Funda Ustek-Spilda on fair work in the gig economy after COVID-19

Funda Ustek-Spilda will join the WIDER Webinar Series to introduce a new research on the impact of COVID-19 on gig workers and platform economy.

Looking ahead after COVID-19: Fair work in the gig economy

In this seminar, Funda Ustek-Spilda will introduce the Fairwork Foundation, an action-research project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Fairwork conducts action research into the working conditions in the platform economy, in order to develop ‘fairness ratings’ for digital labour platforms like Uber and Deliveroo. These ratings are then used as a lever to improve pay and conditions for platform workers across the world.

Ustek-Spilda will also the discuss the findings of Foundation’s Covid-19 research, for which they have reviewed nearly 200 platforms in 40+ countries, majority of which are located in the Global South.

This will be followed by Arturo Arriagada’s talk on the platform economy in Chile, and the impact of Covid-19 on the workers in Latin America.

UNU-WIDER Research Associate Simone Schotte will chair the webinar. 

About the speakers

Funda Ustek-Spilda is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Project Manager at the Fairwork Foundation. She is interested in studying data invisibilities and visibilities, and looking at the ethical, societal, political and economic implications of being counted and not being counted in data. She has approached this theme from various angles within the fields of labour, gender, migration and responsible technology design.

Ustek-Spilda holds a PhD in Sociology and an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford. In her doctoral thesis, she studied survival strategies of women workers in Turkey as they navigated various jobs in the informal labour market. Her work has been published in Big Data & Society, Science and Technology and & Human Values, Environment and Planning D, amongst others. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her doctorate thesis.

Arturo Arriagada is the Principal Investigator for the Fairwork project in Chile. He is an associate professor of communications at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (UAI-Chile), where he conducts research on the intersection of media, technology, and society. He is also the Director of Social Media Culture, a research laboratory based at the School of Communications and Journalism at UAI that studies the role of social media and platforms in social and economic life.

Arturo’s particular areas of interest include social media and labor; social media and political communication; platform economy, and promotional culture. His research has been published in the Journal of Communication, Journal of Cultural Economy, Online Information Review, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Press and Politics, amongst others.