Digital piece work – Big Data at the Margins

Digital Piece Work: The New Workers and Geographies of the Digital Economy

Webinar video | Summary | Biographies | Resources

Featuring: Lilly Irani (UC, San Diego), Lisa Nakamura (Michigan), and Greig de Peuter (Wilfrid Laurier). Hosted by Nick Dyer-Witheford (Western)

25 March 2021, 7PM

How can we support workers in communities on the margins whose jobs and livelihoods are being threatened or transformed by developments in AI, big data and machine learning? How we can demand accountability from the powerful platforms that are engendering these transformations while denying the rights of their workers to fair pay and safe working conditions?

The third in our Big Data at the Margins series examines the ways in which digitization and AI are profoundly transforming the kinds, nature, and location of work, often with severe consequences for those on the social and economic margins or living in smaller towns and rural communities. As traditional manufacturing jobs have disappeared or moved overseas, new forms of AI and digitization have moved in, threatening jobs such as construction, maintenance, food preparation, service and agricultural work, and pushing workers into new forms of ‘gig’ or ‘micro’ work – short-term, standardized, precarious and low-paying jobs, which take place primarily on powerful digital platforms such as Uber, Task Rabbit, or Amazon Turk. These jobs are most often held by women, young people, migrants, indigenous people and people of colour, intensifying already existing forms of social stratification and deepening economic inequality. And, while these platforms publicly praise their workers as ‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘partners’, behind the scenes they work tirelessly to deny, punish or bust any attempts by workers to organize unions or demand legal recognition and protections.

Panel discussion summary

Dr. Lily Irani addresses the precarity of work conducted by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and the design of the Turkopticon platform as an avenue for labour organization. Mechanical Turk is a gig-work platform that crowdsources discrete, piece-rate, on-demand tasks that are “hard for computers to do”. Turkopticon is a mutual-aid website and browser tool that enables Mechanical Turk workers to write up reports, review jobs, and discuss employers. However, Irani’s efforts soon shifted towards turning Turkopticon into a dedicated organizing platform operated and sustained by Turk workers. Dr. Lisa Nakamura outlines an approach to theorizing the digital labour of repair by way of “anti-racist platform studies”. Nakamura’s approach attempts to remediate certain gaps in platform studies by considering the intersection of race and labour more pointedly. Specifically, anti-racist platform studies are concerned with the role of women and racialized populations in digital production, rooted in the historically undefined work of these populations in traditional labour contexts (manufacturing) and in domestic contexts (care work and reproductive labour). Dr. Greig de Peuter elaborates on new modes of worker organization in media and cultural industries. While work on media labour organizing has focused on unions or alternative worker associations, de Peuter suggests that we turn our attention to cooperatives. Cooperative businesses are collectively owned and controlled by its members, predicated on the equitable distribution of power and surplus, and advances principles of democratic economic participation and accountability.

Key themes that emerged include:

The need for worker organization alliances across hierarchical or rigid corporate structures
The cultivation of work solidarity across industry sectors and international borders
The impact on workers’ ability to organize arising from the shift towards platformized/ remote/ online work
The need for research to account for the ways in which workers see themselves and others
The drastic change in worker militancy and strike tactics in the era of digital work

Biographies

Lilly Irani is an associate professor at the University of California San Diego and member of the AI Now Academic Council. Her award-winning work looks at the ways digital platforms deploy the discourses and practices of entrepreneurialism to justify further exploiting and disempowering workers around the globe.

Lisa Nakamura is Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and member of the Precarity Lab. She is a leading scholar in the examination of race and digital media. Her recent work looks at the ways in which precarity unfolds across disparate geographic regions and practices, consolidating the wealth and influence of a few and further marginalizing women, migrants and people of colour.

Greig de Peuter is an associate professor at Wilfred Laurier University and co-founder of Cultural Workers Organize. His work explores the recomposition of labour politics today as artists, contract workers, interns, self-employed, freelancers, part-timers and other flexible labour forces seek to collectively confront precarity and financial and social insecurity.