{"id":42635,"date":"2023-10-20T15:22:39","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/protecting-the-rights-of-the-digital-workforce-in-the-gig-economy-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:22:39","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:22:39","slug":"protecting-the-rights-of-the-digital-workforce-in-the-gig-economy-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/protecting-the-rights-of-the-digital-workforce-in-the-gig-economy-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Protecting the rights of the digital workforce in the ‘gig’ economy – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
Spurred by advances in digital technology, an on-demand workforce has been growing steadily for well over a decade, creating a new \u201cgig\u201d economy. This is an economy in which more and more people either choose to, or are forced to, earn their livelihood working on lots of small \u201cgigs\u201d rather than being employed full- or part-time.<\/p>\n
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While the gig economy can offer greater flexibility and economic efficiencies, it also spells the rise of an anxious, disenfranchised workforce glued to their smartphones or laptops, waiting for the next gig to materialise.<\/p>\n
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First there were service marketplaces such as Elance, oDesk (now Upwork), Freelancer, and 99Designs- through which computer professionals and designers competed for one-off or short-term assignments. Then came the current wave of digital platforms such as Uber, airbnb, and Australian start-up, Whizz, which offers on-demand cleaning services.<\/p>\n
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An even bigger global on-demand workforce has been nurtured by crowd-based platforms such as Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk AMT and CrowdFlower on which millions of workers perform what are known in the trade as micro-tasks.<\/p>\n
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These are tasks such as tagging images, extracting keywords, gathering or checking address data, translating small fragments of texts and so on. AMT refers to these as human intelligence tasks (HIT). One HIT can be completed in a few seconds or a few minutes (for which workers may be offered a few cents) and they come in HIT groups of hundreds of HITs.<\/p>\n
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