“First there’s an economic crisis. Then comes an enormous restructuring of capital — and with it a restructuring of labor — throwing past certainties into doubt. Old industries, companies, and occupations disappear and new ones emerge, enabled by new technologies. As people struggle to find a way to describe the seismic upheavals in the economic and social landscape, a linguistic mist arises, muddling the features of this new landscape, blurring attempts to analyze and map it.”
“This time around, among the first commentators on the scene were techno-utopians, offering terms like “sharing economy” and “peer-to-peer networking” to conjure up a vision of a positive new development that, they claim, prefigures what a cooperative, post-capitalist society might look like. This is a society in which the Internet allows services to be freely shared between those who need them and those who can supply them, eliminating the capitalist intermediary. With 3-D printing, they even speculate, we can cut out factories too, allowing goods to be produced when they are needed.”
“When terms like crowdsourcing are deployed, they’re used not to describe a voluntary gift economy but one in which online platforms are used to access a global pool of workers, on a just-in-time basis. In phrases like “liquid labor” and “workforce on demand,” this logic is even more apparent.”
“It appears a new kind of working life is emerging.
It is a life in which who you are and what you can do are displayed to the world in the form of a standardized profile: your skills and the tasks you can perform listed in standard tick-box form, perhaps embellished with some self-promotional text. The strangers with the power to hire you can assess the quality of your work through user ratings that may reflect informed judgement but might equally be an indication of poor taste or a rationale for not paying you.”
“You don’t know from one week, day, or even hour to the next when or whether you will have work: so keep the smartphone always at hand, ready to hit “accept” at a moment’s notice. You are, in short, permanently logged on.”
“And since your work is largely carried out online, your every activity is recorded. You are thus continuously generating the data that makes it possible for you to be monitored even more closely, with increasingly precise performance indicators, reducing still further any wiggle room for individual autonomy.”
“You become part of an atomized workforce, in which individuals are increasingly interchangeable. Their labor is logged: logged in the sense of being chopped up into standardized units; logged in the sense of being connected online, and logged in the sense of being recorded for future analysis. You could call it triply logged.”
“But viewing the online-platform organization of labor as an issue only affecting the informal market is to ignore a larger reality. Several disparate trends that have been slowly building over decades are now converging, accelerating the formation and dissemination of a new labor management model across a range of sectors. It is appearing in both public and private sectors; in manual, clerical, and intellectual jobs; high-skilled and low-skilled; regardless of whether they are covered by permanent employment contracts.
Logged labor is becoming the new norm.”
“Slowly and insidiously, it has become accepted that you should have an up-to-date resume permanently available for inspection and be ready to pitch yourself anew for each job, promotion, grant, or inclusion in a project team. It is taken for granted that these applications should be made online, requiring you to contort your past experience to fit the standard tick boxes and drop-down menus. Even if you have a contract that specifies a 40-hour week, it is also now normal to expect you to check your email round the clock wherever you happen to be.”
“It is an outward symptom of a major restructuring of work: the manifestation of an underlying pattern whereby tasks are standardized, enabling them to be coordinated and monitored systematically.”
“Each unit of production is nested into a larger hierarchy of electronically-managed coordination. And each of these units, under pressure to keep costs as low as possible, seeks to minimize them by externalizing as much labor as possible to its users, or the next level down in the hierarchy.”
“Any given transaction may take only a few minutes or even seconds, but multiplied across a whole economy, having everybody book their own tickets, submit tax returns, upload articles, order groceries, update their profiles, and log their own working hours saves millions of dollars in wages not paid — and adds cumulatively to the cyber-bureaucratic load of unpaid “consumption work” required for everyday survival.”
“Not only is the cost of this labor externalized to others; these procedures also create an audit trail, allowing each transaction to be tracked, each worker’s performance to be monitored; the basis created for establishing what a “normal” pattern of work should look like for any particular occupational group, which can then be used to set targets for the future.”
“This is where the precariousness comes in. Even if they are ostensibly employees, high-skill development workers are increasingly likely to feel they are only as good as their last project. Each time, they have to prove themselves; putting in extra hours, showing extra dedication, and performing that difficult balancing act of demonstrating that they are a good team player while drawing attention to their individual brilliance — anything to make sure they will be picked for the next team. Life inside the corporation is coming to resemble life outside it ever more closely.”
“Choice only exists when there are genuine alternatives to choose from.
Does this mean, as some have suggested, that all workers are becoming part of a common “precariat” or undifferentiated “multitude”? No. Precariousness is the normal condition of all labor under capitalism — held at bay only by strong organization of workers under favorable circumstances. It is no more a glue that binds workers together in a common class identity than, say, hunger or poverty.”
“How should political economists understand the new phase of capitalism that is now reaching critical mass? It has several dimensions.”
“First, it brings new areas of life within the orbit of capital, allowing profits to be made from activities that were previously freely shared. Companies like Airbnb, SnapGoods, Lyft, or the Italian Gnammo, for example, bring human sociality within the orbit of capitalism, allowing a rent to be taken from each act of sharing, even when no employment relationship exists.”
“Second, whether it involves the online organization of online work (like Elance, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or Upwork) or manual work (like TaskRabbit, Handy, or Zaarly) or markets for petty manufacture (like Etsy) the platform economy extends capitalism’s scope into the informal economy, again taking a hefty rent from each transaction, as well as bringing this labor within the scope of capitalist discipline and time regimes.”
“Third, it represents an externalization of investment costs. In the past, companies that ran hotel chains or car fleets had to invest in real estate or automobiles, which represented depreciating assets. Now Airbnb, Uber, and the like have persuaded citizens to carry this cost, including the interest on the loans and mortgages they have had to take out to acquire these assets. This ties them ever more tightly into the capitalist system even while they carry the burden of risk.”
“The fourth impact is perhaps even more insidious because it extends way beyond the scope of the new online platforms into the heartlands of the “old” economy. By establishing a new normative model of what work should be like — logged in all senses — it removes any sense of entitlement to work that is organized differently.”
“The bodies, minds, and daily lives of the members of this new global labor force are sites of intense contradiction. They are both highly atomized and highly connected with each other. Their tasks are highly specialized, yet they also have more in common with other workers than ever before.”
“They must be both autonomous and compliant. They must both compete and collaborate. They must be always available but not show signs of fatigue. They must demonstrate past experience and reputation but are still only judged on the last job. There is the potential for new antagonisms as well as new solidarities between them.”