Regulating digital crowdwork and the need for global responses

The growth of the digital platform economy has led to an increasing global division of labour via web-based labour platforms where work is outsourced by businesses through an open call to a globally geographically dispersed crowd also called "crowdwork". 'Global' crowdwork risks triggering a race to the bottom on wages and workers' rights, related to geographical differences in skills and labour costs. A key consideration for policy makers and regulators is addressing inequities, by enabling the relevant stakeholders to work together to ensure level playing-field rules across national jurisdictions, reverting a potential degradation of core labour standards, and social dumping. Responding to this challenge, we argue, international regulation of labour platforms appears necessary. To this end, inspiration can be taken from voluntary cross-border social dialogue initiatives and agreements such as the transnational company agreements and global sectoral collective bargaining whose effectiveness in promoting labour standards in multinational companies and highly globalised industries has been already tested.