In the discussion about platform work, I keep bumping into a big dilemma. Online platforms offer a fast -access solution for work and income in the short term. At the same time, they often fall short in providing good working conditions, sustainable careers, and future perspectives. In my opinion, this tension is the most important challenge for the future of work. How do we solve it?

Frida Mwangi knows all about it. She made the transition from housewife to platform worker, and then went on to become an entrepreneur and union leader. As a founding member of the Kenya Union of Gig Workers (KUGWO), she champions the rights of Kenyan platform workers. Her lessons are relevant not only for Kenya, but for the platform economy worldwide. I spoke to her for a new episode of The Gig Work Podcast by the WageIndicator Foundation during my visit to Nairobi, Kenya.

A new start

Mwangi knows from her own experience what opportunities and perils the platform economy can offer. After being a full-time motherand housewife for 17 years, she wanted to return to work. Not only to earn money, but also to set an example for her children. But without recent work experience or references, a regular job was out of reach.

Then she discovered Upwork, one of the largest international platforms for freelance work. After a short training course, she was able to start working right away. Her first job was converting audio into text (transcription). “I could work from home in my own time, which was ideal in combination with raising my children and running the household,” she says. “In the beginning, it was exhausting because it was my very first job. At the same time, it felt like confirmation: ‘Oh, this is real. And it’s something I can actually do.’ It felt like a chance for a new life.”

Learning from others

Mwangi once wanted to become a lawyer, but that didn’t happen. She was still eager to learn. She discovered all kinds of online communities where platform workers shared knowledge and experience. “I learned a lot from that, both about the work and about how to earn more,” she says. “Those communities were incredibly valuable. In no time, I had more work than I could handle. I was able to outsource my surplus work through my own small business: Kazi Remote.”

This shows that platform work can be a stepping stone to employment and self-employment. But Mwangi also quickly discovered the negative aspects.

Unilateral conditions

Firstly, working conditions and earnings could change suddenly. Initially, she earned between $15 and $20 per assignment, later rising to $100 when she specialised in legal, financial and academic transcription transcription assignments. “As more people started working via Upwork, it became more difficult to get jobs,” she says. “The problem was that you had to bid on assignments, and that system was unreliable. Some days you kept bidding without getting any work.” The work also shifted from transcribing to proofreading AI-generated transcriptions.

Then Upwork introduced a new system. Platform workers had to buy credits to bid on a job. “To maintain a secure position on the platform, you sometimes have to spend up to $45 a month on credits,” says Mwangi. “For those coming from a financially vulnerable situation, that’s a significant barrier. The platform suddenly made the workers bear all the risks.”

Exclusion and slow payments

What’s more, the algorithm could exclude you for no reason. “Sometimes you would wake up and find that your account had been blocked without warning,” she says. “Often you would be reinstated automatically, but that took a while. In the meantime, you lost income.”

Platforms did not take responsibility, she says. ‘In the beginning, PayPal was not accessible to the African region. When the service did become available, accounts were regularly closed, even though the workers’ money was still in them. And payments were sometimes delayed by months. When we had complaints, no one was available to help us.’

Internet waste and mental damage

Ironically, Frida’s activism began through an initiative of the platform itself. During an Upwork event, she met other freelancers and discovered that she wasn’t the only one with problems. She also heard dire stories from colleagues in content moderation and data labeling. This is the work where people have to remove illegal or offensive texts or videos from platforms and train algorithms to recognize this type of content.

“Many thought they were going to do translation work, but instead had to filter harmful content on a daily basis,” she says. “It was garbage, internet garbage that you had to sift through. And the more you take in, the more harmful it is to your mental health.”

‘Platforms don’t offer a career’

She also saw that while platforms offered a stepping stone to work, they didn’t really help workers progress. “If I had stayed stuck in my transcription work, I would hardly have any assignments now,” she says. “This type of work has now been largely automated. That applies to more jobs via platforms.”

Tech companies offer a low barrier to entering the workforce, but rarely offer opportunities for advancement, training, or guidance. Mwangi: “I realized that platforms don’t offer you a career, but are only suitable as a temporary place to earn money. Yet many people become dependent on them, precisely because of the lack of opportunities for advancement.”

Organized action is not easy

She also heard more and more stories about underpayment in location-based work, such as taxi services. All these stories touched her deeply and brought back an old dream: to become a lawyer. She felt a strong urge to stand up for platform workers. Mwangi: “I believe that platforms must take responsibility, both in terms of working conditions and pay, as well as in terms of long-term prospects.”

Her first attempt to set up an association in 2019 failed. “No one had any experience with organizing,” she says. “Moreover, organizing is not easy in the platform economy. Whereas in a factory hall it is easy to talk to colleagues about problems, platform workers sit alone at home. There is also a gap between the different types of work. Online freelancers feel different from Uber drivers, for example.”

But she did not give up, because she was convinced that collective action was necessary. In 2024, she succeeded: together with other platform workers, they founded the Kenya Union of Gig Workers (KUGWO). It is the first Kenyan trade union dedicated to improving working conditions, wages, and rights for all types of platform workers.

‘It’s a matter of taking responsibility

Mwangi’s vision: platforms can offer both short- and long-term benefits for workers. “It’s a choice for companies whether or not to participate in exploitation,” she says. “That doesn’t just apply to the platforms themselves. Their customers are often large Western corporations. These companies must not forget the ‘S’ (Social) in the ESG principles (Environmental, Social, and Governance).”

KUGWO is keen to work with tech companies to put the interests of workers first. A good example is the collaboration with Microsoft/LinkedIn Learning. The Kenyan union pointed out that platform workers who lost their jobs due to automation had no opportunities to improve their skills. After consultation, Microsoft offered eleven free courses (such as project manager or software developer) as a stepping stone to better work. Mwangi: “This proves that even in a complex relationship, you can find concrete and sustainable solutions.”

The power of strong unions

Finally, I spoke to Mwangi about political influence and regulation. According to her, the voice of workers in Kenya is systematically ignored by policymakers. Her appeal to the rest of the world is therefore clear: “Build stronger institutions that enable workers to exert more influence. Support them, for example with legal and technical expertise. Employers and governments already have so much power, while workers are in a weak position.”

Mwangi emphasizes that you need financial independence and a strong membership base to be able to negotiate at all. She knows from experience how difficult that is. Nevertheless, with her resilience and perseverance, she has already achieved a lot.

Finally: is it a dilemma?

Mwangi’s call echoes earlier conversations I had, such as with Ephantus Kanyugi of the Kenyan Data Labelers Association. This is not an official trade union, which is precisely why it is fast and flexible. Mwangi chose a different route: establishing a formal union, with all the bureaucracy and political dynamics that entails. In practice, they are complementary. They have different strategies but a shared goal: better working conditions and pay for platform workers.

I agree with Kanyugi and Mwangi: what is needed in the short term and what is important in the long term must go hand in hand. Quick and easy access to work, with security and future prospects. Especially when the clients are companies, they must take responsibility and not shift it onto individual workers. Clients and platforms must choose: do they contribute to exploitation, or do they help build prospects for workers worldwide?

Last week, I had the opportunity to contribute to a seminar organised by the International Society for Labour and Social Security Law in collaboration with the Levenbach Institute. The theme was “The role of social partners in the use of AI at work”. Following contributions about experiences in the Netherlands, Belgium and Europe, I was asked to conclude with some reflections and to lead a workshop. Here are a few takeaways and thoughts:

• The impact of technology on labour is not new; we can learn a lot (as previous speakers mentioned) by looking at past experiences.
• AI and work is often not about replacement, but about the quality of – and access to – work and a growing asymmetry of power between employers/clients and workers.
• Social partners fill the gap between regulation and society, but I wonder whether the pressure becomes too high when enforcement is lacking, and the question is what skills social partners lack in order to be an equal partner in the debate;
• At the same time, social partners can really make a difference by including agreements on AI (I know: a very broad concept) in collective agreements. The only disadvantage of this is that 1) collective agreements usually apply to employees, while 46% of the working population worldwide is not employed, 2) collective agreements are often (especially when viewed globally) not public, which means that unions and sectors cannot learn from each other effectively, and 3) if you look at worker protests in the gig economy (= the testing ground for AI and labour), grassroots movements are by far the largest organisers, not trade unions.
• In discussions about labour law, preference is often given to employee status, while in many cases this will result in working with subcontractors and temporary employment agencies. Yet another company taking a slice of the pie, and you know where the bill will end up. I still miss a broader discussion about the value and appreciation of work.
• We really need to think about contract-neutral regulations and protection. See, for example, this paper on the European Platform Work Directive.
• Discussions about AI and work tend to focus on those who use AI or where AI is applied, but not on the workers and the work in the AI supply chain.

After my introduction and reflection, the attendees divided into groups to discuss the following four issues I had brought up:

1. Which stakeholder is responsible for setting up and managing a data wallet for workers: the GigCV case study.
2. How can the cooperative model leverage power in the topic of work and AI for workers?
3. How can we create a tariff floor for self-employed workers?
4. How can social partners safeguard the rights of workers in the AI supply chain in a global labour market?

All in all, it was an interesting session to attend and contribute to, and it is always great to learn more from other disciplines. Thank you to Miriam Kullmann and Matthijs van Schadewijk for the invitation and organisation, and to Mijke Houwerzijl, Juliana Londono, Simon Taes and Klara Boonstra for your inspiring presentations.

Last week, together with Tessa Duzee, I organised the event “Ghostwork, the invisible labour behind AI” at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The aim was to raise awareness of the fact that behind AI there are tens of millions of vulnerable workers who annotate and check the data, thereby keeping AI running. And to start a conversation about how we can improve these working conditions. From the perspective of the individual, from professionals in “Responsible AI”, from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences itself and from organisations (AI companies and their customers). This was led by moderator Tessa and contributions from experts Fiona Dragstra (WageIndicator Foundation), Nanda Piersma and myself. The data workers themselves were also given a platform through video clips, where they talked about their experiences.

It was interesting to bring together the various disciplines and engage in open discussion with the 80 students in the room. My five takeaways from this event:

1. Whether or not to exploit workers is a conscious choice. Not exploiting them is also a choice. The data work market is characterised as a to-business market, which is different from other gig markets such as taxi and delivery. And in a to-business market, organisations are responsible for their supply chain. I am looking here at both the AI companies themselves and the customers they serve.
2. In a market where organisations capitalise on fragmentation and information asymmetry, bringing people together is more important than ever. Think of trade unions and cooperatives. The key to solutions or resistance lies in finding and connecting nodes with which you can create critical mass. Consider, for example, (Dutch) organisations such as SURF and Public Spaces. But the government, as (I suspect) the largest customer of big tech and a major distributor of capital through subsidies, is also such a node. Make use of this, take responsibility and dare to make choices.
3. Creating fair(er) alternatives takes time. It is not realistic to expect alternatives to be as smooth and scalable to use as the current dominant players from day one. After all, they have a head start of years of innovation, learning and further development. Paid for from the income we as users have paid. Breaking this cycle requires us to bite the bullet, where short-term convenience and long-term sovereignty are at conflict with each other.
4. There is a lot of talk about European “champions”. Of course, I am in favour of European tech companies, but as long as nothing changes in terms of ownership and governance, there is nothing to prevent these companies from eventually being bought out by other parties or making profit-driven choices that have a negative impact on society themselves. That is why I advocate, in addition to “home-grown” tech companies, also engaging in dialogue about ownership and governance and making models such as the Steward Ownership model more common and financing for these types of models more attractive.
5. The biggest question during the event was: “What can you do as an individual?”. Firstly, I don’t think you can place the responsibility on the individual. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything as an individual. Make conscious decisions, engage in conversation, listen critically to cheering stories (and keep in mind the interest of the sender of a message) and contribute to highlighting and addressing the issues that matter.

All in all, it was a great meeting, and I hope it has contributed to a better-informed debate about (responsible) AI among students, professionals and the AUAS itself.

The video of the event can be viewed via this link.

Want to know more? Then check out these two videos about data work: