Abstract: Cloudworkers on platforms like Fiverr and Amazon Mechanical Turk are cast into a planetary-scale labour market, as their work can be performed from anywhere in the world with internet connection. These ‘independent contractors’ often experience high levels of subordination to, and dependence on platforms.

Based on surveys with 792 cloudworkers in 75 countries, Fairwork’s first ratings of 17 prominent cloudwork platforms found that the majority of them fail to provide basic standards of fairness for workers, and work on these platforms entails similar risks and harms to workers as in geographically-tethered platform work.