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Companies play a crucial role in shaping the quality of the jobs they facilitate. Through its research and ratings system, Fairwork actively collaborates with companies to encourage and reward pro-worker changes in their policies and practices. With the Fairwork Principles as a guide, companies can improve conditions for workers and thus build safer and fairer businesses.
As a result of engaging with Fairwork, 66 unique companies have agreed to make a total of 414 pro-worker changes to their policies and practices. These changes have been secured across all five Fairwork Principles. They include:
Since 2023, Fairwork has also been deepening its engagement with companies through events for platform managers in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well as for cloudwork (online remote work). These events have so far involved 32 platform managers across 31 platforms and 21 countries. In 2024, Fairwork also established a joint working group with platform companies to improve the conditions of online work. The “Fairwork Cloudwork Initiative” brings managers from each of the participating platform companies to meet regularly with members of the Fairwork research team, to discuss best practices for implementing pro-worker changes and commitments into their policies and practices. All of these efforts have enabled Fairwork to engage companies more closely with research findings, while also creating spaces for dialogue about how those findings could be acted upon in practice. Based on feedback from participants, Fairwork researchers created a best practices document, which provides real-world examples of how companies have met the Fairwork principles.
In 2023, the translation services platform Creative Words made an impressive 14 changes to increase transparency of management decisions, improve access to appeals processes, remove non-compete clauses, and support worker representation because of Fairwork. Such changes represent concrete improvements in the lives of workers, allowing them to take part in fair and dignified work.
After making these changes, Creative Words met all the thresholds of the Fairwork Cloudwork Principles, becoming the first-ever platform to achieve a 10/10 Fairwork score. This rating, and Creative Word’s ongoing collaboration with Fairwork, proves definitively that the Fairwork Principles are not just achievable, but desirable.
Engaging with policymakers is a key pillar of Fairwork’s approach to driving positive change for workers in the digital economy. Fairwork research has played a role in shaping policies that impact millions of workers, though the complexities of politics can make it difficult to trace a direct line between our work and specific policy developments. We do, however, have clear evidence that Fairwork research is embedded in various policy debates in jurisdictions around the world.
The UK’s Digital Development Strategy 2024-2030 by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), notes that, in its agenda on the digital transformation of labour markets, it will seek to complement Fairwork’s existing work
A 2023 US Senator Ed Markey drew on the Fairwork AI principles for a letter sent by him and colleagues (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jamaal Bowman, Katie Porter, Mark Pocan, Ron Wyden and Pramilia Jayapal) to artificial intelligence companies on data worker labour conditions. The Fairwork Cloudwork Scorings 2023 report was also subsequently consulted by Senator Markey’s office to provide comment on the responses that companies submitted.
The Fairwork Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore teams were involved in consultations on the “2023 ASEAN Employment Outlook: The Quest for Decent Work in Platform Economy: Issues, Opportunities and Ways Forward.” The report cites Fairwork as a “benchmark that stakeholders can use to assess platform labour practices” that “international, regional, and local communities can adopt.”
At Fairwork, we believe that when faced with a choice between a poor-scoring company and a better-scoring one, many consumers will choose the most ethical option. Surveys conducted by Fairwork in the UK (London), Brazil (São Paulo) and Colombia (Bogotá) showed that there is collective consumer belief that more robust regulation is required to better protect digital workers.
Our annual ratings allow consumers to select the highest-scoring company operating in a sector, thus applying pressure on companies to improve the working conditions offered. Our “Choose Fairness” tool makes it easier than ever to look up the scores of platforms in your area according to the service you need.
Beyond the tool, we work to ensure Fairwork ratings reach a consumer audience using five key tactics:
In 2021, Fairwork Pledge launched a two-tiered pledge to enable organisations and individuals to publicly express and action their support for fairer working conditions. So far, the pledge has been signed by 73 organisations representing almost 27 million people. If you care about the rights of digital workers, you too can sign the Fairwork pledge.
In 2024, McDonald’s Germany joined the Fairwork pledge. With more than 1,400 restaurants across Germany serving meals to more than 2.5 million customers per day – many of them delivered by gig workers from all the major platforms – this commitment from McDonald’s should catalyse meaningful change for workers in Germany’s digital economy. You can read more about this partnership on the corporate social responsibility website from McDonald’s Germany and the Fairwork blog.
Companies across industries increasingly rely on data enrichment or other business process outsourcing (BPO) services throughout their supply chains. The AI data pipelines in which these activities are embedded often involve non-transparent and dispersed workforces, and many lower-level tasks occur in regions with limited regulations. This makes it difficult to identify and address labour standard violations. With the implementation of new corporate sustainability due diligence regulations in jurisdictions like Germany and the EU, understanding the working conditions in these value chain segments is becoming even more important to companies’ due diligence duties. Fairwork is helping companies navigate this challenging landscape, supporting them with due diligence activities, including risk assessment, remediation, monitoring & evaluation, and reporting.
If you or your company need support with due diligence or are interested in becoming Fairwork certified, please get in touch for a tailored quote.
Fairwork works with journalists to broaden the reach of our findings through newspapers, radio, and TV. To date, Fairwork’s research has been covered in more than 1,600 stories in media outlets across more than 40 countries.
We have actively communicated our research through a range of multimedia outputs shared online. This includes producing two seasons of a podcast that highlights the experiences of workers and insights from researchers across three continents. The podcast examines how platforms like YouTube, OnlyFans, Appen, and Scale are reshaping the global landscapes of labour, revealing the interconnected dynamics of platform work on an international scale.
Fairwork’s YouTube channel features engaging content that brings its research to life, making its significance clear and accessible to anyone who interacts with digital platforms or AI-enabled tools.
In Colombia, Brazil, the UK, Germany, Bosnia and Ghana, Fairwork has conducted public awareness campaigns using billboards and street art aimed at increasing the visibility of Fairwork’s ratings and raising broad awareness of platform workers’ conditions among the public and policymakers.
The ultimate goal of Fairwork’s research is to improve the lives of workers in the digital economy so naturally, workers are crucial to the project’s theory of change. We engage in ongoing collaborations with workers’ representatives and advocates around the world and use our research to support them in developing and deploying evidence-based strategies for securing their rights.
Workers are involved in all stages of Fairwork’s research process. At the beginning of every scoring cycle, researchers organise a stakeholder workshop to introduce the forthcoming research and to receive feedback from a wide range of stakeholders, which importantly includes all trade unions relevant to the research focus. Then, throughout the scoring cycles, we rely on workers’ bodies to provide important evidence regarding the policies and practices of the platforms we are scoring. We ensure our research also takes workers’ experiences into account directly by conducting surveys and interviews with workers at all of the companies we score. To date, Fairwork has engaged with almost 7,400 workers worldwide. We also solicit input from workers, associations and unions’ feedback when conducting our biannual updates to the Fairwork principles, and their expert feedback is critical to ensuring these principles are adequate in assessing the fairness of work in the digital economy.
Fairwork is also committed to building solidarity between workers’ groups and movements. In 2023, Fairwork facilitated meetings between trade unions, confederations, and workers associations at the national (Brazil, Tanzania, Kenya), regional (Africa) and international level. These meetings have led to the formation of workers’ groups such as the Africa Unions and Worker Representatives (APWR) and a platform workers’ association in Peru, founded in collaboration with one of the leading trade union confederations there.
Fairwork has also collaborated with workers’ groups to make our research more accessible to workers in a variety of geographies. The project has produced resources with and for workers including informational pamphlets in Brazil, Kenya and the Philippines, and context-sensitive illustrations of the Fairwork principles by local artists in Colombia, Philippines, South Africa, Indonesia, Ghana, Egypt and UK. Posters with these illustrations were seen on the picket lines when the South African Western Cape E-hailing Association (WCEA) staged a three-day strike in 2024 appealing to companies like Bolt, Uber and inDriver to meet their demands for fairer work.
We also maintain a directory of unions and workers’ associations. If you would like to be added to this, please reach out to info@fair.work
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