New futures of work or continued marginalization? The rise of online freelance work and digital platforms

Workers from historically marginalized populations are an increasingly important, but not-well-understood, set of participants in the narratives being developed about the many futures of work. Here, we argue that the growth of non-standard work and the changes in worker/employer relationships that this reflects, the rising number of independent workers, and the surge of digital labor platforms demand more attention to what these new working arrangements mean for historically marginalized groups. To do so, in this paper we: (1) summarize long-documented inequalities in traditional workplaces, (2) highlight how these issues translate into the under-regulated and fast-evolving landscape of digital labor platforms, and (3) focus on how the emergence of data-driven algorithms and AI technologies may impact these issues. Our discussion draws attention to how HCI researchers can continue to address issues of bias and inequality embedded within technology. In particular, we focus on how issues of bias are diminished, transformed, or exacerbated in emerging forms of digitally-mediated work that seem to be core to discourse on the futures of work.