Crowd Work: Shame, Secrets, and an Imminent Threat to Employment

Kristy Milland

You may have no idea what crowd work is, and that is understandable. Most people do not. Crowd work is not a job that many aspire to, nor is it one that workers are necessarily proud of. It may not carry as much shame as some other jobs, but due to the low pay and unfair treatment workers often experience, it is not a job to boast about.

Crowd work comes in a variety of forms, but I define it as any paid work which is offered to or completed by a large group of people. Crowd work is the dirty secret of major corporations. It is a rising threat to economies and governments around the world, and it could be a future for many people as they try to make a living. In this article I wish to reveal the exploitation of crowd work, the pressing threat it has become when paired with automation, and some possible avenues of resistance that we can use to protect ourselves and our loved ones in a future where this is the only option left for income generation. I want to show the reality of crowd work and how harmful it could become.

An Introduction to the Platforms
A few major forms of crowd work are found today. The first are macro-task platforms such as Upwork, Uber, and Fiverr, where work is offered to a large group of people, but only one completes it. Competition is fierce, so pay declines over time, and worker reputation, which is key to accessing more work, is totally in the hands of the work requester.

Work Struggles at Amazon in Germany and Beyond

Workers in the logistics sector have tremendous leverage because they work at the global intersection between production and circulation of goods. However, they and their unions are seldom prepared for the transnational tactics used by corporations to undermine worker struggles, such as building distribution centres abroad or sourcing deliveries from non-striking centres.

In Germany, however, workers from Amazon, the leading US e-commerce multinational, have been organising for more than two years with some success. With the support of solidarity groups, they have developed international relationships with workers from other Amazon sites, such as Polish workers who are usually considered a threat owing to their lower salaries. Such self-organisation shows that a section of the organised workers at Amazon have the willingness to organise beyond national borders and are ready to take an emancipatory path.

‘Work hard, have fun, make history’[1]

Amazon was founded in 1994 in the US, and opened its first centre in Germany in 1999. It now has nine distribution centres with about 10 000 workers. Worldwide, it has about 230 000 full-time and 100 000 short-time employees.

Work in a distribution centre is industrial and comparable to a factory: individualised mass distribution, reliance on machinery such as goods-picking robots, assembly lines, and advanced division of labour and standardisation of tasks. It is therefore more appropriate to call these centres ‘distribution factories’, and Amazon’s success lies more in increasing the rate of exploitation than in innovative business strategies.

Working in the solidarity economy: between precarity and emancipation

Jacob Carlos Lima

Angela Maria Carneiro Araújo

Marcia de Paula Leite



Since the early 2000s, the discussion on the role and nature of cooperatively organised work in Brazil has been intense, reflecting its multiple facets: as a form of cost-cutting and labour precarisation; as an alternative way of generating jobs and income; or as a democratic form of labour organisation, based on the principles of cooperativism and self-management.

Between 2007 and 2011, we researched the management experiences of cooperatives formed by local authorities, NGOs and trade unions in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo (De Paula Leite et al, 2015), asking questions like: To what extent are cooperatives and associations a form of employment creation and income generation? We also examined their scope for transforming gender relations: who are the men and women who work in these cooperatives? How does the form of work organisation affect gender relations within the workplace?

To overcome the difficulty of finding reliable, current data, we surveyed associative labour in the State of São Paulo and conducted field work at several solidarity economy units.

Working poverty in many sizes: A survey of Delhi garment workers challenges key assumptions in the labour standards debate

Alessandra Mezzadri

Three years after Rana Plaza, garment workers worldwide still endure poor working conditions. The industry has witnessed several ‘minor’ disasters and sweatshop scandals since then. In Cambodia, a garment factory outside Phnom Pehn collapsed and fell into a pond a month after Rana Plaza. Images of garment workers swimming to safety amidst floating pieces of clothing appeared in major newspapers (O'Keeffe K. and Narin, 2013). In 2014, Cambodian garment workers were subjected to a wave of state-based violence (Sotheary, 2014). The industry made news yet again in February this year, when the sports’ gear giant Rip Curl was named and shamed for producing in North Korea, where many factory workers endure ‘slave-like’ conditions, according to Labour Behind the Label. The label on the clothing read ‘Made in China’. Rip Curl declared they had no idea their goods were being made in North Korea, blaming unauthorised, hidden subcontracting by suppliers.

Challenging the standard story about labour standards

The common narrative is that, while labour standards might work in tier-one factories (those with direct relation to the global buyer), the problem - so the story goes - is that many tier-one factories further outsource production to ‘unauthorised’ sub-contractors. This is a key message in the recent Stern report, whose focus on informal garment units beyond tier-one factories unveiled several noteworthy issues and sparked fierce criticisms (See Anner and Bair, 2016). In particular, it questions the coverage and effectiveness of the Bangladeshi Accord on Fire and Building Safety (the Accord).

Coordination among strikes and prospects for pattern bargaining in Vietnam

Chi Do Quynh

The 1995 Labour Code granted Vietnamese workers the right to strike. However, none of the more than 5 000 strikes since then followed legal procedures, nor was organised by the official union, the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL). While the VGCL called these wildcat strikes ‘purely spontaneous’ (Chi and Van den Broek 2013), many studies proved they were organised by rank-and-file workers with the covert support of the Vietnamese mid-managers in foreign-owned enterprises, and sometimes even the official union leaders in the enterprises (Clarke and Pringle 2007, Anner and Xiu 2015). Based on a longitudinal study of strikes from 2005 to 2015 in seven provinces of Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh City, Dong Nai, Binh Duong, Long An, Hanoi, Bac Ninh and Hai Phong, this paper finds that not only are strikes well organised, but there is also coordination among strikes. Strike waves result from the characteristics of industrial clusters, coordination among foreign employers, and worker communities inside industrial zones, which together create the basis of informal pattern bargaining.[1]

Organisation of strikes

Most strikes happened without advance notice or any attempt by the de facto leaders to negotiate with the employers. A smaller number of strikes, however, happened after several attempts to bargain informally. These strikes were often organised as follows: a group of rank-and-file workers petitions the employers, either directly or via the official union leader. The petition states the workers’ hardships and presents demands. It gives a deadline for the employer’s response, and fixes a date for the strike if the employer fails to respond or refuses the workers’ demands. In these companies, the informal leadership is active not only during strikes but also after. According to Tran (2013), the de facto leaders are often team leaders or experienced workers who have built networks among rank-and-file workers in the workplace and in their community, often around common cultural identities such as gender, province of origin or workplace.