IT for Change joined with Privacy International, Human Rights Watch, Derechos Digitales, TEDIC in a group of more than 30 civil society organisations and labour unions in endorsing the call for the International Labour Organization (ILO) to adopt a binding Convention supplemented by a Recommendation to secure decent work in the platform economy. As a signatory to the joint declaration submitted to the 2025 International Labour Conference, we stress the urgent need for strong international labour standards that respond to the challenges of algorithmic management and employment misclassification that have left millions of platform workers across the world without adequate rights or protections.
The declaration outlines core elements that must be included in the new standards: fair and living wages, proper employment classification, universal access to social security, health and safety protections, algorithmic transparency, meaningful human oversight, and the right to collective bargaining. These standards must apply to all platform workers, regardless of their contractual status or engagement through third-party intermediaries, and should close the regulatory gaps that have enabled exploitative platform-models to thrive unchecked.
At IT for Change, we believe this is a crucial moment to lay the foundation for a just digital economy. As labour becomes increasingly governed by opaque algorithms and extractive data practices, international labour standards must embed principles of informational autonomy and algorithmic accountability.
Read the full statement here.