AFL-CIO lauds international labor standard for app-based workers

The following is from the AFL-CIO:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 15, 2026) — The AFL-CIO today joined the global labor movement in celebrating the adoption by the International Labor Conference of the Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy (No. 193), the first binding international labor standard to guarantee fundamental rights to the hundreds of millions of workers who earn their living through digital labor platforms.

For more than a decade, app-based and online digital platform workers, including drivers, couriers, domestic and care workers, and online taskers, have been excluded from the basic rights and protections that every worker is owed. With this Convention, the world’s governments, workers and employers affirmed that the mediation of an app between a company and a worker does not erase the digital platform’s obligations to workers’ rights.

The AFL-CIO celebrates several hard-won gains in the convention:

• Guaranteeing that fundamental rights at work apply to all platform workers, including the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining;

• Ensuring that all platform workers receive timely payment, not below the minimum wage and access to social benefits;

• Regulating algorithmic management by establishing an international floor of accountability—transparency, rights-consistent use, explanation and human review of adverse decisions, and data protection; and

• Requiring governments to take measures that protect platform workers from violence and harassment and health and safety risks.

“This Convention responds to years of algorithmic abuse and proves that no company is too powerful to be held accountable for the basic rights of working people,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Workers built the global economy that these platforms profit from, and today the world has said that all workers, regardless as to how that work is arranged, must be treated with dignity.”

The AFL-CIO calls on all governments around the world to move swiftly toward ratification and to translate the Convention’s guarantees into enforceable national law. The AFL-CIO also pledges to keep organizing alongside platform workers until those rights are real in practice.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is the largest labor organization in the U.S., a federation of 65 national and international labor unions that represent nearly 15 million working people. Learn more at aflcio.org.