In July of this year, the FairTube campaign was launched, through a partnership between IG Metall, the largest sector trade union in Europe, and the Youtubers Union, a Facebook group made up of some 23,000 people who live either partially or entirely from revenue earned from posting videos on YouTube. IG Metall, which has been keenly interested in the new worlds of work created by the ‘platform economy’, has asked the German arm of Google, which owns YouTube, to hold talks about the status of YouTubers, their working conditions and pay. In what has come as a surprise move, Google agreed to the request on 23 August. Robert Fuß, a member of IG Metall’s board and head of the FairTube project, spoke to Planet Labor in greater detail about the initiative.
The FairTube alliance, how and why. “The idea behind the FairTube initiative was born in September 2018, after a meeting between Jörg Sprave, who created the public Facebook group Youtubers Union, and our colleague Michael Six Silbermann, who co-developed this initiative and had previously set up Turkopticon, a rating platform open to all workers on Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform,” Robert Fuß explains.
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