November 8, 2017

Eight European crowdsourcing platforms, the German Crowdsourcing Association (Deutscher Crowdsourcing Verband), and the German Metalworkers’ Union (IG Metall) announced today the establishment of a joint Ombuds Office. The Ombuds Office will be tasked with resolving disputes between crowdworkers, clients, and crowdsourcing platforms and with overseeing enforcement of the “Crowdsourcing Code of Conduct” adopted by the platforms. The Code of Conduct is signed by the German crowdsourcing platforms Testbirds, clickworker, Streetspotr, Crowd Guru, AppJobber, content.de, and… Read More

June 19, 2017

On July 16, 2017, the European Parliament adopted a text proposing to regulate the “collaborative economy,” including labor platforms. Read More

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

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

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

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

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