Fairwork Podcast
Fairwork
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
All episodes
Best episodes
Seasons
Top 10 Fairwork Podcast Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Fairwork Podcast episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Fairwork Podcast for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Fairwork Podcast episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
005: YouTube Gets A Union - Part 1
Fairwork Podcast
01/16/23 • 28 min
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 children. It’s a sought after job, apparently. But YouTube isn’t just a cultural phenomenon it’s also an economic and technological phenomenon as well, involving the use of a digital platform to manage a distributed workforce spread across the globe. And the practices and protocols that Google, the company that owns YouTube, employs have huge impacts on shaping the working conditions that YouTubers experience.
In this two part episode of the Fairwork podcast, we hear from Jörg Sprave, a German Youtuber who runs the slingshot channel, a channel where he makes homemade slingshots and launchers. We hear his story of getting into YouTube, what it is actually like making a living from YouTube, what happens when the platform on which you’ve built your livelihood starts to make seismic shifts, and how he formed the world’s first union, for Youtubers.
Here's Jörg's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVZlxkKqlvVqzRJXhAGq42Q
There's loads of good videos about the Adpocalypse on YouTube itself, but I found this one particularly informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7M7yyRDHGc&ab_channel=vlogbrothers
As always, you can contact me at [email protected]
Robyn Caplan has written a great academic article with Tarleton Gillespie on YouTube's demonetisation policies which you can find here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305120936636
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
001: An Incomplete Prediction
Fairwork Podcast
11/21/22 • 9 min
We exist in a world where Information Communication Technologies, have made a remarkable number of tasks independent of distance. In is no longer necessary for many workers to share the same geographic location as their colleagues, or employer. Clerical work, transcriptions, video editing, copywriting and a huge raft of other types of work can be done from nearly anywhere on the planet, communicating, sharing files and transacting payment, via their computers. Of course, the majority of physical skills – manual labour, driving, cleaning – require a person to be in a specific place, but for an increasing number of different types of work, this is no longer the case.
This series of the Fairwork podcast is about this change. It’s about what happens when work goes global and the emergence of platforms that manage the transactions between workers and employers scattered across the 4 corners of the globe. It’s about the creation of labour markets that exist at the planetary level, and the social, political and economic questions that this poses for workers.
You can contact me via email: [email protected]
You can find the full video of Arthur C. Clarke's interview on the BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwELr8ir9qM&t=484s&ab_channel=BBCArchive
I got the idea to include the sound of the dial up internet after looking through the brilliant Archive of Endangered Sounds: http://savethesounds.info/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
006: YouTube Gets A Union Part 2
Fairwork Podcast
01/23/23 • 30 min
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; recommendation algorithms and demonetisation processes, which you, as a worker, don’t get any insight into. They are determined solely by YouTube, without consultation, even though they hugely influence the working experiences of content creators on the platform.
At the same time, the amount of content uploaded to YouTube is astronomical – equivalent to 400 hours of new content every minute. For every successful content creator, there is apparently a whole army waiting in the wings to take over should they miss a step, stumble or fall down. A seemingly endless pool of labour in a labour market without geographic barriers.
Understandably the pressure that this can take on YouTubers is huge.
In this episode we return to hear the conclusion of Jorge Sprave’s story. In part one of this two part story, we head his story of getting to YouTube with the Slingshot Channel, where he makes homemade weapons and launchers, how he left his well paying job to go full time on the platform and how his income collapsed following the implementation of a series of policies by YouTube – in a period that would be know as the Adpocalypse. We return to the story looking at what steps Jorge took to combat the changes.
Olga Kay's story for this podcast came from an interview for this book written by Chris Stokel Walker https://www.canburypress.com/products/youtubers-by-chris-stokel-walker
There's a lot of great stuff on YouTube itself about creator burnout that helped me with this episode. Here's a few things I wanted to share:
Great short documentary by the BBC with a focus on Latin American creators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUrNbl1lNV4&t=3s
Elle Mills' Burnout at 19 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKKwgq9LRgA
The Mental Health Struggles Of Being A YouTuber: Trolls, Jealousy, Burnout by Dr Ali ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq4YhMUvhjQ&t=920s
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
009: Ukraine
Fairwork Podcast
09/08/21 • 39 min
This week on the Fairwork Podcast we head to Ukraine, to hear the story of a rider for the food delivery platform Glovo. We explore what it's like working in the Gig Economy in Ukraine as well as exploring the historical and political context which shaped the emergence of the Gig Economy.
This episode was co-produced by Labour Initiatives, an NGO and legal clinic based in Kyiv and was written and produced by Robbie Warin and Svitlana Iukhymovych.
You can contact Robbie at [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
008: India
Fairwork Podcast
08/05/21 • 42 min
Karnataka, located in the South West of India is home to around 64 millions people. It’s known as the tech hub of India, home to many of the countries largest technology companies. But it is a city marked by huge inequality and beyond the high rise offices, lives a huge number of people using their smartphones and computers to make a living in the gig economy.
In this episode of the Fairwork podcast, we hear from Vinod, a gig worker based in Bengaluru. We hear his story of working for the gig economy platform Swiggy. What’s it like moving to the city to work as a courier? How do you navigate providing for your family and the costs associated with your work? And what happens when a global pandemic brings your work to a standstill?
In addition, we hear from the Principal Investigators for Fairwork India, Janaki Srinivasan and Balaji Parthasarathy, as they outline the history and context of the gig economy in India.
As always, you can contact Robbie, with any thoughts, suggestions, comments (or just to say hello) at [email protected]
This episode was written and produced by Pradyumna Taduri, Mounika Neerukonda and Robbie Warin.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
007: Gorillas
Fairwork Podcast
07/22/21 • 47 min
Last month Gorillas riders in Berlin went on strike, blockading warehouses around the city and stoking international media coverage. The company which, in under a year of operating, has managed to achieve a market valuation of a billion US dollars finally started to come up against the collective will of riders.
This week on the Fairwork podcast, we are exploring the company Gorillas Technologies - one of the fastest-growing startups in Europe. It’s a company with massive plans for expansion and is growing at a breakneck speed. We’ll hear from two Gorillas riders - Zeynep and Jakob - about their own experiences of the strikes, as well as catching up with Oğuz Alyanak to look at what the rise of these companies says about the way in which technologies are reshaping labour markets.
You can (and are actively encouraged to) get in touch with Robbie via email: [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
006: The UK Gig Economy
Fairwork Podcast
07/06/21 • 26 min
Last month, Fairwork released our first ever round of scoring for the UK. We gave 11 platforms a fairness score out of 10, based on their ability to provide fair and decent work. Scores ranged from 8 all the way down to 0, showing a massive variation in the types of work being provided by different platforms. But the conditions present within the gig economy, do not arise in a vacuum, but emerge out of specific social, cultural, economic and political contexts.
To mark the release of the first round of UK scores, this week on the Fairwork podcast we are joined by Alessio Bertolini – a post-doctoral researcher at Fairwork.
Alessio is here to help us understand the gig economy in the UK, where did the gig economy comes from? What decisions led us to this point? And what does the future holds?
Check out how we scored gig platforms in the UK here: https://fair.work/en/ratings/uk/
Read the full UK report here: https://fair.work/en/fw/publications/fairwork-uk-ratings-2021/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
005: Pay
Fairwork Podcast
04/06/21 • 29 min
Many of us take for granted the minimum wage. It’s just there, hovering in background, the floor that sits beneath us, ensuring the minimum we will take home at the end of a day’s work. But for workers in the gig economy, it’s a luxury they rarely know, as they piece together a living task to task, never knowing what a days work will be worth at the end of it.
This week on the Fairwork podcast, we hear the story of Ethan Bradley, a Deliveroo courier based in the North East of England. We look at issues related to pay, what it is like working under a piece rate system, the mental stress attached to this, and how it shapes your experiences of your work. We hear from Matt Cole, a researcher at Fairwork and from Emiliano Mellino of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about their recent investigation into hourly pay for Deliveroo riders across the UK.
You can read the Bureau's full report here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
004: Management
Fairwork Podcast
03/16/21 • 15 min
Francis Scaife works as a courier in the North East of England, in their home town of Teesside, a town heavily effected by deindustrialisation. Working as a courier for the gig economy platform Stuart provides Francis with a vital source of income in a time of huge national economic insecurity, but more than this it gives them a sense of purpose, drawing them out their house and into their community.
Stuart is a multinational business operating across Europe, it runs the online platform through which Francis works, shaping their working life in important and profound ways. As a company, it is everywhere and nowhere, operating at huge scales, but without the fixed infrastructure and offices that characterised the traditional courier companies that preceded it.
This episode looks at management, what’s it like working through a platform, where the principal colleague you’re working with is your smartphone? And how do you deal with the problems you encounter in your working day when you have no human manager to turn to?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
003: The Strange Case of Dr Scale and Mr Remotasks
Fairwork Podcast
12/04/22 • 41 min
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, doesn’t just emerge out of the minds of technologists – it’s a shared endeavour.
It works like this. If you want to develop, say a piece of software that can recognise animals in images for example, you need a whole bunch of existing images of animals. And these need to be captioned, segmented, and annotated to a really detailed level. Your software needs to know what animals look like, so it can tell the difference between a flamingo and a pink cushion. You then use these images – known as training data - to teach your software, so that when it encounters new images, it can tell the animals from the cars.
But the key question is, where does this training data come from?
In this episode of the Fairwork Podcast, we look at the curious case of Scale and Remotasks, and the relationship between these two platforms. We talk to Juan, a worker on Remotasks, and Dr Kelle Howson, looking at the ways in which digital infrastructures can work to obscure working conditions on labour platforms.
Here's a few links for those interested in diving deeper:
The Scale website: https://scale.com/
The Remotasks website: https://www.remotasks.com/en
The theme in focus for this years Cloudwork report focuses on the relationship between these two platforms and you can read it here: https://fair.work/en/fw/publications/work-in-the-planetary-labour-market-fairwork-cloudwork-ratings-2022/
Here's the link to the video me and Kelle discuss in the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuGBwQ7sQac&t=5s&ab_channel=ScaleAI
As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions, thoughts or feedback, and you can reach me at [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Show more best episodes
Show more best episodes
FAQ
How many episodes does Fairwork Podcast have?
Fairwork Podcast currently has 24 episodes available.
What topics does Fairwork Podcast cover?
The podcast is about News, Tech, Activism, Podcasts, Technology and Politics.
What is the most popular episode on Fairwork Podcast?
The episode title '008: India' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Fairwork Podcast?
The average episode length on Fairwork Podcast is 27 minutes.
How often are episodes of Fairwork Podcast released?
Episodes of Fairwork Podcast are typically released every 13 days, 23 hours.
When was the first episode of Fairwork Podcast?
The first episode of Fairwork Podcast was released on Feb 15, 2021.
Show more FAQ
Show more FAQ