You know something has being “a thing” in Cairo when someone acquires a tawkeel for an international brand. That’s happening now in the co-working segment with the arrival of Urban Station (website, Facebook) in Mohandiseen. The chain joins the ranks of Rasheed22, 302 Labs, Icecairo, Maadi’s District and Muqaddima at The Greek Campus. Urban Station bills itself as a cross between a coffee shop and a co-working space: “The main difference with other co-working spaces is that we are on the ground; eventually, we will be there at every corner. This is the first working space that exists in the retail form,” co-founder Khaled Abdel Razek tells CairoScene. While existing places could offer free drinks, Urban Stations says it’s in talks with TBS and Crave to provide catering for the space — for ‘free’ food. The newly-opened space reminds us of MAKE Business Hub in Dubai, which is currently closed and will re-locate in a few months.

Are co-working spaces facilitating a race-for-the-bottom for freelance workers? Competition between workers in online marketplaces for outsourced tasks is creating a race to the bottom that hurts freelancers and companies alike. That’s our takeaway from Oxford University Associate Professor Mark Graham and Cambridge research student Alex Wood’s piece for openDemocracy UK. Workers accept getting paid poorly because they’re desperate for work — or they want to get good ratings to get more jobs in the future. “What then happens at the same time is that some of the people who do have good scores bid for jobs and then re-assign them to workers with lower scores (usually for a much lower wage),” the article reads. “It is irrational to do tasks yourselves as a worker who has a decent score when you could outsource them for a fraction of the cost you would receive to deliver them.” The authors’ solution? “Digital unions.” Well, good luck with that. Closer to home: Here is a guide on how to survive as a freelancer in Egypt, and you have founder Ameer Sherif’s Wuzzuf recruitment portal to check for opportunities.