This open access book shows how to design labour rights to effectively protect digital platform workers, organise accountability on digital work platforms, and guarantee workers' collective representation and action. It acknowledges that digital work platforms entail enormous risks for workers, and at the same time it reveals the extent to which labour law is in need of reconstruction. The book focusses on the conceptual links – often overlooked in the past – between labour law's categories and its regulatory approaches. By explaining and analysing the wealth of approaches that deconstruct and reconceptualise labour law, the book uncovers the organisational ideas that permeate labour law's categories as well as its policy approaches in a variety of jurisdictions. These ideas reveal a lack of fit between labour law's traditional concepts and digital platform work: digital work platforms rarely behave like hierarchical organisations; instead, they more often function as market organisers. The book provides a fresh perspective for international academic and policy debates on the regulation of digital work platforms, as well as on the purposes and foundations of labour law. It offers a way out of the impasse the debate around labour law classification has reached, by showing what labour law could learn from digital law approaches to platforms – and vice versa. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book shows how to design labour rights to effectively protect digital platform workers, organise accountability on digital work platforms, and guarantee workers' collective representation and action. It acknowledges that digital work platforms entail enormous risks for workers, and at the same time it reveals the extent to which labour law is in need of reconstruction. The book focusses on the conceptual links – often overlooked in the past – between labour law's categories and its regulatory approaches. By explaining and analysing the wealth of approaches that deconstruct and reconceptualise labour law, the book uncovers the organisational ideas that permeate labour law's categories as well as its policy approaches in a variety of jurisdictions. These ideas reveal a lack of fit between labour law's traditional concepts and digital platform work: digital work platforms rarely behave like hierarchical organisations; instead, they more often function as market organisers. The book provides a fresh perspective for international academic and policy debates on the regulation of digital work platforms, as well as on the purposes and foundations of labour law. It offers a way out of the impasse the debate around labour law classification has reached, by showing what labour law could learn from digital law approaches to platforms – and vice versa. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

The emergence of online digital labour platforms has been one of the major transformations in the world of work over the past decade. This report provides one of the first comparative studies of working conditions on five major micro-task platforms that operate globally. It is based on an ILO survey covering 3,500 workers in 75 countries around the world and other qualitative surveys. The report analyses the working conditions on these micro-task platforms, including pay rates, work availability and intensity, social protection coverage and work-life balance. The report recommends 18 principles for ensuring decent work on digital labour platforms.

Comprehensive directory of databases as well as services "involved in the production and distribution of information in electronic form." There is a detailed subject index and function/service classification as well as name, keyword, and geographical location indexes.

There is a discursive phenomenon permeating current debates on digital platform work. Even authors who strongly advocate classifying digital platform work as “employment” rarely support an application of employment law in the strict sense. For the most part, relevant policy debates have treated the question of how to classify who counts as an employee and the matter of regulating specific rights and obligations for digital platform work as two separate issues; that's where the debate seems to have run into dead ends. This article looks for a way out of the loop by exploring the conceptual questions involved in searching for the link between employee classification and its ensuing rights and obligations. It shows how the very compatibility problems encountered in classification exercises contain the clue to consistent regulation by arguing that digital work platforms are market organizers. As such, they should be addressed in terms of their mediating function, without denying that questions of power exist in work relationships.The article proceeds by delineating the gap between the regulatory domains of labor law and digital law (part I.), before showing how digital platform work may or may not be classified as “employment” (part II.). It ends by categorizing common regulatory proposals at the interface of labor law and digital law and explains how addressing digital work platforms as market organizers can lead to more consistent regulatory design (part III.).

Indexes the Times and its supplements.

There are fears that existing forms of intellectual property protection are insufficient for the digital era, as technology has raced ahead of legislation. This work assesses the problems confronting players in the information economy, from authors and performers to publishers and broadcasters