de acts as a marketplace for writing and is one of the signatories of the “2017 Crowdsourcing Code of Conduct“. The day-long workshop proceeded in roughly three phases. First, all participants introduced themselves. As most participants were… Read More

Testbirds and IG Metall hold joint workshop

March 17, 2017

On February 15, German software testing platform Testbirds and IG Metall (the German Metalworkers’ Union) hosted a joint workshop in Munich. Workers, platform operators, and unionists discussed workers’ experiences and working conditions on the platform. The group agreed to meet a second time and a detailed write-up of the meeting (from the perspective of several workers who were present) is available on the Testbirds blog. At the workshop we also learned… Read More

Überblick zu digitalen Plattformen

March 8, 2017

There are thousands of digital labor platforms, and often they are discussed as if they were roughly the same. Design theorist and journalist Florian Alexander Schmidt has classified the various platforms in a report published by the Fredrich Ebert Foundation. Read More