Abstract
Crowdwork involves paid work organised through online platforms. As a relatively new form of employment, a range of issues have emerged around work practices and contractual arrangements between the three parties: task requesters, crowdworkers, and platform owners. In this paper we examine some of the issues associated with workers’ experience of crowdwork that have been raised in recent years. We then outline how the affordances offered by another emerging technology, blockchain, could be used to address some of those issues. Based on a conceptual, scenario-based exercise, we argue that there is considerable potential for blockchain technology to manage the transaction-based aspects of crowdwork processes and contractual arrangements to make them fairer and more transparent, but without necessarily incurring excessive overhead costs. However, despite the claimed “democratizing” effect of blockchain, some structural issues associated with managing work are not likely to be improved by blockchain-based solutions.
Recommended Citation
Tate, Mary; Johnstone, David; and Fielt, Erwin, "Ethical issues around crowdwork: How can blockchain technology help?" (2017). ACIS 2017 Proceedings. 63.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2017/63