ABSTRACT
Sustainability became a topic in human factors and ergonomics (HFE) on an international level (IEA 2017) in the years following the establishment of the new Technical Group “Human Factors and Sustainable Development” by the International Ergonomics Association in 2009. National and international HFE conferences have mostly focused the discussion of sustainable work environments on one single organization. But today’s working world is changing, and new types of work (like crowd work) are appearing that use a global workforce and have no organizational boundaries. The HFE community has not been very involved in the discussion of this new type of work. Some of these newer forms of work, however, deserve to be discussed because they don’t fulfill the criteria of decent or sustainable work. After describing the state of the art, the concepts of crowd work will be compared with the requirements of sustainable and decent work systems. This leads to the conclusion that improvements are needed for specific types of crowd work. This chapter discusses proposals for such improvements and recommends a broader definition of sustainable work.
