Navigating through active conflict zones, resource constraints and crises, and even imminent danger in their home countries, over two thousand workers representing their unions and collectives are set to join the 114th International Labor Conference (ILC), which will convene in Geneva from June 1 to 12. This edition of the ILC represents a significant sociopolitical moment for all of us—labor organizations and activists, worker collectives, digital rights organizations and activists—tied to the broader ambition of actualizing social protections and dignity for all forms of labor, and particularly, holding extractive digital platform-based labor industries to account.
The 114th ILC promises an inflection point
Since the 113th ILC in June 2025, the mechanics and implications of platform-based labor have become more visible than before. In South and Southeast Asia, where the workforce vastly outnumbers readily available formal sector jobs, workers resort to informal employment in the form of location-based and data-based digital labor. This short, quick way to earn a living slowly reveals its precarity—digital platform workers face high levels of job insecurity and occupational risk, are excluded from most social protections in their countries for not being classified as ‘employees’, and have no direct relationship of trust or accountability with the digital platforms that employ them.
Many forms of digital platform-based labor do not allow workers the mobility or dignity to progress to better job titles, make lateral career shifts, or even quit their current positions. Domestic governments, especially in the Global Majority, often create monetary incentives and regulatory exemptions to lure transnational platforms and intermediaries (such as Samasource and Meta in Kenya before the workers’ movement, or currently in tech industries in Southeast Asia) into their markets and simultaneously promote domestic ones—reinforcing that the economic boost and job creation brought in by these industries is exponentially more valuable than the welfare and protection of workers.
Geopolitical instability and the rapid escalation of conflict across the world in the past year has made the problem worse. Data work, which encompasses many forms of content-based digital platform labor, is often extracted from vulnerable populations facing socioeconomic precarity, who cannot otherwise obtain on-site work permits or formalised employment. The remoteness and ostensible freedom of gig-based data work, offered by microwork sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, or Fiverr, seems like an accessible avenue to make petty cash quickly. The popularity of microwork among captive or vulnerable populations like refugees, children, prisoners, low wage workers may seem like a product of high demand for easy work—but in contrast, is by extremely extractive and nefarious design.
Microwork, by design, comes without rights, security, routine, or fair pay. As a ground report from Rest of World notes, “[Microwork is] just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed… stuck in camps, slums, or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life.” Its existence and ubiquity hinges on such vulnerability across the Global Majority, as seen in Venezuela during its financial crisis, or in Lebanon, Jordan, and Kenya among their vast refugee populations. m2Work, a joint venture between Nokia and World Bank, was recently brought to Palestine to “alleviate high rates of unemployment”—but what hides behind this ‘economic development’ smokescreen are two powerful firms engaging populations facing genocide in unequitable and highly precarious labor arrangements. These are marked by lack of agency in choosing work assignments, uncertainty in task outcomes, variable pay, and non-transparent decisions, often even resulting in termination. Situations have escalated in the Global North, too, where technology firms have partnered with prisons across Finland and the United States to use the labor of incarcerated persons to train their AI systems.
It is this saturation and rapid erosion of worker protections worldwide that makes the 114th ILC a significant moment for workers and labor activists worldwide. Platform-based labor is a highly complex, constantly evolving economy which has the potential of placing workers worldwide in danger, informality, and indignity. Many platforms and industries today readily abuse this power with impunity. The lack of robust and updated labor laws, especially in labor hotspots in the Global Majority, fuel this impunity.
Global bodies and fora such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) have historically attempted to plug these gaps through Conventions, Recommendations and policy instruments, which are then adopted domestically by Member States, or used by worker groups to bargain with local policymakers for better protections. In context of this relationship, labor and digital rights communities have now been looking to the ILO to urgently guard the very foundations of decent work in the platform economy and reinstate the dignity of labor from first principles.
Stronger together
The air, though, is not thick with despair. Confronting massively powerful transnational tech firms and governmental apathy has been an uphill battle—but one that workers, worker collectives, and activists continue to relentlessly fight. A battle fuelled by hope and solidarity. Just last month, in May 2026, the International Court of Justice interpreted that ILO Convention No. 87 (Association and Protection of the Right to Organize Convention, 1948) explicitly enshrines the right of workers to go on strike. This is a plain, short, and fairly straightforward reading of an instrument with near-universal adoption. But in practice, it is the legitimization of dignity. For worker collectives facing existential threats and violence in their countries for simply existing, it is a formal acknowledgement of their mandate, existence, and audacity to hope.
The 114th ILC will take up digital platform-based labor as its fifth agenda item and convene discussions and negotiations around a Draft Convention and Recommendation concerning decent work in the platform economy, with an intent to adopt both. The primary anxiety around this process is the steady dilution of rights and protections offered to workers under the Convention due to pushbacks from industry representatives at the ILO. Importantly, risks posed to workers by algorithmic management systems and automated decision-making—including but not limited to biased task allocation, low wages, penalties, and even termination—are not adequately addressed in newer versions of the Draft.
Our research on and sustained engagements with content-based digital platform labor industries, specifically in content moderation and data work, suggest massive gaps in the current Draft that do not protect many categories of digital platform workers embedded in transnational tech supply chains from extraction and exploitation at very basic levels. This is a large, vulnerable, and rapidly growing population located primarily in the Global Majority world.
With these concerns, TGI endorses and echoes the Joint Civil Society Declaration on the proposed Convention and Recommendation on Decent Work in the Platform Economy at the ILO. We further hope that the 114th ILC leads us to a robust, inclusive, rights-based framework which paves the way for more nuanced policymaking on data work in the future, and one that catalyses worker-led policymaking in ILO’s Member States.
