부산대학교 도서관

Online platform work—also known as ‘cloudwork’—has seen rapid growth in recent years. In this context, development policy debates emphasise the new income and professional development opportunities for well-educated but often underemployed workers from Global South countries. Cloudwork platforms offer these workers new access to clients and jobs from the Global North that are remunerated in dollars or euros. However, studies also show that online platform work is often associated with precarious conditions and psychological stress. This paper examines the income and professional development opportunities of cloudworkers from the Global South in the translation and transcription sector. It draws on a quantitative online survey of 401 platform workers (266 of whom are from the Global South) conducted in 2022 as part of the Fairwork project. The results show that the income and professional development opportunities of cloudworkers are influenced by their geographical location and by the way in which work is organised on the individual platforms. Workers from the Global South had to invest more unpaid labour time, e.g. searching for jobs, than their colleagues from the Global North. Nevertheless, workers from the Global South were also more likely to earn an income above the local minimum wage level, even when hours of unpaid labour are taken into account—a fact that can be explained by international differences in wage levels. Unpaid labour is particularly pronounced on so-called ‘micro-task platforms’ in the transcription sector, where the oversupply of labour is usually very high. Overall, our paper highlights the power position of platform companies that create and control new global geographies of online work and thus influence opportunities for good work in the Global South.