News

On 20 October, UNI Europa in cooperation with the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) held a workshop on the future of employment in a digital economy. The workshop brought together Members of the European Parliament, trade unionists, and researchers to discuss new strategies for the creation of quality jobs and social justice in the era of digitalisation. The discussion focussed in particular on the practice of ‘crowdsourcing’ – a system where employers post job offers on online platforms, often no more than ‘micro tasks’, for which self-employed workers bid competitively.  Such practices encourage workers to undercut each other’s wage demands, bypass collective agreements, and exclude workers from social security as no permanent employment relationship is established on such platforms. The discussions held at the workshop focussed on the social challenges arising in this context, the state of play of EU policy, and on avenues for progressive policies and trade union action to organise the digital workforce.

While EU policy currently fails to support high levels of worker and social protection in digital labour markets, trade unions and activists are taking important steps to secure a socially just digital age. Several European trade unions, among them UNI Europa affiliate ver.di, are beginning to develop legal and support services for crowdworkers. At the same time, corwdworkers are beginning to organise themselves and to take collective action, like the workers on Amazon’s platform ‘Mechanical Turk’ that are campaigning for decent pay and fair treatment. Their leader, Kristy Milland, was present on 20 October to provide a detailed and exciting account of how workers’ power can be built under the conditions of digital platform capitalism.

Digitalisation and the future of work will be one of the key topics addressed by the UNI Europa conference taking place in Rome in March 2016. A recent assessment of the European Union’s current digitalisation strategy issued by UNI Europa can be found here.