Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2023: Work in the Planetary Labour Market

The Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2023 assesses and scores basic standards of fairness in working arrangements on 15 web-based digital labour platforms according to the five Fairwork principles: fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation.

This year’s scores, show that platforms are still far from safeguarding the basic standards of fair work expressed in our five principles. Three platforms scored 5 points out of 10. For the other 12 platforms, we were unable to get evidence that they met more than 3 of our 10 thresholds. For four platforms, we could not find evidence that they met any threshold.

The Fairwork cloudwork research has revealed precarious conditions for workers active in microwork platforms that provide services such as data annotation and labelling, video scoring and model evaluation to artificial intelligence (AI) companies. Microwork platforms were among the lowest scores in our evaluation this year. While the run for AI deployments gets public hype and momentum, workers behind the design, building and testing of these technological solutions, unfortunately, still face enormous challenges and experience unfair working conditions.