Dataharvest 2023 - the European Investgative Journalism Conference

The promise of the digital age: anything, anytime, anywhere; fast, easy, and cheap. And all of this is to be made possible by robots or algorithms (partially), but even more by the workers themselves. Each of them is a small part of a larger machine set up to achieve radical efficiency. Every task is planned down to the last minute, every worker is monitored and tracked. Labor laws, employment rights, and protections are often circumvented and ignored by employers and governments, and union representation of workers is often missing. In this session, three journalists will talk about the investigative methods used to research platform work and the inner workings of online commerce giants like Amazon. We will also discuss what working for and with automated systems and processes looks like today, and what it might look like in the future. How will our day-to-day work change and look? In which way will labor rights and unions need to adapt to the developments? And what should journalists pay attention to next in this field?