On the finish of January, Hanna Kompaniets obtained an e mail from Upwork, an internet site the place for seven years she has linked with on-line purchasers to work as a digital assistant. The e-mail, which was despatched to Ukrainian staff on the platform, mentioned the corporate was monitoring escalating tensions in Japanese Europe. “First and most significantly, we hope you might be secure,” it mentioned. Then it supplied options to Ukrainian freelancers to “assist decrease any potential disruptions to your freelance or company enterprise and shopper relationships:” Maintain purchasers up to date in your security, in case they get nervous. “Guarantee all work is up-to-date.” Again up computer systems and different units. “Please keep secure, keep wholesome, and keep linked,” the e-mail concluded.
Lower than a month later, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Kompaniets says she hasn’t heard straight from Upwork since. “It made me indignant,” she says. The e-mail was “in regards to the shopper’s security and care, and never about freelancers.”
Freelancers or gig staff who piece collectively work on on-line platforms are a hidden engine of the Ukrainian financial system—and the world’s. They signal on to English language web sites together with Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com, Russian ones together with Fl.ru, and Ukrainian ones like Kabanchik.ua and the nation’s hottest, Freelancehunt.com. They work as software program engineers, mission managers, IT technicians, graphic designers, editors, and copywriters. They usually work for everybody, on long-term contracts or in piecemeal jobs: startups in Germany; a storage designer in Beaverton, Oregon; a musician in Toronto; huge corporations resembling Airbnb, GE, and Samsung.
A 2018 survey by the Worldwide Labour Group, a United Nations company, estimated that as many as 500,000 Ukrainians have been registered on internet platforms—as much as 3 % of the nation’s workforce. An Oxford report discovered that the nation is the world’s seventh largest provider of on-line labor.
The Covid-19 pandemic could have pushed these numbers even larger. For corporations within the US, Europe, and elsewhere, Ukraine is a sexy supply of labor. Staff are well-educated, versed in tech, and sometimes fluent in Russian and generally English. They have an inclination to work for decrease wages than their American or western European counterparts, although they earn, based on the ILO survey, barely above the typical Ukrainian wage.
Some corporations have opened workplaces in Ukraine, and a few of these—together with, reportedly, Wix, Lyft, and Uber—say they’re serving to relocate staff and giving them further break day. The web freelancing platform Fiverr has a small international growth staff in Ukraine, the vast majority of whom have both left the nation or moved to “secure locations” inside Ukraine, says spokesperson Siobhan Aalders.
Invading Russian forces have plunged freelancers’ dwelling workplaces into chaos and uncertainty. Vlad, a video editor in southern Ukraine, says he’s grown accustomed to the air alarm sign, and hiding till it has handed. Now there are battles 30 miles from his dwelling. “However so long as there may be water, electrical energy, and web, I can work,” he says. “As a result of all of us have to stay for one thing, eat one thing, and pay lease.”
Amid the battle, some freelancers are renegotiating with purchasers—and counting on their goodwill. Kompaniets reached an settlement with two common Upwork purchasers to pause on these tasks, however continued to work for 2 others, generally from the basement of her dwelling in Zaporizhzhya, within the nation’s southeast. She says one shopper despatched her a bonus by means of the platform. One product designer, who requested to not be named, says he’s been unable to focus since his household fled Kyiv for western Ukraine, however says he appreciates the flexibleness that the contract work gives.
The state of affairs is a very poignant reminder of the precarity of contract-based internet work, says Valerio De Stefano, a labor regulation professor at Osgoode Corridor Legislation Faculty at York College in Canada who research platform staff in Europe. “When there’s a disaster like this, a battle, the labor market at all times suffers and staff at all times endure,” he says. “Having mentioned that, freelancers each on-line and offline closely depend on their work for any type of compensation, and after they don’t work, they don’t get an revenue.”
The battle additionally raises questions on what platforms owe their contract staff. The employees bid on contracts from people and corporations in search of assist, after which the platforms usually take commissions of as much as 20 % of the fee. Now some Ukrainian staff are asking for a reprieve from the commissions. Ivanna Demianiuk has labored on Upwork and Fiverr since 2015, and carved out a distinct segment as a contract mission supervisor for US-based development corporations. She moved from Ukraine to Germany final fall, however nonetheless works with individuals who’ve been unable to depart Ukraine. “I mentioned, ‘Are you able to a minimum of throughout this tough time cease charging charges and help us?’” she says. She says she obtained an automatic message from Fiverr, and has not heard again from Upwork.