Digital labor is a world of outsourcing and temporary employment.  Health care and other benefits are often nonexistent.  The "flexibility" of contract work means that you are always doing two jobs -- the one you have (temporarily) and the next one for which you are searching.  You may make good money for 11 or 12 months but then you scramble unpaid for another month or two until you start the next temporary job. 

The erratic nature of digital work, coupled with a lack of health care, makes it very difficult for workers to respond properly to the possibility of work related injury.  The chances that digital workers will have neither health insurance nor ergonomic work areas provided by their employers is high.  The outsourcing of digital work has also meant the outsourcing or exporting of work related injuries, which under the conditions of digital labor become not only the physical and psychological burdens of digital laborers, but their financial burdens as well.

These problems are real and dangerous.  In 1999 OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (the government agency responsible for overseeing safety standards for the documented labor force in the U.S.), attempted to establish guidelines to address these problems.  The agency met virulent protest from employers and was forced by those employers to recall the recommendations.