Join DiPLab & Friends at Fairwork Online Workshop (30 Oct 2025)

DiPLab - Monday, October 20, 2025

We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, October 30, 3:30 CET/2:30 GMT, Dr. Paola Tubaro (DiPLab, CNRS) will be speaking at the upcoming FairWork workshop, alongside Dr. Milagros Miceli (DiPLab associate researcher, DAIR, and Weizenbaum Institute) and Ephantus Kanyugi (INDL plenary speaker and DiPLab collaborator). Together, they will contribute to discussions on ongoing research and initiatives around online labour and workers’ rights. The event will bring together leading scholars, trade union representatives, and workers’ associations to explore the realities of online work—its challenges, working conditions, and regulatory perspectives.

You are all invited to register here.

Fairwork Project

“Online Workers’ Challenges, Working Conditions, and Regulation”

October 30, 2:30 PM GMT

Online workers (also called cloudworkers, crowdworkers, or microworkers) are a key part of the platform economy. Platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, Freelancer, and others gather millions of workers worldwide. A report recently estimated up to 435 million workers globally (Datta et al., 2023). Studies have highlighted how these workers face precarity, fierce competition (usually at an international level), underpayment and unpaid labour, poor working conditions, unfair management, and health and safety risks and harms.

Since platforms impose a self-employment model, these workers are excluded from basic labour protection. Additionally, the nature of these platforms creates barriers for workers to organize. These issues pose extra obstacles for cloudworkers to fight for better conditions and to participate in regulatory discussions.

This online workshop will gather world-leading researchers on this topic and confederations, trade unions, and associations to discuss the problems cloudworkers face and potential paths to improve their working conditions. It will also discuss paths to address those issues in regulatory debates (from the ILO convention to regional and national proposals). The workshop is organized by the Fairwork Cloudwork Project, based at the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
The workshop will take place online on October 30 at 2:30 PM British Time. The language used will be English.

Find the registration link here: https://wzb-eu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tIzk-95LTSinQEqRr_dJjQ

Union representatives and workers’ leaders are welcome. Feel free to share this invitation with unions and workers’ associations that have initiatives aimed at these workers or are interested in the topic.

Agenda
2:30 PM GMT (3:30 PM CET) – Opening Remarks – Jonas Valente
2:40 PM GMT (3:40 PM CET) – Findings from Researchers

Jonas Valente – Fairwork Project, Oxford Internet Institute
Milagros Miceli – Data Workers’ Inquiry, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and Weizenbaum Institute
Paola Tubaro – DiPlab, Centre national de la recherche scientifique

3:20 PM GMT (4:20 PM CET) – Reflections from Unions and Workers’ Associations

Monica Tepfer – International Trade Union Confederation Legal Officer
Hod Anyigba, Chief Economist, ITUC-Africa
Lucie Susova – European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) Adviser
Marcelo Di Stefano, Secretary of Trade Union Strengthening and Organization of the TUCA
Ephantus Kanyugi, Vice President of the Data Labelers Association

4:00 PM GMT (5:00 PM CET) – Q&A
4:25 PM GMT (5:25 PM CET) – Final Remarks