Against the backdrop of the ILO’s 2025 breakthrough on international standards for platform labor, Part A of this article examined the structural realities of a rapidly expanding digital economy. It traced how platforms consolidate power by shifting risks onto workers through opaque subcontracting chains, algorithmic control, and fragmented legal categories, leaving much of the workforce—particularly in the Global South—without protections. Examples from content moderation hubs in Africa to Amazon’s global empire illustrated how platform capitalism erodes traditional employment boundaries while reproducing entrenched racial and gender hierarchies. It also showed how these dynamics drive downward pressure on wages, intensify surveillance and precarity, and exploit jurisdictional gaps that national laws alone cannot close.

Part B: Restructuring the platform economy—Frontiers for collective action

As the platform economy continues to expand across borders and sectors—deepening precarity and entrenching North-South inequalities—workers and allied movements have begun to articulate and reshape the terms of participation, resistance, and renewal. This Part B explores how ongoing struggles are forging alternative visions of the digital economy. It outlines strategies to universalize labor rights beyond employment classification and across digital value chains; to secure greater public and worker control over data resources and technological infrastructures; to develop cooperative and public interest technologies rooted in democratic governance and value distribution; and to restructure the international trade regime to safeguard developing countries’ economic sovereignty over their digital ecosystems. This is aimed not merely at equitable inclusion in the existing order, but also a broader transformation of the rules that govern labor, digitalization, infrastructure, and trade. The proposals outlined here reflect a commitment to democratic and worker-led digital futures, grounded in collective agency, socio-economic justice, and transnational solidarity. 

1. Universalizing fundamental labor guarantees

At the heart of the platform economy lies a false binary: worker or contractor, employee or entrepreneur. The legal fiction of self-employment sustains an ecosystem where millions of workers labor without access to basic rights—no minimum wage, no social protection, no collective bargaining. In the North, platformization has resulted in the exclusion of large sections of the workforce from the protections embedded within the post-War employment model. However, in the South, where informality has historically been the default condition of work for the vast majority, platformization has only served as a conduit to channel vulnerable workers into the throes of global capital.

It is critical, then, to secure a decisive break from the status-based model, particularly in the South, where a large section of workers depend on platform work for sustenance. Accordingly, fundamental labor guarantees, including fair wages, freedom of association, social protection, and occupational safety, must be extended to all workers, regardless of contractual labels. Legal innovations like a presumption of employment, and new worker-categories that offer protections to platform workers outside the fold of conventional employment, are being tested from the EU to Mexico, and now, at the ILO.

At the same time, as the tides of datafication, platformization, and contractualization sweep across work arrangements under platform capitalism, the features once distinctive to platform-based gig work are permeating into diverse forms of employment.

At the same time, as the tides of datafication, platformization, and contractualization sweep across work arrangements under platform capitalism, the features once distinctive to platform-based gig work are permeating into diverse forms of employment. In this context, the ILO’s framing of “platform work”, limited to app-based, on-demand working arrangements, is misattuned to a world where algorithmic systems increasingly govern crucial aspects of work. Sofia Scasserra, a researcher with the Transnational Institute (TNI), suggests in this regard:

“We cannot frame the platform economy purely in terms of “platforms”. What we need is more regulation focused on algorithmic management, which is the right umbrella to capture how these automated systems are being used to manage labor. That’s where the focus should be—on the systems of control, not the corporate labels.”

Moreover, the dominant framing also fails to account for the subcontracting webs through which digital corporations often outsource their back-end operations to poorly-paid workers in the South. Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan, describing her experience as a Meta content moderator engaged by the BPO company Samasource in Kenya, recounts:

“The job was very distressing—eight hours a day watching suicide, hate speech, violence. It starts to change your personality. You can’t even go to the bathroom without logging a break. If you take that time, you lose your lunch …The whole system makes you fearful, like they could replace you at any moment.”

Fasica’s experience is emblematic of the labor extraction characteristic of AI value chains, marked by labor arbitrage, atomization, and contingency—realities consistently reflected in worker accounts under the Data Workers’ Inquiry. Data workers, from annotators and data labelers to content moderators and audio transcribers, play an indispensable role in building and sustaining supposedly autonomous AI systems. As massive investments in AI development push up the global demand for such labor, labor governance frameworks must evolve to address the structural exploitation of data workers by extending due diligence obligations across tech value chains, mandating transparency in subcontracting arrangements, and ensuring enforceable labor protections, including redress for psychological harm, for all data workers, regardless of geography or employment status.

While transnational value chains have long served to fragment labor and erode the power of national regulation, they are increasingly also becoming sites of counter-power. Platform and data workers are forging new forms of solidarity across borders to confront the concentrated power of digital capital.

While transnational value chains have long served to fragment labor and erode the power of national regulation, they are increasingly also becoming sites of counter-power. Platform and data workers are forging new forms of solidarity across borders to confront the concentrated power of digital capital. The Make Amazon Pay campaign, for instance, mobilizes an international coalition of trade unions, grassroots movements, civil society organizations, and researchers in a coordinated struggle against Amazon’s extractive practices across its logistics, tech, and retail infrastructures. Their demands, which range from living wages and tax justice to climate accountability, are grounded in a vision of economic and labor rights that transcend platform-specific or contractual classifications. A similar momentum is building at the least visible frontiers of the digital economy, where data workers have begun to organize and assert their interests. Under collectives such as the African Content Moderators Union (ACMU), the Data Labelers Association (DLA), and the Techworker Community Africa (TCA), workers outsourced by Meta, TikTok, and others are bringing visibility and collective power to hidden labor in AI supply chains. Accountability initiatives like the Fairwork Foundation’s AI Principles and supply chain certification mechanism reinforce these struggles, pushing digital corporations to uphold decent work standards in the development and deployment of AI systems.

2. Reclaiming data and digital resources

Data extraction fuels platform-firms’ opaque decision-making on tasks, pay, and performance, also driving their value capture and monopolistic growth, as discussed in Part A. To challenge the digital intelligence asymmetry wrought into the contemporary platform economy, workers are increasingly leveraging data rights, strategic litigation, and collective data initiatives.

Global union federations are assisting their affiliates in negotiating rights over their data. Public Service International, for instance, maintains a Digital Bargaining Hub, with guidance documents and sample provisions for workers to assert their rights in relation to workplace technologies through collective agreements.

Litigation has also proven to be a powerful, albeit fragmented tool. In Europe and the UK, the Worker Info Exchange (WIE) uses data access rights under privacy laws to help workers understand and contest platform-firms’ algorithmic disciplining. In a major victory in October 2023, a WIE-led challenge against the robo-firing of taxi drivers led a court in Amsterdam to impose a fine on Uber. Moreover, as WIE-founder James Farrar observes, this data is also valuable for debunking platform-firms’ long-standing denial of managerial control:

“I’m being told I’m an independent contractor in control of my own work, but in reality, an algorithm is directing everything I do, and then having access to the data (that shows this) becomes absolutely crucial. That kind of data access could serve as evidence of an employment relationship.”

Besides illuminating algorithmic management, workers are also leveraging data rights to gather insights surrounding other aspects of their working conditions. A striking example is the Data4Mods project, born out of the ACMU’s collaboration with PersonalData.IO, a public interest organization supporting data-rights actions that uses European privacy law to trace data flows from the EU to outsourcing firms engaging data workers in Africa. As co-founder Paul-Olivier Dehaye explains:

“The main output of the project is a map—a global map of data flows. Anyone can look at it from wherever they are and situate themselves in advocacy relative to global flows. It helps build global collective responses. For African workers, it reveals valuable information to demand better working conditions. From a European perspective, it shows how European intermediaries facilitate these flows, suggesting alternative, mutually beneficial models.”

In other systematic efforts to reorient datafication in workers’ interests, workers have formed data cooperatives, where members voluntarily pool their data, which is then used for collective benefit under democratic governance.

In other systematic efforts to reorient datafication in workers’ interests, workers have formed data cooperatives, where members voluntarily pool their data, which is then used for collective benefit under democratic governance. Driver’s Seat, a cooperativist initiative operating in multiple US cities, helps app-based drivers to aggregate and analyse work data to improve their earnings. It also sells data and insights derived therefrom to city authorities for transportation planning, while redistributing profits amongst its members. Similar initiatives are underway at a smaller scale in the South as well, such as the Self-Employed Women’s Association’s attempts to leverage its cooperative structure to harness data-driven insights for wider market access and fairer returns for women farmers.

While these efforts are encouraging, the current state of the digital economy—characterized by centralization of technological control, data ownership, and infrastructural power in the hands of first movers—poses serious constraints on the viability of worker-led data cooperatives, especially in the Global South. These cooperatives aim to reclaim agency over data produced through labor, yet they operate in an environment where platforms monopolize access to digital infrastructure and obscure, enclose, and extract data for private gain. Moreover, most existing governance and financial mechanisms favor scale-intensive, venture capital-backed platforms, rendering cooperative initiatives vulnerable to marginalization or co-optation. In many Southern contexts, weak data protection regimes and limited public investment in cooperative digital infrastructure further exacerbate this challenge.

To counter these structural constraints, there is an urgent need for policy frameworks to fend off data-expopriation, and center the role of data as a shared resource, one that workers can collectively govern and benefit from.

To counter these structural constraints, there is an urgent need for policy frameworks to fend off data-expopriation, and center the role of data as a shared resource, one that workers can collectively govern and benefit from. This would require legal recognition of data commons, guaranteed rights to access and reuse data generated through work, and arrangements that require digital corporations to contribute to these commons, through taxes, licensing, and data-sharing mandates.

3. Building worker-centric technologies

To tackle precarity at its roots, it is critical to rewire the economic incentives that create it. Most platform businesses depend on externalizing risk, suppressing labor costs, and hoarding data for rent extraction. Accordingly, collective action must go beyond demands for labor rights and interrogate how value is generated and how it is redistributed. Collective action must therefore include structural demands: banning exploitative commission structures, capping investor-driven losses passed on to workers, and exposing the hidden social costs behind supposedly “convenient” digital services.

Parallelly, it is essential to foster alternative techno-institutional infrastructures that are designed for and governed by workers, communities, and public institutions. Across the world, a diverse ecosystem of worker-led alternatives is emerging. These include platform cooperatives, as well as other solidarity-based and public models, characterized by principles of collective ownership and emphasizing democratic control over digital infrastructures.

A leading example is CoopCycle, set up as a worker-led delivery platform in France in 2017. It now operates as a federation of cooperatives across the EU, with software licensed under a Copyleft model that restricts commercial use to collectives aligned with the European Social and Solidarity Economy Law. In São Paulo, Senoritas Courier Cooperative, a social solidarity enterprise, offers a low-tech bicycle-based delivery platform developed and run exclusively by women and trans workers. The cooperative not only strives to provide dignified work but also focuses extensively on the techno-political education of its members to deepen democratic participation. In Brazil, the Homeless Worker Movement (MTST) is advancing a vision of digital sovereignty rooted in the self-organization of working-class communities. Through its Technology Division, MTST develops platforms that enable labor self-management, such as a chatbot that directly connects informal construction workers with clients, eliminating the need for exploitative intermediaries. Alexandre Costa Barbosa, a member of the Technology Division, elaborates on the underpinnings:

“We think of the ‘digital’ within the urban sphere as eventually a global coalition of popular social movements dealing with the digital regardless of, or even in spite of, the state. In the 20th century, the idea of pluralistic sovereignty started to rise, going beyond the (state-centric) Rousseauian or Hobbesian approach. In the 1980s, we saw the emergence of Via Campesina and the fight for food sovereignty, focusing on people’s capacity to grow, produce, and deliver healthy food. (Similarly) we see digital sovereignty as a popular, working-class, movement-driven agenda.”

Further, publicly anchored digital alternatives are also emerging, where states invest in or incubate platform-based infrastructures designed to serve workers’ collective interests. For instance, the Indian state of Kerala developed a platform marketplace, the Kudumbashree Bazaar, for over 42,000 small-scale women retailers. Piloted during COVID‑19, it combines public infrastructure with cooperative governance: the state manages the interface, listings, and payment flows, while retailers control pricing, inventory, and customer engagement. By reducing dependence on intermediaries and expanding market access, the platform attempts to strengthen workers’ economic agency within a supportive institutional frame.

To support the growth of worker-centered platform alternatives, it is vital to strengthen the underlying institutional and technical ecosystems they depend on.

To support the growth of worker-centered platform alternatives, it is vital to strengthen the underlying institutional and technical ecosystems they depend on. Beyond initial funding, long-term sustainability requires access to shared infrastructure, such as open-source software, federated cloud services, and interoperable data architectures, which enable autonomy and scalability. Public investments in capacity-building in areas like collective data management and platform operations are especially crucial in the Global South. Moreover, the success of worker-centric platforms also depends on broader institutional linkages, enabling policy environments, and public investment flows. For example, municipalities, development agencies, and research institutions can play catalytic roles by offering technical support or committing to long-term data partnerships. Legal frameworks must also evolve to recognize collective data rights and protect bottom-up governance from being undermined by extractive actors. These forms of institutional engagement are key to ensuring that worker-led platforms are not only viable but also capable of shaping just and plural digital economies

4. Rewiring international trade for developmental sovereignty

The platform economy is not only shaped by business models, but also by the evolving rules of international trade. From cross-border data flows to the taxation of digital services, trade agreements increasingly determine who controls digital infrastructures and to what extent states can regulate them. Underlying this is the “digital trade” agenda, which preemptively restricts states from regulating their digital economies in the public interest.

For years, the US and its allies have advanced a suite of provisions in trade agreements that are designed to curtail public oversight of the digital economy, restricting states’ ability to govern data flows, tax digital services, or demand transparency over proprietary algorithms and source codes. The 2016 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) provided a fillip to this agenda, and even after the US withdrew from the TPP in 2017, the provisions survived in the 2018 Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Subsequent agreements, including the 2018 US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the 2019 US-Japan Digital Trade Agreement (USDJTA), and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), as well as plurilateral initiatives like the Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on E-Commerce, launched at the sidelines of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2017, have reinforced these norms.

Such provisions systematically erode the policy space of Global South states to regulate the digital economy in workers’ interests and simultaneously entrench the power of dominant US-based digital corporations. By banning data localization, these rules prevent states from requiring that data about their citizens or markets be stored domestically—a key precondition for building national data infrastructures. Prohibitions on source code access make it impossible for regulators to audit the algorithms driving the exploitation of platform workers. And the push for “non-discrimination” between foreign and domestic digital services restricts states’ ability to promote domestic tech ecosystems aligned with local needs and developmental priorities. As Sofia Scasserra explains:

“What we need to understand is that the trade regime in digital services is not really about trade or the exchange of goods and services. It’s about the architecture of impunity that Big Tech enjoys. If you look at the trade provisions being pushed through free trade agreements and the WTO’s Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on E-Commerce, it becomes clear that trade has become a vehicle for corporations to curtail the capacity of states to regulate. This makes it increasingly difficult to set domestic norms for regulating the digital economy.”

Pertinently, the digital trade regime has advanced in parallel with the decline of the WTO and the rise of US unilateralism under Trump. In 2018, the first Trump administration imposed sweeping tariffs and duties in flagrant violation of WTO rules. In 2019, it unilaterally blocked appointments to the WTO Appellate Body, rendering its dispute settlement system defunct. Since Trump’s re-election in 2024, the US has doubled down on its rejection of the WTO’s multilateral system, characterizing many states’ public interest policies as “trade barriers” designed to discriminate against American companies, thereby justifying the imposition of “retaliatory tariffs”. Such policies include those designed for a fairer digital economy—laws that restrict or conditionalize cross-border data transfers, challenge monopolistic power in digital markets, and impose taxes on digital services. As states rally under the logic of competitive liberalization to strike bilateral deals with the US and ward off tariffs, they may find themselves compelled by the US administration, acting essentially on behalf of BigTech, to accept far-reaching digital trade provisions that undercut existing and prospective regulation.

In the face of escalating US unilateralism and the entrenchment of trade rules that privilege Big Tech, Global South states need to reimagine global trade and digital governance to reassert control over their digital futures. The weakening of the WTO offers a diplomatic window for the South to demand meaningful trade reform. Rather than retreating into bilateral deals that lock in unequal terms, states may be well-advised to push for a renewed multilateralism, which centers data sovereignty, developmental asymmetries, and the right to regulate the digital economy in the public interest. Regional coalitions like BRICS, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, and the African Union (AU) can be leveraged to articulate coordinated digital industrial policy and establish common positions on digital governance. The AU’s Data Policy Framework is an important precedent, calling for collective ownership over African data, developmental use of digital resources, and public-interest regulation of cross-border data flows in accordance with the different levels of digital readiness, data maturity, and regulatory environments of states. Such frameworks must further be institutionalized to limit long-term reliance on US-led digital architectures and resist coercive trade provisions that undermine national policy space.

As importantly, workers’ movements must also step into the digital trade arena. The terms of digitalization and digital governance are increasingly being negotiated in trade forums, often without labor representation and behind closed doors. In response, global union federations are attempting to intervene in trade policy discourses to challenge the dominance of corporate-driven digital trade rules. For example, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has worked with the New Economy Foundation to highlight how digital trade agreements can weaken states’ regulatory capacity and lead to further “Uberization” across sectors. Public Services International has organized workshops to explain the significance of the digital trade agenda to unions within and outside the technology sector in the Asia-Pacific. Such efforts, designed to surface the intricate connections between digital governance, trade, and labor interests, must be expanded. Global unions, other workers’ collectives, trade justice groups and digital justice activists must build and harness alliances (see, for example, the Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network and the Gender and Trade Coalition)¹ to demand transparency in trade negotiations and pressure governments to preserve digital and developmental policy space in their international relations. For the workers’ movement, shaping the rules of international trade is a key component in the struggle for economic sovereignty and democratic control.

Conclusion

This two-part essay surveys how the platform economy is built on hidden architectures of value extraction: fragmented labor chains, algorithmic control, and cross-border governance gaps that consistently disadvantage workers. It thrives on invisibility, concealing the scale of global platform labor, masking the flows of data and value, and sidestepping responsibility through jurisdictional arbitrage. These are systemic features, shaping how work, rights, and accountability are organized in the digital age. Thus, any attempt to build fairer futures must directly confront these foundations.

The essay also illustrates how across the world, initiatives are pushing back and actively shaping alternative possibilities—workers taking platform-firms to court, regulators testing innovative governance structures, cooperatives experimenting with alternative models, and transnational campaigns exposing obscured labor chains. Yet these efforts remain fragmented. Going forward, it is critical to bring together these multiple strands, including labor standards, data rights, competition policy, trade reform, corporate accountability, and many others, in mutually reinforcing ways. Parallel to this, the challenge is also to articulate a shared horizon while acknowledging that interests and contexts will inevitably diverge.

The work ahead will involve extensive negotiation: between Global North and South, between visions of tighter regulation and those of structural redesign, between centralized governance and decentralized approaches, between data minimalism and data-driven empowerment, and between immediate protection and long-term transformation. It will require building legal, political, and epistemic infrastructures that allow diverse actors to engage with one another, to contest and reconcile choices, and to work towards collective futures beyond platform domination. It will also entail nurturing solidarities that extend across borders and sectors, grounded in shared commitments but leaving room for local priorities to shape action. By weaving together these dispersed struggles, we can begin to reshape a digital economy defined by precarity and corporate control into diverse digital economies organized around labor justice and collective agency.

Notes

1. IT for Change is an active member of both groups.