At the end In January, Hanna Kompanieten received an email from Upwork, a website where she has been in contact with online customers for seven years to work as a virtual assistant. The email, sent to Ukrainian employees on the platform, said the company was monitoring rising tensions in Eastern Europe. “First and foremost, we hope you are safe,” it read. It then offered Ukrainian freelancers suggestions to “minimize potential disruptions to your freelance or agency business and client relationships:” Keep clients informed about your safety, in case they get nervous. “Make sure all work is up to date.” Back up computers and other devices. “Please stay safe, stay healthy and stay connected,” the email concluded.
Less than a month later, Russia invaded Ukraine and Kompaniets says he hasn’t heard from Upwork since. “It made me angry,” she says. The email was “about customer safety and care, not freelancers.”
Freelancers or handymen working together on online platforms are a hidden engine of the Ukrainian economy – and that of the world. They log on to English language websites including Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer.com, Russian ones including Fl.ru and Ukrainian websites such as Kabanchik.ua and the most popular in the country, Freelancehunt.com. They work as software engineers, project managers, IT technicians, graphic designers, editors and copywriters. And they work for everyone, with long-term contracts or temporary jobs: startups in Germany; a garage designer in Beaverton, Oregon; a musician in Toronto; large companies such as Airbnb, GE and Samsung.
A 2018 survey by the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, estimated that as many as 500,000 Ukrainians were registered on web platforms — up to 3 percent of the country’s workforce. An Oxford report shows that the country is the seventh largest supplier of online labor in the world.
The Covid-19 pandemic may have pushed those numbers even higher. Ukraine is an attractive source of labor for companies in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Employees are well-educated, tech-savvy and often fluent in Russian and sometimes English. They usually work for lower wages than their American or Western European counterparts, although they earn slightly above the average Ukrainian wage, according to the ILO survey.
Some companies have opened offices in Ukraine, and some of them, reportedly including Wix, Lyft and Uber, say they are helping employees relocate and giving them extra time off. The online freelance platform Fiverr has a small global development team based in Ukraine, the majority of whom have left the country or moved to “safe places” in Ukraine, spokesman Siobhan Aalders said.
Invading Russian forces have plunged freelancers’ home offices into chaos and uncertainty. Vlad, a video editor in southern Ukraine, says he’s gotten used to the air raid siren and will hide until it’s over. Now there is fighting 30 miles from his home. “But as long as there’s water, electricity and internet, I can work,” he says. “Because we all have to live for something, eat something and pay rent.”
During the war, some freelancers renegotiate with clients — relying on their goodwill. Kompaniets reached an agreement with two regular Upwork clients to take a break on those projects, but continued to work for two others, sometimes from the basement of her home in Zaporizhzhya, in the southeast of the country. She says a customer sent her a bonus through the platform. A product designer, who will not be named, says he has been unable to concentrate since his family fled Kiev to western Ukraine, but says he appreciates the flexibility the contract work offers.
The situation is a particularly poignant reminder of the precarity of contract-based web work, said Valerio De Stefano, a professor of employment law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada who studies platform workers in Europe. “When there is a crisis like this, a war, the labor market always suffers and the workers always suffer,” he says. “That said, freelancers, both online and offline, rely heavily on their work for whatever compensation, and if they don’t work, they get no income.”
The war also raises questions about what platforms owe their indentured servants. The employees bid on contracts from individuals and companies seeking help, and then the platforms usually take commissions of up to 20 percent of the payment. Now some Ukrainian workers are asking for the commissions to be postponed. Working on Upwork and Fiverr since 2015, Ivanna Demianiuk has carved out a niche as a contract project manager for US-based construction companies. She moved from Ukraine to Germany last fall, but still works with people who have not been able to leave Ukraine. “I said, ‘Can you at least stop charging fees and support us during this difficult time?'” she says. She says she got an automatic message from Fiverr and hasn’t heard from Upwork.
