Platform Predicament – Making sense of a datafied future of work

The largest businesses of the world today are set up on the platform model. It is often said that the modern-day capitalist does not own the means of production, but the means of “connection”, and that’s exactly what platform companies such as Amazon, Uber, DoorDash, TopCoder and Zomato do.

It’s worth noting, that Since 2010, there has been a five-fold rise globally in the number of such digital labour platforms that facilitate online work The global south has a large part of this share.

These platform companies are the new, invisible bosses in this datafied world of work, relying heavily on the network effects of data, and algorithmic management tools, to capture vast markets in their respective sectors. While the innovation such platforms have brought in is admirable, it brings with it many important implications for labour law, workers’ data rights, data governance and corporate governance.

Brought to you by IT for Change and supported by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and Fair Green Global (FGG), this podcast series explores the very bold and very quick changes taking place in the labour economy today, driven by rapid digitalisation and platformisation of the workplace.

Over the course of the series, we listen to experts viz. labour economy researchers, trade unionists, platform workers, and platform founders, to understand the origins of platform based work, how “gig work” intersects with it, what this means for the employment question right now as well as in the coming years, the power that data holds in this work model and who holds power over it, what issues of labour rights and data rights of workers emerge, and also what alternative models of platform based work are coming up in different parts of the world, to counter some of the criticisms of the current platform model.

Join us as we break down this Podcast Predicament, and attempt to make sense of this datafied future of work.