Dataharvest EIJC 2022

Ukrainian workers fleeing "modern slavery" conditions on British farms. Europe's meat industry becoming a "coronavirus hot spot" in which many workers are migrants from poorer countries. The pandemic helping us realise how essential are “essential workers”, and how Covid has disproportionally affected mobile workers and others working in precarious conditions across Europe. The rise of the so-called gig or platform economy has been both an opportunity to get flexible work and also to be easily exploited, a situation that some national courts are starting to reverse. And now our work is increasingly being managed by algorithms, often with unpleasant results.

Working is how we spend most of our awake time and how many of us define ourselves. Where and how we work has been rapidly changing in the last years -- and in many cases for the worse. Yet, even though EU institutions and regulations affect not only cross-border work but also national labour markets, we can't find much cross-border investigative journalism into labour topics.

It's time that we work on investigating labour topics across borders, and Arena is in the first stages of developing a collaborative network of journalists interested in covering work. Come to this session with ideas and questions about cross-border labour reporting. What are the needs and opportunities? What data can be used, and what data should we work to find?