Our Mission

FairTube stands for fairness, transparency, accountability, dialogue, freedom from discrimination, and democratic participation for all platform workers.

 

Digital labor platforms have been growing in importance for more than ten years.

 

The rights of platform workers and the corresponding obligations of platform operators and customers remain legally unclear and politically contested.

 

Most labor platforms require workers to agree that they will be legally classified as self employed. These workers typically have no access to the protections enjoyed by employees, such as minimum wage, dismissal protection, occupational health and safety measures, protection from discrimination, or collective rights.

 

Self employed platform workers often face significant earnings uncertainty, and work daily under the knowledge that their access to work can be suspended or terminated at any time, for any or no reason, often without the possibility to object.

 

Discrimination - including, but not only, unintentional and/or algorithmic discrimination - on digital labor platforms has also been extensively documented. Despite good intentions on the part of platform operators to combat such discrimination, concrete measures are still under development and are relatively incomplete. FairTube stands for equal rights and freedom from discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or ethnic origin, gender identity, religion, political persuasion, ability or disability, age, or sexual orientation, for all platform workers and users, as well as for employees of platform operating organizations.

 

The struggles to improve working conditions on digital labor platforms - including both platforms for in-person work such as delivery and transportation platforms and platforms for remote or online work such as Mechanical Turk and YouTube - have grown in urgency in recent years, and seen some successes.

 

Policy makers at many levels, from the municipal to the international, have turned their attention to the working conditions of platform workers, and some improvements have been made a result of targeted policy changes.

 

However in the big picture, and despite their growing importance, platform workers of all kinds are still second-class citizens in the world of work.

 

FairTube stands for fairness, transparency, accountability, dialogue, freedom from discrimination, and democratic participation for all platform workers.

 

We believe that if these goals can be achieved, the promise of platform work - time-flexible access to work with low barriers to entry - can be realized while reducing negative consequences and risks for workers and society.

 

FairTube started as a campaign for fairness and transparency for all YouTube creators. The campaign was a collaboration between the Youtubers Union and the Crowdsourcing Project at IG Metall, the trade union in the German manufacturing sector. FairTube e.V. is a new not-for-profit organization that welcomes members and partners from all over the world that share our goals and values.