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Digital platforms, decent work and developing countries
Dr. Jamelia Harris has published a new in the journal Development in Practice. With the rise of platform work in developing countries, the paper attempts to position this trend in the decent work agenda by exploring the conditions likely to be associated with measurable decent platform work.
The analysis uses Fairwork as a proxy for decent work and offers indicative findings that having verifiable evidence to score fair and decent work among platform companies is correlated with the level of development, regulatory quality, and having surplus labour. Findings are also suggestive of ethical relativism as the same platform is less likely to have evidence of working conditions in developing vs developed countries. From a policy standpoint, the findings reinforce previous calls for international standards to regulate platform companies, and make the case for international organisations to help capacitate local agents to effectively monitor platform work.