Labor Vector
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Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings

Labor producing AIGains and lossesrating programmeactive
Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings: a rating programme: a ratings report (league table) scoring cloudwork platforms against the five Fairwork Cloudwork Principles. Operator: the Fairwork project, based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center; funded by BMZ, commissioned by GIZ; on fair.work, Fairwork describes itself as a non-profit spun out of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). Its unit: a cloudwork platform, scored out of 10 on ten thresholds (two per principle: fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, representation). Whose labor: cloudwork: online remote work through digital labour platforms, from microwork (data labelling and processing, AI training, image categorisation) to freelance work (translation, design, web development, writing); the report names AI data work for clients such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia.
Visit Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings ↗The /non rowThe DSL audit
The Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2025 assesses and scores basic standards of fairness in working arrangements on 16 cloudwork digital labour platforms according to the five Fairwork Cloudwork Principles: fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation.

In its own words: https://fairwork.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2025/05/Fairwork-Cloudwork-Report-2025-FINAL.pdf, read 2026-10-29

Who supplies, who directs, who gains

Supplies the laborcloudworkers, generally classified as self-employed or independent workers paid piece rates; the survey drew 776 workers in 100 countries
Directs itthe platforms rated (16, including Upwork, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, Remotasks, Appen, Clickworker, Prolific) and the requesters or clients who post work on them
Receives the gains, bears the costsnot recorded as a quantity; the report records which platforms meet pay thresholds (four of 16 met the local minimum wage threshold) and names leading AI companies among the clients of AI data work

Each as the resource itself records it. Where it records nothing, the census says so.

What it records

IntersectionsLabor producing AI: annotation, moderation, evaluation, maintenance, and creative or scholarly work entering training and retrieval; Distribution of gains and losses: wages, employment, workload, credit, ownership, and who captures productivity gains; Worker power: bargaining, organizing, consent, refusal, contestation and enforceable protections; AI governing labor: hiring, surveillance, scheduling, quotas, evaluation and discipline
Kind of evidencerating against standardsworker testimony
Unit of recorda cloudwork platform, scored out of 10 on ten thresholds (two per principle: fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, representation)
Whose laborcloudwork: online remote work through digital labour platforms, from microwork (data labelling and processing, AI training, image categorisation) to freelance work (translation, design, web development, writing); the report names AI data work for clients such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia op
Methoddesk research (public information and platforms' contractual terms), platform manager evidence (questionnaire and interviews), and worker surveys; scores decided collectively by the core team and peer-reviewed; a point is awarded only on clear evidence op
Coveragegeography: global platforms and regional market leaders; worker survey responses from 100 countries; period: survey data collected February 2024 to January 2025; changes counted since the July 2023 report
What it findsthree platforms scored 8 and two scored 7 out of 10; Amazon Mechanical Turk, Freelancer and Microworkers scored 0; four platforms met threshold 1.2 (the majority of workers earn at least the local minimum wage); no platform received the second representation point (collective governance or bargaining); 56 changes were adopted by platforms since the last report, estimated to affect over two million workers; of 448 respondents asked which rights matter most, 33.3% named receiving at least the local minimum wage
Its stated limitsthe worker surveys do not aim to be representative; failing to achieve a point does not necessarily mean a platform fails the principle; it means no evidence was found; where platform managers do not engage, scoring rests on desk research and worker surveys; the report contains sections in common with other Fairwork reports; in the platform comments (Appendix II), Scale/Remotasks states the evaluation remains overly subjective in key areas; the executive summary says the remaining nine platforms scored no more than 2, the key findings say eight (the league table shows eight)

op the resource's own statement · 3p a third-party account · obs our observation · rd our reading. Hover a tag for its quote; each opens below with its source.

What this evidence can settle

Can answer

  • whether a named cloudwork platform shows evidence of meeting each Fairwork threshold
  • which platform policies changed during the scoring dialogue
  • which rights surveyed cloudworkers rank highest

Cannot answer

  • the share of cloudworkers earning below minimum wage across the market
  • whether a platform with no point actually violates the principle
  • the conditions of AI data work at business process outsourcing companies outside the platforms rated

In the worked questions

Where it meets Labor Vector

rd none stated. The archive reads the ratings as scoring the intermediary that directs cloudwork (allocation, rejection, deactivation, contract terms); thresholds 1.1 and 2.1 (payment for all completed work; compensating loading and reviewing time) are the report's own measures of unpaid labor and stay in its terms.

Entity

Canonical nameFairwork Cloudwork Ratings
Also known asFairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2025: Advancing Standards in Digital Labour and AI Supply Chain Governance, Fairwork, Fairwork AI
Addresshttps://fairwork.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2025/05/Fairwork-Cloudwork-Report-2025-FINAL.pdf
Operatorthe Fairwork project, based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center; funded by BMZ, commissioned by GIZ; on fair.work, Fairwork describes itself as a non-profit spun out of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) op
Founded2018 (the five principles, at a multi-stakeholder workshop at the ILO); cloudwork principles 2020 op
Kindrating programme: a ratings report (league table) scoring cloudwork platforms against the five Fairwork Cloudwork Principles
Lifecycleactive — four cloudwork editions: 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025 (the operator's cloudwork page lists all four; the 2022 report, on 15 platforms, is also recorded by the WZB and King's College London); the 2025 report calls itself both 'this third report' and 'this second cloudwork league table'; Fairwork published Germany Ratings 2026 and offers an AI supply chain certification scheme op
Count16 cloudwork platforms rated; 776 worker survey responses in 100 countries (as of Cloudwork Ratings 2025 (the report calls itself both 'this third report' and 'this second cloudwork league table'))
Data accessthe report as a PDF on fairwork.oii.ox.ac.uk (the record's URL under uploads/sites/17 now redirects to the same file under uploads/sites/11, the final URL as fetched); a platform search tool on the Fairwork home page; the Principles and methodology pages
Licencenot stated in the saved sources
Versions and datesreport: Cloudwork Ratings 2025 (PDF path dated 2025/05); survey period: February 2024 - January 2025; previous report: July 2023; editions: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025; report 2022: 2022-08-25 (WZB news item); principles renewed: 2024; read: 2026-10-29
Observation2026-10-29: read

Relations

Neighbours

Captures: the composition layer's account

The /non row

Evidenceevery field's quote, its source and the hash of the saved copy43
Negative tagswhat it is not4
  • NOT a representative survey of cloudworkers
  • NOT a finding of non-compliance where a point is missing
  • NOT the Fairwork AI Principles for workplace AI deployment, a separate Fairwork strand
  • NOT the location-based platform ratings (38 countries)
Sourcesevery source read, with its date and hash7
Not yet checkedwhat remains to read5
  • the Fairwork Cloudwork Principles and Methodology pages
  • the platform search tool on the home page (JavaScript)
  • the Fairwork AI Principles and the AI supply chain evaluations (Tinkogroup 2026)
  • the 2021, 2022 and 2023 cloudwork reports themselves (the 2022 report is known here from the WZB news item and the King's College London record, the 2023 report from the operator's cloudwork page)
  • the PDF's two-column layout interleaves its extracted text, so some quotes are short single-column runs

Cite this record

Lee Sharks, ed. "Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings." Labor Vector meta-aggregator, laborvector.org, compiled 2026-10-29. https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/fairwork-cloudwork

Record https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/fairwork-cloudwork · entity https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/fairwork-cloudwork#entity · the census as data

@misc{lv-fairworkcloudwork2026,
  editor = {Sharks, Lee},
  title = {Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings},
  howpublished = {Labor Vector meta-aggregator, laborvector.org},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Compiled 2026-10-29; every field sourced and dated},
  url = {https://www.laborvector.org/aggregators/fairwork-cloudwork}
}
Editor: Lee Sharks (ORCID 0009-0000-1599-0703). This page is the Labor Vector meta-aggregator's record of the resource above: its reading and fields are ours, and each field carries its source, its basis and the hash of the copy read. The resource's own terms and findings are kept as its own. Compiled 2026-10-29. CC BY 4.0.