Introduction: Platform Labour in the Global South and Global North

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Sociology explores the variegated nature of digital labour platforms and their operations across the Global South and Global North. In recent years, digital labour platforms have emerged as a significant technological wave, reshaping and reconfiguring the landscapes of labour and the broader economy. However, their emergence and expansion have not followed uniform trajectories across different parts of the world. Within this context, drawing on case studies from Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, France, Sweden and the UK, the contributors examine how platform work is shaped by shared ‘techno-social logics’ while remaining differentiated by local contexts, power relations and modes of contestation.

Introduction

An increasing body of literature has focused on the emergence of digital labour platforms and how these platforms build, connect and reconstruct social relations among workers, consumers and businesses (Aslam & Woodcock, 2020; Lata, 2025; Lata & Copolov, 2025; Lehdonvirta, 2018; van Doorn, 2017). Digital labour platforms constitute the newest technological wave that is reshaping and reconfiguring the landscapes of labour and the economy. These platforms encompass a broad range of app-based models which connect consumers with workers to complete their on-demand tasks. These on-demand apps have created new labour markets that have transcended borders, by relying on a revolving door of workers to complete both local and global service tasks (Anwar & Graham, 2021; Chen & Soriano, 2022; Lata, 2024; Lata et al., 2023; van Doorn et al., 2023). This is reshaping gig economy sectors, which require new work and labour relationships to respond to the needs of on-demand apps.

Digital gig work is based on online platforms that facilitate interactions between buyers and sellers and provide irregular work to gig workers based on customer demand. Work can be sourced locally or globally, with clients able to utilise platform apps to interact across spatial lines. Global estimates posit 70 million workers registered with platform apps, with user growth of online platforms at 26% annually (Heeks, 2017; Kässi & Lehdonvirta, 2016). There is a disparity in views on the gig economy, with policymakers in high-income countries concerned about the casualisation and fragmentation of work and the paid per piece model undermining minimum standards of work (De Stefano, 2016; Wood et al., 2019). However, low and middle income countries view gig work as a possible poverty reduction mechanism, which can digitally supply jobs across borders and foster economic growth (Irani, 2019; Lata, 2025; Nair, 2023; Nair & Divyadarshi, 2023; Ray 2024a; Yasih, 2023). This indicates that the emergence and expansion of the gig or platform economy has not followed the same trends in the Global South and Global North – an important contextual perspective that can often be overlooked when trying analyse or conceptualise a ‘global gig economy’. Additionally, existing research shows that gig workers are discriminated against based on their gender, race, caste and/or migrant status (see Lata, 2026, Ray 2024a, 2024b), which once again raises the important question of who researchers focus on when studying the gig and platform work and why? Within this context, this special issue focuses on the variegated nature of digital labour platforms and their operations in/across the Global South and Global North. This special issue presents case studies from Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, France, Sweden and the UK that address topics ranging from the informalisation of platform labour to workers’ resistance and informal governance mechanisms and the processes through which platforms are reproducing structural inequalities. In addition, this special issue features reviews of three recently published books on digital labour platforms, AI and human labour.

Digital Labour Platforms, Precarity and Informalisation of Platform Labour

Digital labour platforms manifest in two primary forms: localised, on-demand work, and globally distributed online freelancing. Localised work includes services that are tied to specific geographical locations and immediate temporal demands, such as ride-hailing, food delivery and home services. In these cases, the platform mediates an immediate transaction between a consumer and a proximate worker. Workers are often remunerated per task and their earnings fluctuate based on demand, platform algorithms and customer ratings (Duggan et al., 2020; Lata et al., 2023). These jobs tend to be low to medium-skilled and are frequently undertaken by economically vulnerable populations.

In contrast, globally distributed online freelancing involves the provision of services that are location-independent and mediated entirely through digital networks. Workers in areas such as software development, graphic design and writing provide services to clients worldwide via platforms such as Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr. These platforms enable workers to compete in a global labour market, which can lead to both opportunities for higher remuneration and intensified competition that drives down wages (Lehdonvirta, 2018). Online freelancing also exemplifies the decoupling of labour from geographical constraints, allowing capital to access labour at a global scale while imposing competitive pressures on workers. Despite differences in skill levels, spatial constraints and market reach, both localised and globally distributed platform work share characteristics of precariousness, algorithmic management and the reorganisation of traditional employment relationships (Lata, 2025; Schor et al., 2024). These commonalities highlight the broader socio-economic impact of platforms as instruments of labour market restructuring.

While workers are often at the centre of analysis in studies of platform work, another crucial category of actors underpinning the platform economy is that of ‘platform intermediaries’, whose labour is frequently treated as peripheral. Digital platforms are often understood as enabling a form of digital ‘(dis-/-) intermediation’ – the removal of traditional middlemen and the creation of more direct access within labour markets (Vallas & Schor, 2020). In practice, however, platforms frequently generate new forms of social intermediaries and intermediation rather than eliminating them (Ray, 2024b). These intermediaries are obvious across the Global North and South, but their work often seems to carry further consequence for those that are part of the global majority, as they face even more restricted access to formal and stable forms of work and employment. Existing research shows that the introduction of platform labour in the Global South has not fundamentally altered ‘informal work’ practices; rather it has given rise to a new form of informality driven by the lack of regulatory oversight of digital labour platforms (Filipetto et al., 2024). Furthermore, platform workers have established informal organisations to engage in collective bargaining with these platforms.

Labour Struggles, Resistance and Regulation

The contributors to this special issue advance debates on labour struggles, resistance and regulation and how these challenges reproduce structural inequalities. Challenges arise with long-established unions, which often represent workers from different industries with competing interests. Whether taxi drivers in the UK (Aslam & Woodcock, 2020) or truck drivers in Australia (Ore, 2022), such divisions complicate collective mobilisation. Under these circumstances, strikes and protests are frequently organised through grassroots organisations, with traditional unions playing more removed or minor roles.

In the Global North, these smaller, newer organisations are also typically more attuned to the cultural specificities of gig workers, many of whom are migrants. Irrespective of scale or duration, successful unions are those that acknowledge this complexity, recognising workers as also being students, migrants, or parents, and tailoring their advocacy accordingly. Yet given the high turnover rate within platform-based work, more substantial unions continue to play a valuable role by supporting the longevity of workers’ struggles and contributing to policy and regulatory reform. Traditional unions also provide workers with tested mechanisms for interfacing with government, making them essential in sustaining a collective voice.

Platform work often fragments workers spatially and socially, shaping both their daily lives and their capacity to organise. Long and irregular hours, typically at times when others are socialising, leave little room for building relationships. Without common workplaces, encounters among workers are fleeting, even when they share backgrounds or experiences. This dispersal is not incidental but central to how platforms organise labour into individualised tasks.

Such fragmentation weakens collective capacity. Platforms excel at connecting clients and consumers yet rarely facilitate lateral ties among workers themselves. Where opportunities for co-location do exist, as with ride-hailing drivers who gather at airports or transport hubs, workers are more likely to exchange information, share grievances, and develop the trust needed for mobilisation. Research confirms that strikes and protests are more common among platform workers who retain some element of physical co-presence (Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020). Organising those in online freelance or micro-work is particularly difficult given the delocalised nature of this work (Lehdonvirta, 2016). Recent examples such as the 2024 Valentine's Day strikes in the US, UK, and Canada illustrate the importance of proximity and visibility in labour organising (Anonymous, 2024; Bartholomew, 2025; Hussain, 2024). Workers who could recognise one another in urban space, and coordinate through shared gathering points, were better able to turn digital discontent into collective action (Lata, 2025). In platform economies, dispersion inhibits solidarity, while proximity helps to seed it.

Across the globe, platform workers are typically classified as independent contractors, which excludes them from protections such as minimum wages, paid leave, or compensation for injuries. This legal classification is central to platform business models and underpins their ability to scale rapidly without the labour costs associated with conventional firms (De Stefano, 2016; Woodcock & Graham, 2020). In some cases, particularly in high-income countries, platforms have reclassified certain groups of workers as employees, often under pressure from courts or regulators (Prassl, 2018). Such reclassifications are encouraged through mechanisms like the EU Platform Work Directive (2024), which introduces a rebuttable presumption of employment status and provisions on algorithmic transparency and data rights (De Stefano & Taes, 2023).

Australia, the UK and Canada have each pursued ‘third way’ approaches to platform regulation. In Australia, the Closing Loopholes reforms empower the Fair Work Commission to set minimum standards for ‘employee-like’ workers while retaining contractor status (Parliament of Australia, 2024). In the UK, the intermediate worker (a middle ground between self-employed and employees) category provides entitlements such as minimum wage and paid leave without extending full employment protections (Powell et al., 2025). Canada has also introduced measures that guarantee basic rights to platform workers while maintaining independent contractor classification (Ogunde, 2024). Some legal scholars have warned, however, that creating this ‘employee-like’ category risks incentivising employers to push workers out of mainstream labour law and into a hybrid category that avoids full protections (Forsyth, 2020).

By contrast, many Global South contexts remain in more fragmented and/or pre-regulatory phases. In Colombia, repeated attempts to legislate ride-hailing have stalled, leaving workers in a legal grey zone where grassroots organisations like Drivers Club Bogotá develop informal governance structures (Lozano-Paredes, 2025). In East Africa, strategic litigation and court rulings are among the main avenues for contesting algorithmic management, while regulatory initiatives often remain confined to capacity-building workshops rather than binding standards (Anwar & Graham, 2021). In India, new unions of gig and platform workers have increasingly displayed early collectivisation efforts and deployed historical tactics and strategies of both formal and informal unions, to effect changes within the regulatory landscape at the state and the federal levels (Ray & John, 2025).

In the gig economy sector, labour struggles diverge from conventional union models and take highly context-specific forms. In China's platform expansions abroad, struggles emerge around temporal compression and intensified schedules (Liu et al., 2026). In Sweden, platformisation of care work exposes uneven geographies of social reproduction (Zampoukos et al., 2026), while in Bogotá, drivers have created informal governance structures that demonstrate grassroots institutional innovation (Lozano-Paredes, 2025). Together, these cases show that resistance is shaped by context, and that effective regulation must be attentive to diverse and situated practices.

These different trajectories illustrate the diversity of responses: the EU foregrounds employment status, Australia emphasises minimum standards for employee-like contractors, and many Global South countries contend with regulatory absence or experimentation. These differences shape the strategies available to workers, from legal mobilisation in Europe, to hybrid coalition-building in Australia, to grassroots innovations and informal governance in parts of the Global South.

Contributions of This Special Issue

The contributors of this special issue articulate different perspectives and responses to the contemporary governance of digital labour platforms. Turning to each article in greater detail, Lozano-Paredes (2025) demonstrates how ride-hailing drivers in Bogotá, Colombia craft their own systems of governance and collective autonomy in response to the challenges posed by platform-mediated work, institutional weakness and urban inequality. This study highlights how workers themselves innovate bottom-up governance practices that shape the conditions of their work instead of focusing solely on how corporate platforms control labour through algorithms and app design. A key insight of the article is that informal governance structures do not simply fill gaps left by official institutions, but constitute a form of institutional innovation in their own right. Drivers’ networks create norms, communication protocols and cooperative practices grounded in autonomy, reciprocity, dignity and solidarity rather than the hierarchical, profit-driven logic of corporate platforms. Through these systems, members share real-time information about market opportunities, traffic conditions, regulatory enforcement actions such as police checkpoints and safety concerns, effectively managing risk and shaping work conditions more equitably than the impersonal algorithms of multinational platforms. In its policy discussion, the article advocates for what the author calls a ‘partner state’ framework, one that supports and amplifies such grassroots governance innovations without subsuming them under top-down regulation. This perspective challenges conventional debates that see formal regulation and corporate control as the primary levers for shaping platform labour, arguing instead that recognising and enabling worker-centred governance from below can lead to more equitable and adaptable systems of work organisation in the platform economy.

While Lozano-Paredes's article focuses on platform workers’ agency and their innovative bottom-up governance practices, Zampoukos et al. (2026) critically examine how digital platformisation in care services is reshaping the geographies of social reproduction in contemporary societies, focusing on empirical cases from Sweden. With the rapid expansion of platform work, particularly in sectors such as healthcare, home deliveries and cleaning, the authors argue that platforms do not simply digitise existing forms of labour rather they actively redistribute social and economic conditions of care across different populations and places, deepening structural inequalities. At the core of their analysis is the concept of social reproduction, the set of activities and relations involved in maintaining everyday life, including caring for children, the elderly, and households. Traditionally undervalued and often invisible, this labour has historically been shouldered disproportionately by women and marginalised groups. Platform companies enter this terrain by mediating care work through digital apps and labour markets, resulting in new spatial and social dynamics. The article demonstrates how different digital labour platforms produce uneven outcomes for workers and care receivers alike. The authors emphasise that these processes are not simply local but spatially and socially differentiated. Platforms can reinforce global divides between labour markets in the Global North and Global South by establishing flows of cheap care labour towards wealthier contexts while redistributing care burdens back home. Within countries and cities, too, platformised care intensifies urban–rural disparities and reproduces inequities based on class, gender and migration status. Conceptually, the authors frame the political economy of platformised care as inherently spatially uneven. They argue that rather than alleviating the crisis of care, platformisation often re-organises and intensifies care inequalities by embedding them into digital labour markets and geographical hierarchies.

Exploring the links between social identity, precarity and gig work further, the next contribution in the collection demonstrates how migrant food delivery couriers in the platform economy interpret and manage precarious work conditions through entrepreneurial narratives and gendered identities. Based on three years of ethnographic research with food delivery couriers in France and the UK, Popan (2026) contributes to the sociological understanding of gig work by linking migration, masculinity and entrepreneurial ideology in the context of platform labour. A key contribution of the article is demonstrating how entrepreneurial discourse shapes migrant couriers’ identities and coping strategies in precarious labour environments. Although gig economy platforms are widely criticised for producing insecure work, many couriers frame their work in entrepreneurial terms such as independence, flexibility, and self-reliance. Popan argues that these narratives are not simply imposed by platforms or policymakers but are also actively adopted and reproduced by workers themselves. By presenting themselves as entrepreneurs rather than employees, migrant couriers attempt to maintain a sense of autonomy and dignity in jobs that often offer little security or labour protection. However, the research reveals a tension between these ideals and the realities of platform work, which often involve unstable income, intense competition and algorithmic control.

The fourth article by Salvagni and Grohman (2026) addresses the issue of online YouTube content creators who function as key intermediaries who teach and normalise online data work in Brazil, but with it, a form of neoliberal aspirational subjectivity as well. In this context, these digital creatives’ accounts combine religious motifs and personal stories of hardship, with appeals to social reproduction – all elements that legitimise digital labour as not just economically useful but emotionally and morally meaningful. The neoliberal pedagogies practised in these videos reflect a transnationally standardised discourse that nevertheless plugs into region specific inequalities and idiosyncrasies, enabling data annotation to be framed as a gateway to global participation and upward mobility for Global South workers, who otherwise face widespread precarity, informality and insecurity. In this sense, the article provides fresh insights into how platform power circulates transnationally, embedding Global South workers into global data and artificial intelligence (AI) supply chains, and reshaping these workers through discourses that largely originate and benefit the ‘economic core’ of the Global North.

The next contribution demonstrates how the rise of the information economy, particularly app-based transportation platforms, has reshaped the employment and livelihood conditions for traditional transport workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Hussain, 2026). Drawing on survey data from 480 respondents, the article shows that digital platforms such as ride-sharing services have significantly transformed the urban labour market. While these platforms create new opportunities for digitally skilled workers, they simultaneously marginalise traditional transport workers who lack digital literacy and access to technology. Consequently, a clear digital divide has emerged, intensifying employment insecurity, income decline and social exclusion among less skilled workers. The article also highlights significant policy gaps, including weak regulation of platform work, lack of social protection and insufficient initiatives to build digital skills among informal workers. To address these challenges, Hussain (2026) recommends that policies focus on improving ICT literacy, expanding access to digital services, strengthening labour protections and integrating traditional workers into the digital economy.

The final contribution demonstrates how Chinese digital platforms export tight temporal governance, characterised by algorithmic urgency, work intensification and short-term monetisation, into Global North labour markets (Liu et al., 2026). Drawing on data collected from platform workers working in two Chinese-owned platforms operating in Australia: Bigo Live, an entertainment livestreaming platform, and HungryPanda, a food delivery service serving Asian diasporic communities, Liu, Lata and Liu argue that Chinese platforms do not simply transplant domestic labour practices but intensify pre-existing forms of time insecurity through platformised governance, algorithmic incentives and migration precarity. The article further shows how racialisation functions as a mechanism through which temporal intensity is distributed and normalised, producing new configurations of inequality under transnational platform expansion.

In addition to the above contributors, three contributors reviewed three recently published books on digital labour platforms, AI and human labour. Fatmawati (2026) reviewed Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih's (2023) book Precarious Workers in the Gig Economy: Neoliberalism and its Discontents in Indonesia. This book offers a theoretically rich and empirically grounded analysis of how gig work in Indonesia reproduces and intensifies longstanding forms of labour precarity. Drawing on a synthesis of Foucauldian governmentality and political economy, Yasih demonstrates that platform-based work, particularly the ride-hailing sector, reconfigures rather than breaks from existing labour relations, institutionalises insecurity. The book highlights how gig workers internalise entrepreneurial identities that normalise insecurity while simultaneously limiting collective resistance, resulting in fragmented forms of solidarity and constrained political influence. While offering valuable insights into workers’ subjectivities, organising efforts and regulatory struggles, the book also underscores the structural and political limits faced by gig workers in influencing policy. Overall, the book makes a significant contribution to understanding precarity, neoliberal labour governance and platform capitalism in the Global South, despite some scope for deeper comparative and policy analysis.

While Fatmawati's book review demonstrates how historical trajectories of labour and state formation in Indonesia shape gig work and gig workers’ precarious solidarity, Hemangini Gupta's book, Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India, reviewed by Singh (2026), instead adopts a feminist ethnographic approach, centring gender, caste and affective labour to examine how startup capitalism produces uneven opportunities and subjectivities, particularly for women. The book examines how startup capitalism in Bangalore produces gendered, caste and class-based labour, marked by precarity, affective demands and ‘unremunerated experimentation’. Using an innovative ‘labour as method’ approach, Gupta focuses on workers’ embodied experiences to reveal how entrepreneurial ideals such as risk-taking, flexibility, and ‘doing what you love’ are unevenly accessible and often reinforce existing social hierarchies. The book shows how women, particularly from non-elite backgrounds, navigate structural constraints while contributing affective and reproductive labour that sustains startup environments, even as they face insecurity, exploitation and limited recognition. It also highlights how experimental practices in startups promise innovation and mobility but frequently expose workers to uncertainty and disposability. While the book offers rich theoretical and empirical insights into feminist labour, subjectivity and power in India's startup economy, the review notes some scope for deeper engagement with caste and risk. Overall, it makes a significant contribution to debates on gender, labour and capitalism in contemporary India.

The third book, Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering A.I. by James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant (2024), reviewed by Palacios Crisóstomo (2026), offers a powerful and accessible critique of artificial intelligence by exposing the vast, often invisible networks of human labour and material infrastructure that sustain it. Through a series of grounded case studies, from data annotators in Uganda and engineers in London to warehouse workers, artists and content moderators, the book reveals how AI systems are built on global inequalities shaped by class, gender and colonial legacies. It demonstrates how narratives of technological neutrality and efficiency obscure exploitative labour practices, environmental costs and political accountability, while reinforcing capitalist logics of extraction and control. At the same time, the book highlights emerging forms of resistance and collective organising, proposing pathways for challenging and reimagining the current AI paradigm. While the review notes some limitations, including a tendency to frame AI's expansion as inevitable and a lack of engagement with academia's role, it ultimately positions the book as an important and thought-provoking contribution that demystifies AI and calls for critical reflection and action.

Each of the three reviewed books engage critically with contemporary forms of capitalism and labour, but they do so through different empirical sites, theoretical lenses and focal concerns. A key similarity is their shared emphasis on precarity and hidden labour: Yasih's analysis of Indonesia's gig economy, Gupta's study of India's startup culture, and Muldoon, Graham, and Cant's account of AI production all reveal how new economic formations rely on insecure, often invisible workforces. Each book also foregrounds how neoliberal logics, such as flexibility, entrepreneurship and innovation, mask exploitative relations while shifting risks onto workers. Additionally, all three highlight the limits of collective resistance, showing how fragmentation, individualisation or structural constraints weaken workers’ capacity to organise effectively.

Conclusion

The contributions to the special issue illustrate the need to evaluate platform work and labour in the Global North and South through a dynamic comparative frame that accepts its heterogeneity and evolving nature. They demonstrate how platform work is shaped by similar ‘techno-social-logics’ but is separated by context, power and modes of contestations. Across cases, we see how platforms mediate work globally, through similar algorithmic management of work tasks, but the consequence of this mediation is felt differently in different places.

The contributions to this issue foreground workers’ innovation in these circumstances, through bottom-up forms of governance, for example, through emergent organisational forms among Bogota's ride-hailing drivers (Lozano-Paredes, 2025), or couriers and care workers in Sweden (Zampoukos et al., 2026), that challenge the notion of platforms as totalising systems. Other articles centre the cultural and pedagogical infrastructures that legitimise platform work, showing how everyday aspirational narratives and moral economies are combined with gendered logics of social reproduction and care in the Global North and South, to fuel both the national and global platform economy.

Read together, these accounts chart a field where opportunity and exploitation, agency and constraints, continue to co-exist, albeit not without tension; and where platformisation reorganises labour markets, while also actively reworking socio-spatial relations and identities. The key contribution of the collection is therefore a trans-local Global North–South lens that demonstrates the shared socio-technical infrastructures of the global platform work and economy, and the contextual divergencies in workers’ subjectification and responses to platform power in different context and places.

While algorithmic management and contractual ambiguity appear across both the Global North and the Global South, their nature and stakes differ. In the Global North, debates often revolve around employment rights and status for platform workers and data rights, and the reach of established labour institutions. In the Global South, platformisation intersects with longstanding forms of informality, fragmented regulation and precarious spatial contexts, producing hybrid socio-technical arrangements, in which workers navigate overlapping regimes of risks, solidarity and survival.

The contributions in the special issue also strongly suggest that different axes of marginalisation – whether gendered or racialised – occupy pivotal position across both North–South geographies of platform work, giving rise to intersecting transnational circuits of care, that is worth further exploration. The North–South framing further highlights the ‘globally connected’ nature of precarity for platform labour, otherwise located within distinct socio-cultural, legal and institutional settings. This framing exposes how benefits of platform value chains and attendant discourses travel unevenly: where North-originated business models and narratives are repurposed in Southern contexts, producing novel subjectivities and governance experiments, that only occasionally challenge the power of the Global North.

Building on these insights, we see four promising directions for future research. First, interrogating the sustainability of platform work and labour: beyond wage and earnings relationship, what are the long-terms social and economic costs of platform work for workers? Research should connect the question of platform labour conditions to wider social precarity, as well as to the hidden reproduction costs borne by platform workers’ communities and households, asking what really makes platform work sustain over the life course?

Second, the question of platform workers solidarities: as the articles in the collection demonstrate that solidarity is being re-invented globally – from informal peer associations and community-based moral economies to strategical litigation alliances and hybrid unions. We need both comparative and longitudinal accounts of which organisational forms emerge, which endure and how they scale from online to offline, physical contexts.

Third, the changing facets of techno-social relations and subjectivities in the platform economy: as algorithmic systems, AI-enabled decision-making and agentic reasoning get integrated into platform and gig work, we need to ask, what impact do they have on workers’ identities – whether gendered, class based, racialised, or intersectional? Additionally, how are workers’ subjectivities and aspirations altered, and how do they navigate these changes?

Fourth, tracing transnational platform regulation: several platforms that the collection explores operate across jurisdictions (both localised gig platforms and online freelance ones) – bringing together labour from the Global North and South through similar techno-managerial practices but also arbitraging legal differences across spatial contexts. Future scholarship should track how policies (from EU presumptions of employment to ‘third-way’ standards) travel, diffuse, mutate and interact with Southern regulatory settings. What are the ‘unique’ or ‘hybrid’ outcomes of this process? This also points in the direction of further sociological research into how cross-border coalitions and civil society actors may influence these processes. Ultimately, understanding platform work requires attentiveness to both its global infrastructures and local materialisations, recognising that while platforms operate through shared logics of capital accumulation and algorithmic control, the conditions of work, resistance, and survival remain irreducibly situated. Only through sustained comparative engagement across North–South divides we can adequately theorise platform labour's contradictions and chart pathways towards more just and equitable work futures.