Fairwork Podcast
By Fairwork
From online freelancing to couriering, domestic work to beauticians, digital platforms are radically changing the frontiers of work. This is a podcast series about the workers who make up the gig economy. Each episode we speak to workers who have made headlines with legal cases, taken part in strikes and those just quietly getting on with trying to put food on the table. We ask the big questions, looking at the political and the personal – exploring the radical changes to our world of work through the eyes of those at its centre. Written & Produced by Robbie Warin. Music by Louis Borlase. Fairwork is an action-research project based at the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre that evaluates and rates the working conditions of digital platforms across the world.
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Latest episode
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011: Coda
In the final episode of this series of the Fairwork Podcast, we look back at the different stories we've heard, what lessons have we learnt? What can these stories tell us about the nature of work in planetary labour markets? What are the challeng… -
010: A Roof Over My Head
Research conducted by our colleagues at the Online Labour Index at the Oxford Internet Institute found that in 2020, Serbia had around 70,000 people finding work on digital platforms. That’s around 2% of the total workforce, giving Serbia the high… -
009: A Guide to Making Friends as a Freelancer
In this series of the Fairwork podcast, we’ve looked at work in the planetary labour market, we’ve looked at the experiences and stories of workers who work via digital platforms, from Colombia, to Germany, the USA to the UK. But in each of these … -
008: A Platform Named Desire
The history of the internet and of pornography are deeply intertwined, they mix and overlap that to see one without the other is to only capture half the picture. And the human desire for sex is often a desire that has driven the development of ma… -
007: OnlyBans
In the summer of 2021, probably the world’s largest sex work platform, OnlyFans announced that it would be banning creators from posting sexual content. The platform which rose to prominence in the pandemic, allows people to monetise the content t… -
006: YouTube Gets A Union Part 2
If you’re making your living from YouTube, there’s no financial safety net, no contract, no sick pay, holiday pay. it’s a fierce popularity contest in which an individual’s earnings is largely determined by a set of black box systems; recommendati… -
005: YouTube Gets A Union - Part 1
In 2019 a poll found that 30% of children in the UK and the US would choose being a Youtuber as their preferred profession ahead of jobs like astronaught, musician, athlete, or teacher – making it the top rated profession amongst school age childr… -
004: Love, Loss and Unpaid Wages
In this episode of the podcast, we hear the story of Lisa, a worker on Appen, based in the UK. We hear her story of struggling to make a living or Appen, or maybe more accurately, struggling to not make a living, in this epic tale of love, loss an… -
Bonus Episode: Strike
Many members of Fairwork staff at the University of Oxford took part recently in 3 days strike action against falling wages, casualisation, pension cuts and increasing workload. The action was part of a nationwide strike across the university sect… -
003: The Strange Case of Dr Scale and Mr Remotasks
Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence, one which underpins a huge amount of modern life. If you’re using a computer, smartphone and searching the internet, then you encounter machine learning. It's ubiquitous. And machine learning,…
