Workplace learning for fair work on digital labour platforms

Digital labour platforms, due to their organisational form and algorithmic management, set new challenges for workplace learning. This chapter highlights the issues of fairness of work and investigates the fairness-related problems, benefits and development ideas described by platform workers, particularly focusing on the workers’ experiences with the rating schemes affecting their ranking, self-evaluation and remuneration. Learning opportunities are a part of fair work, but learning is also present in the processes of workers’ efforts to understand, act in accordance with and influence the mostly algorithmically managed rating systems. Based on the interviews with a food courier and a freelancer working on and through two virtual labour platforms, the findings show how fair work is intertwined in multiple ways with the (lack of) transparency of rating, and how instrumental, interpersonal and deontic perspectives on fairness are present in platform work. By using the cultural-historical activity theory framework, we interpret and discuss workers’ learning efforts through various dimensions of expansion. We argue that non-traditional conceptualisations and research mindsets are needed to reconceptualise digital labour platforms as workplaces and as environments of workplace learning to improve fairness.