The Global South powers the AI industry’s labour supply chain through data annotation, content moderation, and platform mediated “ghost work” that trains AI systems across. Yet this significant economic source remains largely unprotected by the frameworks meant, both global and domestic, that are meant to safeguard it. 

This chapter, authored by Seerat Jabeen and Shashank Mohan in collaboration with Prof. Nirmala Gopal of UKZN, South Africa, analyses the active labour laws in India and South Africa alongside the recently adopted ILO Convention No. 193 on Decent Work in the Platform Economy and argues that global standards alone are not enough. Implementation gaps and misaligned domestic frameworks risk undermining ratification and enforcement. As a starting point, the chapter proposes a BRICS Data Labour Protocol as a co-created, regionally grounded set of labour protections and safety mechanisms, tailored to the specific harms of AI data work and designed to be implementable in practice by the very countries supplying this labour.

The chapter is part of a larger compendium on ‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability’ brought together by the Observer Research Foundation launched on 24 August 2026 at the 18th BRICS Academic Forum in Lucknow. 

Read the entire compendium here: https://www.orfonline.org/research/brics-building-for-resilience-innovation-cooperation-and-sustainability