Digital labor

Last updated

Digital labor or digital labour represents an emergent form of labor characterized by the production of value through interaction with information and communication technologies such as digital platforms or artificial intelligence. Examples of digital labor include on-demand platforms, micro-working, and user-generated data for digital platforms such as social media. Digital labor describes work that encompasses a variety of online tasks. If a country has the structure to maintain a digital economy, digital labor can generate income for individuals without the limitations of physical barriers. [1]

Contents

Origins

As production-based industries declined, the rise of a digital and information-based economy fostered the development of the digital labor market. The rise of digital labor can be attributed to the shift from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. Digital labor can be connected to the economic process of disintermediation , where digital labor has taken away the job of the mediator in employee-employer supply chains. The value of the labor produced by marginalized digital workers in the digital or gig economy has yet to be recognized formally through labor laws. [2] In many cases, individuals who work in digital labor are considered to be self-employed and are not protected by their employer from fluctuations in the economy. [3]  Based on Marxian economic theory, digital labor can be considered labor as it produces use-value, produces capital, and is based upon collective labor in a workforce. [4]

Digital labor markets are websites or economies that facilitate the production, trade, and selling of digital content, code, digital products, or other ideas or goods emerging from digital and technological environments. A widely used example of a digital labor market is Amazon Mechanical Turk. Other forms of emergent digital subcultures including community forums, blogs, and gamers utilize digital labor as organizing tools. The platforms can be potential generators of cultural goods and are incorporated into global economies and networks.

The popularity of the digital economy can be applied to the onset of economies based on peer production platforms like free and open-source software projects like Linux/GNU and Wikipedia. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier, in the books You are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, argues that the open source approach contributed to the social stratification and widening of the gaps between rich and the poor, the rich being the major stakeholders in digital companies, who own the content of the content creators. A critique of the open source software movement is that peer production economies rely on an increasingly alienated labor force, forced into unpaid, knowledge labor.

On-demand platforms

On-demand work has been rising since the years 2008-2010. It follows the development of Internet access and the spread of mobile devices, which allow almost everyone to be in touch with this kind of platform, including children and teenagers. Such platforms cover a large field of domains: rental (Airbnb, Booking.com), travel (trivago, tripadvisor), food delivery (Uber Eats, Grub Hub, and Postmates), transportation (Uber, Taxify, Lyft), home services (Task Rabbit, Helpling), education (Udemy, Coursera), etc.

'Workers on such platforms are often not considered as employees, and aren't well paid. For example, an Uber driver earns between $8.80 and $11 per hour after expenses.

All of these platforms can be seen as data producers : both customers and workers produce data while using the service. This data can then be used for improving the service or can be sold on the market. Business model of such companies is often centered around data.

In December of 2020, Saile Inc. filed a United States trademark for Digital Labor™, based on their patent-pending Artificial Intelligence that performs the entire sales prospecting lifecycle by performing digital tasks on behalf of human sales executives. Digital Labor™ tasks are tracked, counted and purchased from Saile by companies ranging from the Fortune 500 to small businesses.

[5]

Social media

The notion of digital labor on social media arise from the fact that most of the value of any social media platforms is created by the users. Therefore they can be considered as digital workers on the platform. On most platforms however this work remains unpaid. Some exceptions include video and music sharing platforms. This is linked with the notion of participatory culture, "a term often used for designating the involvement of users, audiences, consumers and fans in the creation of culture and content". [6]

Digital labor is rooted in Italian autonomist, workerist/Operaismo worker's rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the wages for housework movement founded by Selma James in 1972. The idea of the "digital economy" is defined as the moment, where work has shifted from the factory to the social realm. Italian autonomists would describe this as the, "social factory." Studies of the digital labor of social media were some of the first critiques of digital labor. [7] This included scholarship like, "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free" (Trebor Scholz), and "From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City" (2010). (Andrew Ross), Tiziana Terranova and others developed a working definition of digital labor, drawing from the idea of free labor, and immaterial labor.

Other scholars who have written about Digital Labor include: Ursula Huws, Trebor Scholz, Frank Pasquale, Sergio Bellucci, Christian Fuchs, Andrew Ross, Jaron Lanier, as well as Postcolonial feminists, including, Lisa Nakamura. [8] Their work has been tied to other Alter-globalization texts.

Social networking labor, or user labor, denotes the creation of data by social media and networking platforms users, which contributes to the financial gains and profits of those platforms, but not to the users. It is based on the production and exchange of cultural content, and the collection of users' metadata. Microwork tasks can be completed before using the platform, which indirectly trains algorithms (such as text or image recognition when creating an account). [9]

Digital labor rights

The current debate over digital labor examines whether or not society's capitalistic economy has prompted corporate exploitation of digital labor in social media. Social media has developed as a means for people to create and share information and ideas over the Internet. Because social media are typically associated with leisure and entertainment, the monetization of digital labor has blurred the line separating work from entertainment. Proponents argue that exploitation occurs as typical social media users do not receive any monetary compensation for their digital content, while companies are able to take advantage of this freely accessible information to generate revenues. [10] Studies of social media sites such as YouTube have analyzed their business models and found that user-generated digital labor is being monetized through ads and other methods to create company profit. [11] Criticism against exploitation centers around people as prosumers. Scholars argue that exploitation cannot occur if people are both producing and consuming their own digital labor, thereby deriving value from their own created content. [12]

Due to the lack of regulation, the issue of digital labor worker rights has been raised by some activists and scholars. [13] [14] [15] Some scholars have criticized the current situation as a form of neocolonialist exploitation. [16] [9]

Gender Inequality

Female platform work is more prevalent in countries that have lower female participation rates or in areas in which women tend to be more prevalent in non-standard types of employment and lower-wage jobs. [17] The platform economy provides employment opportunities for disadvantaged groups who lack better options in their area. [17] Platform economies can reproduce inequalities that are present in offline work such as lower earnings and occupational segregation. [17] Women tend to be centered around digital roles that conform to patterns in the traditional labor market and economy such as freelancing and on-location services provided by care work platforms. [17] The participation of women in digital work platforms tends to be more concentered on traditionally female gender rolled tasks. A technical report by the European Commission found that females are less likely to perform creative tasks, micro-tasking, transportation, and software development when compared to men when performing digital labor. [18]

Over the last two decades, there has been a steady decline in the gender-based wage gap in the United Kingdom largely caused by strict national labor relation anti-discrimination legislation. [19] However, there still exist many challenges such as low labor force participation, gender wage gaps, occupational segregation, and a postgraduate educational gap. [19]

In the UK and most of Europe, many women find digital labor employment through remote crowd-work platforms (also known as part of the "Gig-economy") like Upwork, TaskRabbit, etc. [20] The switch from the traditional labor market to platform labor has not extinguished the gender bias in traditional employment but rather bought new sets of challenges. [20] The hiring process used in digital labor platforms are executed by machine learning algorithms which learn from past data patterns and are showing discriminatory outcomes based around gender. [21] An interview conducted with 49 women was carried out to figure out the gender dimensions of these digital platforms and multiple complaints based around gender bias were reported as customer feedback.

The African Union has a vision to empower women through Information and communication technologies (ICTs). They also declared 2010 to 2020 as the African Women's Decade. [22] It is found that there are several gender inequalities due to education, socioeconomic status, domesticity, and traditionalism which creates disparity in the ICT access and usage. It further widens the digital gender divide between men's and women's representation in the digital labor market. [22] Women in Africa were hopeful that new digital technologies or digitized work would bring equal pay and working opportunities, but in reality, they are facing new gender-based inequalities like economic insecurities, high work intensity, and adverse psychological impacts among women workers on such platforms. [23]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist economics</span> Gender-aware branch of economics

Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented towards the goal of "enhancing the well-being of children, women, and men in local, national, and transnational communities."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Temporary work</span> Type of employment

Temporary work or temporary employment refers to an employment situation where the working arrangement is limited to a certain period of time based on the needs of the employing organization. Temporary employees are sometimes called "contractual", "seasonal", "interim", "casual staff", "outsourcing", "freelance"; or the words may be shortened to "temps". In some instances, temporary, highly skilled professionals refer to themselves as consultants. Increasingly, executive-level positions are also filled with interim executives or fractional executives.

Freelance, freelancer, or freelance worker, are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance workers are sometimes represented by a company or a temporary agency that resells freelance labor to clients; others work independently or use professional associations or websites to get work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workforce</span> Labor pool in employment

In macroeconomics, the labor force is the sum of those either working or looking for work :

Employment discrimination is a form of illegal discrimination in the workplace based on legally protected characteristics. In the U.S., federal anti-discrimination law prohibits discrimination by employers against employees based on age, race, gender, sex, religion, national origin, and physical or mental disability. State and local laws often protect additional characteristics such as marital status, veteran status and caregiver/familial status. Earnings differentials or occupational differentiation—where differences in pay come from differences in qualifications or responsibilities—should not be confused with employment discrimination. Discrimination can be intended and involve disparate treatment of a group or be unintended, yet create disparate impact for a group.

Social issues in China are wide-ranging, and are a combined result of Chinese economic reforms set in place in the late 1970s, the nation's political and cultural history, and an immense population. Due to the significant number of social problems that have existed throughout the country, China's government has faced difficulty in trying to remedy the issues. Many of these issues are exposed by the Chinese media, while subjects that may contain politically sensitive issues may be censored. Some academics hold that China's fragile social balance, combined with a bubble economy makes China a very unstable country, while others argue China's societal trends have created a balance to sustain itself.

An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.

The digital economy is a portmanteau of digital computing and economy, and is an umbrella term that describes how traditional brick-and-mortar economic activities are being transformed by the Internet and World Wide Web technologies.

Occupational segregation is the distribution of workers across and within occupations, based upon demographic characteristics, most often gender. Other types of occupational segregation include racial and ethnicity segregation, and sexual orientation segregation. These demographic characteristics often intersect. While a job refers to an actual position in a firm or industry, an occupation represents a group of similar jobs that require similar skill requirements and duties. Many occupations are segregated within themselves because of the differing jobs, but this is difficult to detect in terms of occupational data. Occupational segregation compares different groups and their occupations within the context of the entire labor force. The value or prestige of the jobs are typically not factored into the measurements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unpaid work</span> Labor that does not receive any direct remuneration

Unpaid labor or unpaid work is defined as labor or work that does not receive any direct remuneration. This is a form of non-market work which can fall into one of two categories: (1) unpaid work that is placed within the production boundary of the System of National Accounts (SNA), such as gross domestic product (GDP); and (2) unpaid work that falls outside of the production boundary, such as domestic labor that occurs inside households for their consumption. Unpaid labor is visible in many forms and isn't limited to activities within a household. Other types of unpaid labor activities include volunteering as a form of charity work and interning as a form of unpaid employment. In a lot of countries, unpaid domestic work in the household is typically performed by women, due to gender inequality and gender norms, which can result in high-stress levels in women attempting to balance unpaid work and paid employment. In poorer countries, this work is sometimes performed by children.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender inequality in China</span>

In 2021, China ranked 48th out of 191 countries on the United Nations Development Programme's Gender Inequality Index (GII). Among the GII components, China's maternal mortality ratio was 32 out of 100,000 live births. In education 58.7 percent of women age 25 and older had completed secondary education, while the counterpart statistic for men was 71.9 percent. Women's labour power participation rate was 63.9 percent, and women held 23.6 percent of seats in the National People's Congress. In 2019, China ranked 39 out of the 162 countries surveyed during the year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender pay gap</span> Average difference in remuneration amounts between men and women

The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working. Women are generally found to be paid less than men. There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap. The latter typically takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience. In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary.

Immaterial labor is a Marxist framework to describe how value is produced from affective and cognitive activities, which, in various ways, are commodified in capitalist economies. The concept of immaterial labor was coined by Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1996 essay "Immaterial Labor", published as a contribution to Radical Thought in Italy and edited by Virno and Hardt. It was re-published in 1997 as: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività.. Lazzarato was a participant in the Years of Lead (Italy) group as a student in Padua in the 1970s, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. Post-Marxist scholars including Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Judith Revel, and Paolo Virno, among others have also employed the concept.

Gender pay gap in India refers to the difference in earnings between women and men in the paid employment and the labor market. For the year 2013, the gender pay gap in India was estimated to be 24.81%. Further, while analyzing the level of female participation in the economy, this report slots India as one of the bottom 10 countries on its list. Thus, in addition to unequal pay, there is also unequal representation, because while women constitute almost half the Indian population, their representation in the work force amounts to only about one-fourth of the total.

A platform cooperative, or platform co-op, is a cooperatively owned, democratically governed business that establishes a two-sided market via a computing platform, website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services. Platform cooperatives are an alternative to venture capital-funded platforms insofar as they are owned and governed by those who depend on them most—workers, users, and other relevant stakeholders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Platform economy</span> Economic and social activity facilitated by technological platforms

The platform economy is economic and social activity facilitated by platforms, typically online sales or technology frameworks. Platform businesses control an increasing share of the world's economy and sometimes disrupt traditional businesses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gig worker</span> Independent on-demand temporary workers

Gig workers are independent contractors, online platform workers, contract firm workers, on-call workers, and temporary workers. Gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company's clients.

Rhonda Michèle Williams was an American professor, activist and political economist whose work combined economics with multiple other social fields including race and gender analysis, law, politics, public policy and cultural studies. She aimed to show how the examination of the roles of race and gender in economics benefitted from an inclusive approach rather than a separate and fragmented analysis in order to ensure that issues of economic inequality and discrimination were aptly addressed. Williams was also noted as being consistent in aligning her own ethics with economic analysis resulting in a legacy in the political economy of race and gender.

Jill Rubery is a Professor of Comparative Employment Systems at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on comparative analyses of employment systems with a specialisation in gender and labour market structure. She was made a fellow of the British Academy in 2006.

A digital platform is a software-based online infrastructure that facilitates user interactions and transactions.

References

  1. ↑ Gong, Jing. "Role of Monetary Incentives in the Digital and Physical Inter-Border Labor Flows". Journal of Management Information Systems: 1–35.
  2. ↑ Harmon, Silberman. "Rating Working Conditions on Digital Labor Platforms". Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
  3. ↑ Malin, Chandler, Brenton, Curry. "Free to Work Anxiously: Splintering Precarity Among Drivers for Uber and Lyft". Communication, Culture and Critique. 10.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ↑ Fischer, Fuchs. "Reconsidering value and labour in the digital age". New Technology, Work and Employment. Houndmills/Basingstoke/Hampshire. ISSN   0268-1072.
  5. ↑ "Trademark Status & Document Retrieval".
  6. ↑ Fuchs, Christian. 2013. 'Social media:a critical introduction'
  7. ↑ Zittrain, Jonathan (December 7, 2009). "The Internet Creates a New Kind of Sweatshop". Newsweek.
  8. ↑ Fuchs, Sevignani, Christian, Sebastian (2013). "What is Digital Labour? What is Digital Work? What's their Difference? And why do these Questions Matter for Understanding Social Media?". TripleC. 11 (2): 237–293. doi: 10.31269/triplec.v11i2.461 .{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  9. 1 2 Casilli, Antonio (2017). "Digital Labor Studies Go Global : Toward a Digital Decolonial Turn". International Journal of Communication.
  10. ↑ Rey, P. J. (2012-04-01). "Alienation, Exploitation, and Social Media". American Behavioral Scientist. 56 (4): 399–420. doi:10.1177/0002764211429367. ISSN   0002-7642. S2CID   144556897.
  11. ↑ Soha, Michael; McDowell, Zachary J. (2016-01-01). "Monetizing a Meme: YouTube, Content ID, and the Harlem Shake". Social Media + Society. 2 (1): 2056305115623801. doi: 10.1177/2056305115623801 . ISSN   2056-3051.
  12. ↑ Fuchs, Christian (2015). Routledge companion to labor and media. New York. pp. 51–62. ISBN   978-0415837446.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  13. ↑ "The Economics of the Online Gig Economy: Algorithmic Hiring Practices, Digital Labor-Market Intermediation, and Rights for Platform Workers". Psychosociological Issues in Human Resource Management. 6 (1): 160–165. 2018. doi: 10.22381/PIHRM6120187 . ISSN   2332-399X.
  14. ↑ Harmon, Ellie; Silberman, M. Six (2019-09-01). "Rating Working Conditions on Digital Labor Platforms". Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 28 (5): 911–960. doi:10.1007/s10606-018-9313-5. ISSN   1573-7551. S2CID   46957852.
  15. ↑ Graham, Mark; Hjorth, Isis; Lehdonvirta, Vili (2017). "Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods". European Review of Labour and Research. 23 (2): 135–162. doi:10.1177/1024258916687250. ISSN   1024-2589. PMC   5518998 . PMID   28781494.
  16. ↑ Surana, Avni (2020-12-19). "Neocolonialism of the Tech Industry: How Does it Affect the Emerging Markets?". Rochester, NY. SSRN   3774467.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  17. 1 2 3 4 Rodríguez-Modroño, Paula; Pesole, Annarosa; López-Igual, Purificación (2022-03-22). "Assessing gender inequality in digital labour platforms in Europe". Internet Policy Review. 11 (1). doi: 10.14763/2022.1.1622 . hdl: 10419/254275 . ISSN   2197-6775. S2CID   247771497.
  18. ↑ Urzì Brancati, Cesira (2019). Digital labour platforms in Europe : numbers, profiles, and employment status of platform workers. Annarosa Pesole, Enrique Fernández-Macías, Europäische Kommission Gemeinsame Forschungsstelle. Luxembourg. ISBN   978-92-76-08955-1. OCLC   1190911495.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  19. 1 2 Mosakova, E. A.; Александровна, Мосакова Елизавета; Kizilova, K.; Ксения, Кизилова (2021-09-17). "Labor market in the UK in digital era: The gender dimension". RUDN Journal of Sociology (in Russian). 21 (3): 512–519. doi: 10.22363/2313-2272-2021-21-3-512-519 . ISSN   2408-8897. S2CID   239044250.
  20. 1 2 James, Al (2022-07-01). "Women in the gig economy: feminising 'digital labour'". Work in the Global Economy. 2 (1): 2–26. doi: 10.1332/273241721X16448410652000 . S2CID   247645719.
  21. ↑ Vyas, Neha (2021). "'Gender inequality- now available on digital platform': an interplay between gender equality and the gig economy in the European Union". European Labour Law Journal. 12 (1): 37–51. doi:10.1177/2031952520953856. ISSN   2031-9525. S2CID   225324640.
  22. 1 2 Alozie, Nicholas O.; Akpan-Obong, Patience (2016-12-21). "The Digital Gender Divide: Confronting Obstacles to Women's Development in Africa". Development Policy Review. 35 (2): 137–160. doi:10.1111/dpr.12204. ISSN   0950-6764. S2CID   157742099.
  23. ↑ Anwar, Mohammad Amir (2022-09-07). "Platforms of inequality: Gender dynamics of digital labour in Africa". Gender and Development. 30 (3): 747–764. doi:10.1080/13552074.2022.2121059. hdl: 20.500.11820/7671b327-2441-49fc-9f3c-2e591bc25308 . ISSN   1355-2074. S2CID   254409510.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.