There are millions of platform workers who live all over the world, doing work that is outsourced or organised via digital platforms or apps in the gig economy. This work can include jobs as varied as taxi driving using Uber, translation on Upwork, or the training of machine learning algorithms through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Despite the potential of such work to give jobs to those who need them, platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages and working conditions with their employers, who are often on the other side of the world. Our previous research has shown that platforms often operate in relatively unregulated ways, and can encourage a race to the bottom in terms of workers' ability to defend existing jobs, liveable wages, and dignified working conditions. The potentials and risks of platform work touch down starkly in South Africa. A country that, by some measures, has the world's highest income inequality, and 28% unemployment rates. At the same time, the country has relatively well-developed internet infrastructure, and a relatively stable political climate and state/legal institutions. These factors make the country a site in which the platform economy is nascent enough to allow us to co-develop solutions with a multi-disciplinary team from Law and the Social Sciences that will offer tangible opportunities to influence policy and practice surrounding digital work. As other middle- and low-income countries quickly develop their internet infrastructures and millions of more potential digital workers rush online in search of opportunities, the interventions that this project proposes will be of crucial need if we are to avoid some of the 'race to the bottom' that the current world of digital work is bringing into being. Our project will culminate in two key initiatives. First, building on a work package of legal research, a Code of Practice will be developed to serve as an interpretive tool to outline the ways that existing regulations can be made applicable to platform workers. Second, we will develop a 'Fairwork Foundation.' Much like the Fairtrade Foundation has been able to certify the production chains of commodities like coffee or chocolate, the Fairwork Foundation will certify the production networks of the platform economy, and therefore harness consumer power to significantly contribute to the welfare and job quality of digital workers. This programme of work aims to not just uncover where fair and unfair work takes place, but also seeks to codify that knowledge into both a 'Fairwork certification scheme' and an annual ranking of platforms. These two initiatives will ultimately allow for the development of an international standard for good-quality digital working conditions. These objectives will be achieved with 5 project stages. First, the Law team will analyse S. African labour laws, social security laws, and other legal and policy regulations relating to the platform economy, and ask how those laws might be adapted to provide decent work standards for digital platform workers. At the same time, the Social Science team will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to map the key issues faced by S. African platform workers: developing a rich understanding of how platform work may be failing to live up to decent work standards. Third, we develop meaningful decent work standards for platform work that happens outside of the Global North. Fourth, we take those standards and use them in a process of action research in which we seek to certify the digital work platforms: assigning them a Fairwork certification if they pass. Finally, through an extended process of stakeholder engagement and outreach with workers, platforms, and policy makers, we plan a short-term strategy of pressuring platforms to change their policies to improve working conditions and a longer-term strategy of influencing the direction that regulation takes in a currently highly unregulated sector.

This project aims to explore the contribution of digitally mediated labour to the provision of decent work and livelihoods among displaced persons in cities, with a focus on Berlin and Beirut. Both these cities are leading hubs for digital innovation and have recently absorbed large numbers of refugees, prompting a growth in digital work initiatives. These emerged against the backdrop of a growing online 'gig economy' around the world amid an increasingly urban and 'connected' displaced population: more than 60 percent of the world's refugees now live in cities. These combined factors of urbanised refugee economies and the digitalisation of work demand urgent research into the relationship between the online gig economy and displaced populations. Yet despite a growing body of research on digital economies in development contexts, it is poorly understood how the online gig economy reshapes the world of work among displaced persons. Aiming to fill this knowledge gap in partnership with the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and hosted by the University of Edinburgh, this project pursues three research objectives: a) Generate empirical evidence about the digitally mediated work lives of refugees through fieldwork in Berlin and Beirut; b) Gain insights through research of selected digital platforms that offer digital work opportunities and employment trainings; c) Establish a new methodological framework that links ethnography with multidisciplinary methods in the social sciences of the digital, and develop new research skills through trainings. In fulfilment of these research objectives, the project follows two overarching questions: 1) How does digitally mediated labour reshape refugees' access to decent work and sustainable livelihoods? 2) What implications do these transformations have for the rights and policies that govern urban refugee economies, and for the way displacement is conceptualised in the social sciences? These overarching questions are complemented by three empirical sub-questions that correspond directly to the research objectives and three methodological dimensions: a) What types of digitally mediated work do refugees do, how do they get access to it, and what impact does it have on their social and economic lives? b) How do digital work platforms relate to the specific situation of displaced populations, and what impact do they pursue in comparison to the actual experiences of refugee workers? c) What new combinations of qualitative ethnographic research and digital research methods allow us to grasp how digital economies and refugees' working practices intersect and overlap? In line with the New Investigator Grant's aims, the project pursues additional objectives on two levels: skills development and impact. Skills development objectives include completion of a leadership programme at the host institution; the development of new approaches and methods during a three-months visit to the Oxford Internet Institute (OII); and the learning of effective user engagement by collaborating with the ILO and providers of digital work opportunities in the third sector and the private sector. The knowledge exchange and impact objectives include convening a workshop and an international conference with key users at the host institution; production of high-quality research outputs, including an ILO Working Paper, with impact on both users and academic beneficiaries; the creation of a project website and a Briefing for policy makers and platform developers titled 'A Just Gig Economy for Refugees'. The newly gained skills, networks and knowledge throughout this project will facilitate the creation of sustainable research capacity at the host institution through follow-up funding applications with a clear long-term aim in mind: the formation of a research cluster on 'Digital Development' at Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science.

The research will examine the contribution of labour law reform to poverty alleviation in low and middle-income countries. Since the early 1990s, the World Bank and other international financial institutions have argued that labour laws in developing countries should be made more flexible, with a view to promoting a more 'business friendly' environment in those countries. In some cases, deregulatory labour law reforms have been inititated as a condition of countries receiving financial aid from the World Bank. Recent research suggests that the World Bank's approach understates the role that protective labour laws can play in stimulating economic growth by encouraging investment in human capital and technological upgrading by firms. In addition, labour law institutions such as collective bargaining and social insurance can play a direct role in addressing poverty by redistributing wealth and protecting the least well off in society against workplace hazards and social risks associated with unemployment, sickness and old age. At the same time, this emerging body of evidence suggests that, in order to be effective, labour law rules must be appropriate for developing country contexts. Labour laws which are transplanted from industrialised countries may be inappropriate for emerging and developing labour markets in which only a small part of the labour force has access to regular, waged employment, or where private sector enterprises have limited capacity to comply with labour standards or to adapt to regulatory requirements by increasing their investment in new skills and technologies. Labour laws which do not bed down in a given environment may have the counter-productive effect of increasing informality and casualisation of employment. Thus it is important to have an understanding of the preconditions for the effectiveness of labour laws in practice in developing and emerging markets. The present project proposes to develop a new analytical framework for studying the nature of the 'fit' between labour law institutions and the economic and political context of low and middle income countries. The research will take the form of a series of case studies, based on paired comparisons of countries at roughly equivalent stages of development, but with different institutional, economic and political characteristics: Burkina Faso and Cambodia (which have different experiences of the role of financial conditionality in labour law reform); Chile and South Africa (where the political cycle has taken different forms in the recent past); and India and China (which offer contrasting cases of relative stasis in labour law versus recent reform of labour law institutions, taking place, in both cases, alongside rapid economic growth). The experiences of these countries will be studied using a mix of quantitative and qualitative research techniques, which will allow for a more systematic assessment of the nature of the labour law reform process in the different contexts being studied. The end result of the project will be an analytical template for the evaluation of labour law rules which can be used more widely to assess their contribution to poverty alleviation in low and middle income countries. The template will be developed by the research team in collaboration with officials from the ILO and with the active involvement of users of the research in government, the social partners, global NGOs, and civil society organisations in the case study countries. The project will also make a fundamental contribution to understanding the role that formal, quantitative measures and more qualitative indicators of law and development can play in evaluating policy and reform initiatives in relation to poverty alleviation.

Migration between the countries of the Global South, otherwise known as South-South migration (SSM), accounts for nearly half of all international migration, reaching almost 70% in some places. The potential of SSM to contribute to development and delivery of the SDGs is widely acknowledged but remains unrealised, largely due to existing inequalities at the global, national and local levels which determine who is (and is not) able to migrate, where to, and under which terms and conditions. These multidimensional inequalities are associated with a lack of rights for migrants and their families; difficult, expensive and sometimes dangerous journeys; and limited opportunities to access services and protection, which can, in turn, exacerbate inequalities. The challenge of ensuring that SSM reduces inequalities and contributes to delivery of the SDGs is intractable due to: - A lack of evidence about the ways in which horizontal and vertical inequalities can undermine major development investments and policies, and about the types of interventions which can overcome inequalities associated with SSM; - A failure of existing development approaches to take account of how SSM (and related policies) is/are influenced by broader economic, political and social processes (and relevant sectoral policies); - A focus on individual ODA-recipient countries rather than on dynamic effects along migration 'corridors' which connect origin and destination countries and the development implications of (two-way) flows of people, finance, trade and knowledge; - The politicisation of migration and a growing tendency to focus on migration management and border controls at the expense of equitable migration and development related outcomes; - The top-down, high-level orientation of much development policy planning which can dehumanise migrants by focusing on economic indicators and outcomes rather than experiences and well-being, broadly defined; and - A gap between policy and legal frameworks to limit inequalities associated with SSM (where these exist), and their equitable delivery / implementation in practice. The Hub is oriented towards addressing this challenge and ensuring that SSM is able to make a more equitable and effective contribution to poverty reduction, development and delivery of the SDGs, particularly SDGs 1, 5, 8 and 10. It does so by bringing together, for the first time, research and delivery partners from 12 ODA-recipient countries which constitute six SSM 'corridors' (Burkina Faso-Cote d'Ivoire, China-Ghana, Egypt-Jordan, Ethiopia-South Africa, Haiti-Brazil, Nepal-Malaysia) who will work in partnership with five UN agencies and the OECD. The Hub will deliver challenge-led programmes of research and evaluation to address inequalities associated with SSM, undertaking extensive new data collection and policy analysis, and testing interventions and solutions in a range of geographical contexts. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) will lead the Hub's communication and dissemination work, working alongside our research partners in the Global South to develop a range of outputs for different local, national and global audiences to maximise the Hub's impact on policy and practice. The Hub builds on existing RCUK investments but also develops equitable new partnerships in order to generate novel and innovative perspectives on the intractable challenge which it seeks to address. In particular, by bringing together researchers from the Global South working across the countries making up the SSM corridors, and connecting these teams with leading migration scholars in the Global North, the Hub provides an opportunity for significant cross-learning within and between the corridors, and on SSM more generally. In so doing it offers considerable added value, strengthening capacity and capability for understanding - and responding to - the challenges associated with SSM and delivery of the SDGs.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having significant repercussions on the global garment industry, of huge importance not only to Cambodia's economy, but also to its 1 million workers, 80% of whom are women. Many garment factories are interrupting production with the effect that 1/4 of workers have been dismissed or temporarily suspended. Formal social protection in the sector, though improving due to multi-stakeholder efforts, is weak and fragile. Mixed-method longitudinal research will track and amplify the experiences and coping mechanisms of 200 women workers as they navigate the financial repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project's interdisciplinary team from human geography, political economy, and organisation studies will generate new knowledge on underlying and differentiating determinants of risk and resilience arising from formal and informal social protections. The ambitious study will focus its policy attention on learning to 'Build Back Better' social protection to prevent and mitigate longer-term impacts of the pandemic and future risk events. Our approach centres women's representation in planning and decision-making as critical to 'stitching back better' just and resilient garment supply chains to make progress towards gender equality (SDG5), inclusive economic growth and decent work (SDG8). The project's impact, within its 18-month lifetime, will be compelled by its partnerships with, and pro-active convening together, of government (Cambodian Ministry of Labor, British Embassy), regulators (ILO, Better Factories Cambodia), industry (Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia, H&M), think tanks (ODI), workers' organisations (CATU, the only female-led union in Cambodia), and women's media (Women's Media Center and the Messenger Band).