Grappling with Online Work: Lessons from Cyberlaw

Employment law is currently unequipped to decide rights and obligations in many online work scenarios. We simply do not know how the courts will address the dramatic divergence between existing law and the realities of the modern online workforce. But, it is worth remembering that courts have already grappled extensively with the general question of how to apply existing rules to the Internet. Cases dealing with online property, contract, tort, and crime can help us project how courts might approach the novel and perplexing questions sure to arise in online work disputes. This Article identifies three basic approaches: (1) the “blind eye,” in which courts essentially ignore the fact that the activity is taking place online and apply existing law without adjustment; (2) analogy or functional equivalency, in which the courts look to directly or functionally analogous real-world legal scenarios to guide their decisions; and (3) “context-driven” analysis in which courts recognize at the outset the crucial differences presented by online environments, then, by disposing of certain doctrinal elements, adding others, or crafting entirely new standards, endeavor to reconcile existing law with situations its authors could never have envisioned. This Article focuses mostly on cases from the earlier years of cyberlaw, before doctrines developed and legislatures acted. It offers something of a roadmap to practitioners, online employers, and potential employee plaintiffs, explaining how courts and administrative bodies first struggled to cope with the migration of regulable activity into a virtual environment

Crowdworker Economics in the Gig Economy

The nature of work is changing. As labor increasingly trends to casual work in the emerging gig economy, understanding the broader economic context is crucial to effective engage- ment with a contingent workforce. Crowdsourcing represents an early manifestation of this fluid, laisser-faire, on-demand workforce. This work analyzes the results of four large-scale surveys of US-based Amazon Mechanical Turk workers recorded over a six-year period, providing compa- rable measures to national statistics. Our results show that despite unemployment far higher than national levels, crowd- workers are seeing positive shifts in employment status and household income. Our most recent surveys indicate a trend away from full-time-equivalent crowdwork, coupled with a reduction in estimated poverty levels to below national figures. These trends are indicative of an increasingly flexible workforce, able to maximize their opportunities in a rapidly changing national labor market, which may have material impacts on existing models of crowdworker behavior.This work was supported by an EPSRC studentship and EPSRC grants EP/N010558/1 and EP/R004471/1

Reputation Agent: Prompting Fair Reviews in Gig Markets

Our study presents a new tool, Reputation Agent, to promote fairer reviews from requesters (employers or customers) on gig markets. Unfair reviews, created when requesters consider factors outside of a worker's control, are known to plague gig workers and can result in lost job opportunities and even termination from the marketplace. Our tool leverages machine learning to implement an intelligent interface that: (1) uses deep learning to automatically detect when an individual has included unfair factors into her review (factors outside the worker's control per the policies of the market); and (2) prompts the individual to reconsider her review if she has incorporated unfair factors. To study the effectiveness of Reputation Agent, we conducted a controlled experiment over different gig markets. Our experiment illustrates that across markets, Reputation Agent, in contrast with traditional approaches, motivates requesters to review gig workers' performance more fairly. We discuss how tools that bring more transparency to employers about the policies of a gig market can help build empathy thus resulting in reasoned discussions around potential injustices towards workers generated by these interfaces. Our vision is that with tools that promote truth and transparency we can bring fairer treatment to gig workers.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, The Web Conference 2020, ACM WWW 202

The Weakness of Crowds

Why can’t crowds defend themselves? Alek Felstiner explores how the power of crowds to decide is also a weakness when it comes to organizing

Grappling with Online Work: Lessons from Cyberlaw

Employment law is currently unequipped to decide rights and obligations in many online work scenarios. We simply do not know how the courts will address the dramatic divergence between existing law and the realities of the modern online workforce. But, it is worth remembering that courts have already grappled extensively with the general question of how to apply existing rules to the Internet. Cases dealing with online property, contract, tort, and crime can help us project how courts might approach the novel and perplexing questions sure to arise in online work disputes. This Article identifies three basic approaches: (1) the “blind eye,” in which courts essentially ignore the fact that the activity is taking place online and apply existing law without adjustment; (2) analogy or functional equivalency, in which the courts look to directly or functionally analogous real-world legal scenarios to guide their decisions; and (3) “context-driven” analysis in which courts recognize at the outset the crucial differences presented by online environments, then, by disposing of certain doctrinal elements, adding others, or crafting entirely new standards, endeavor to reconcile existing law with situations its authors could never have envisioned. This Article focuses mostly on cases from the earlier years of cyberlaw, before doctrines developed and legislatures acted. It offers something of a roadmap to practitioners, online employers, and potential employee plaintiffs, explaining how courts and administrative bodies first struggled to cope with the migration of regulable activity into a virtual environment

The Weakness of Crowds

Why can’t crowds defend themselves? Alek Felstiner explores how the power of crowds to decide is also a weakness when it comes to organizing