The life of ghostworkers
Doing online tasks from eight in the morning until eternity.
Updates
This is the first publication on the Ghostwork project, in which we asked two questions: Where is microworking performed? Who is performing it? Based on the geolocation of 5,239 EU workers, we identify variation in the relative prevalence of microworking. Furthermore, we distinguish four different classes of microworkers, in terms of diversity and income dependency. The identification of geographic variation in prevalence and these classes of microworkers suggest the importance of heterogeneity to the future study and regulation of microwork.
Ghostwork - Lost in the Crowd (EJD-accepted)
Platform work is a largely invisible form of labor. Consequently, the term “ghost work” has come to refer to the anonymising conditions under which workers perform this behind the scenes labor.
We are currently investigating online platform labor and ghost work in Europe, and one of the aims of this study is to understand where this work is done and by whom. To do this, we have asked platform workers to help us map their general locations across the 27 member states of the EU and four prominent labor platforms – namely, Appen, Microworkers, Clickworker, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).
Claartje ter Hoeven at Studio Erasmus
