Microwork and Global Governance: Sovereignty, Human Rights and the Role of Public-Private Regulation in the Digital Era

The growing diffusion of digital work and online platforms has transformed work organisation globally, giving rise to new forms of employment characterised by fragmentation, opacity, and strong power asymmetry. Although recent literature has highlighted how many practices attributable to digital labour can fall within the indicators of modern forms of exploitation, the mere recognition of such risks does not automatically translate into effective protection for the workers involved. This thesis analyses the effectiveness of legal instruments, both hard and soft law, in ensuring the protection of human and labor rights in the context of digital work. In particular, the international labor regulatory framework, the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, National Action Plans (NAPs), social auditing mechanisms and voluntary certifications are examined, highlighting the persistent gap between what it is called law on the books and law in action. The research aims to demonstrate how these tools, while designed to prevent abuse and promote corporate due diligence, are structurally inadequate to address the specificities of digital work. Algorithmic management, the lack of a physical workplace, task-based fragmentation, multi-level subcontracting chains, and the extraterritoriality of platforms contribute to rendering traditional control mechanisms ineffective, fostering accountability evasion and worker invisibility. The empirical part of the thesis focuses on selected case studies in Africa and Asia, with particular reference to the fields of content moderation, data labeling, and microwork. The analysis of these contexts highlights how, despite the ratification of fundamental ILO conventions and the adoption of NAPs, the working conditions of digital workers remain characterised by low wages, lack of welfare, limited freedom of association, and limited access to effective remedies. The thesis concludes that current protection tools, as conceived and implemented today, are unable to respond to the challenges posed by global digital work. This highlights the need to rethink the mechanisms of regulation and responsibility, moving beyond the voluntaristic and sectoral approach, to develop forms of protection capable of intercepting the algorithmic opacity, the transnational dimension and the indirect economic coercion that characterise contemporary digital labor