Tag Archives: labor

Frameworks for Understanding the Future of Work

Technology is changing work. It’s changing labor. Some imagine radical transformations, both positive and negatives. Words like robots and drones conjure up all sorts of science fiction imagination. But many of the transformations that are underway are far more mundane and, yet, phenomenally disruptive, especially for those who are struggling to figure out their place in this new ecosystem. Disruption, a term of endearment in the tech industry, sends shutters down the spine of many, from those whose privilege exists because of the status quo to those who are struggling to put bread on the table.

A group of us at Data & Society decided to examine various different emergent disruptions that affect the future of work. Thanks to tremendous support from the Open Society Foundations, we’ve produced five working papers that help frame various issues at play. We’re happy to share them with you today.

  • Understanding Intelligent Systems unpacks the science fiction stories of robots to look at the various ways in which intelligent systems are being integrated into the workforce in both protective and problematic ways. Much of what’s at stake in this domain stems from people’s conflicting values regarding robots, drones, and other intelligent systems.
  • Technologically Mediated Artisanal Production considers the disruptions introduced by 3D printing and “maker culture,” as the very act of physical production begins to shift from large-scale manufacturing to localized creation. The implications for the workforce are profound, but there are other huge potential shifts here, ranging from positive possibilities like democratizing design to more disconcerting concerns like increased environmental costs.
  • Networked Employment Discrimination examines the automation of hiring and the implications this has on those seeking jobs. The issues addressed here range from the ways in which algorithms automatically exclude applicants based on keywords to the ways in which people are dismissed for not having the right networks.
  • Workplace Surveillance traces the history of efforts to using tracking technologies to increase efficiency and measure productivity while decreasing risks for employers. As new technologies come into the workplace to enable new forms of surveillance, a whole host of ethical and economic questions emerge.
  • Understanding Fair Labor Practices in a Networked Age dives into the question of what collective bargaining and labor protections look like when work is no longer cleanly delineated, bounded, or structured within an organization, such as those engaged in peer economy work. Far from being an easy issue, we seek to show the complexity of trying to get at fair labor in today’s economy.

Each of these documents provides a framework for understanding the issues at play while also highlighting the variety of questions that go unanswered. We hope that these will provide a foundation for those trying to better understand these issues and we see this as just the beginning of much needed work in these areas. As we were working on these papers, we were delighted to see a wide variety of investigative journalism into these issues and we hope that much more work is done to better understand the social and cultural dimensions of these technological shifts. We look forward to doing more work in this area and would love to hear feedback from others, including references to other work and efforts to address these issues. Feel free to contact us at feedback@datasociety.net

(All five papers were authored by a combination of Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese, and danah boyd; author order varies by document. This work was supported by the Open Society Foundations and is part of ongoing efforts at Data & Society to better understand the Future of Labor.)

(Photo by David Blaine.)

How would you define work in a networked world?

(This post was originally written for LinkedIn.  Go to the LinkedIn version to engage in the conversation.)

I’ve been scratching my head trying to think about how to understand the different facets of labor that are shaping contemporary life. I don’t have good answers; I only have some provocations and a few questions, but I would love to hear your thoughts.

As a teenager, I was a sandwich artist. I’d arrive at work, don my uniform and clock in. I had a long list of responsibilities – chopping onions, cleaning the shop, preparing the food, etc. Everything was formulaic. I can still recite how to ask a customer if they want onions, pickles, lettuce, green peppers, or black olives. The job paid minimum wage and was defined by doing pre-specified tasks in an efficient and predictable manner with a smile. When my compatriots got fired, it was almost always for being late. In-between making sandwiches and doing the rote tasks, we would gossip and chat, complain about regulars and talk about run-ins with cops (who demanded free food which meant a dock in pay for whoever was working). And when my shift was over, I’d clock out and leave, forgetting about Subway even though the scent lingered and filled my car.

Today, I have my dream job. I’m a researcher who gets to follow my passions, investigate things that make me curious. I manage my own schedule and task list. Some days, I wake up and just read for hours. I write blog posts and books, travel, meet people, and give talks. I ask people about their lives and observe their practices. I think for a living. And I’m paid ridiculously well to be thoughtful, creative, and provocative. I am doing something related to my profession 80-100 hours per week, but I love 80% of those hours. I can schedule doctor’s appointments midday, but I also wake up in the middle of the night with ideas and end up writing while normal people sleep. Every aspect of my life blurs. I can never tell whether or not a dinner counts as “work” or “play” when the conversation moves between analyzing the gender performance of Game of Thrones and discussing the technical model of Hadoop. And since I spend most of my days in front of my computer or on my phone, it’s often hard to distinguish between labor and procrastination. I can delude myself into believing that keeping up with the New York Times has professional consequences but even I cannot justify my determination to conquer Betaworks’ new Dots game (shouldn’t testing new apps count for something??). Of course, who can tell if my furrowed brow and intense focus on my device is work-focused or not. Heck, I can’t tell half the time.

In the digital world, the line between what is fun and what is work is often complicated. There are people whose job it is to produce tweets and updates as a professional act, but they sit beside people in a digital environment who produce this content because it’s connected to how they’re socializing with their friends. Socializing, networking, and advertising are often intertwined in social media, making it hard to distinguish between professional and personal, paid labor and career advancement.

There are are people who understand that they’re “on the job” because of where they are physically, but there are also people whose model of work is more connected to their interaction with their Blackberries or the kinds of actions that they’re taking. And then there are people like me who have lost all sense of where the boundaries lie.

There is tremendous anxiety among white collar workers about how blurry the boundaries have gotten, but little consideration for how that blurriness is itself a mark of privilege. More often than not, those with more social status have blurrier boundaries around space, place, and time. Sometimes, this privilege comes with a higher paycheck, but freelance writers have a level of class privilege that is not afforded to the punch-in, punch-out workforce even if their actual income is paltry.

Often, there’s rampant financial and status inequality between those whose careers are defined by blurred boundaries and those who work in a prescribed manner. Many C-level execs justify their exorbitant salaries through the logic of risks and burdens without accounting for the freedoms and flexibility associated with this kind of work or recognizing the physical, psychological, and cultural costs that come with manual, service, or rote labor in prescribed environments. The freedom to control one’s own schedule has value in and of itself. Yet, not everyone with economic resources feels as though they are in control of their lives. And it’s often easier to blame the technology that tethers them than work out the dynamics of agency that are at work.

What’s at stake isn’t just that work is invading people’s personal lives or that certain types of labor are undervalued. It’s also that the notion of fun or social is increasingly narrated through the frame of work and productivity, advancement and professional investment.

Labor is often understood to be any action that increases market capitalization. But then how do we understand the practice of networking that is assumed as key to many white collar jobs? And what happens when, as is often the case in the digital world, play has capital value?

In academic circles, debates are raging over the notion of “free labor.” Much of what people contribute to social media sites is monetized by corporations. People don’t get paid for their data and, more often than not, their data is used by corporations to target them – or people like them – to produce advertising revenue for the company. The high profitability of major tech companies has prompted outrage among critics who feel as though the money is being made off of the backs of individual’s labor. Yet most of these people don’t see their activities as labor. They’re hanging out with friends or, even if they’re being professional, they’re networking. Accounting for every action and interaction as labor or work doesn’t just put a burden on social engagements; it brings the logic of work into the personal sphere.

Most of these dynamics predate the internet, but digital technologies are magnifying their salience. People keep returning to the mantra of “work-life balance” as a model for thinking about their lives, even as it’s hard to distinguish between what constitutes work and what constitutes life, which is presumably non-work. But this binary makes little sense for many people. And it raises a serious question: what does labor mean in a digital ecosystem where sociality is monetized and personal and professional identities are blurred?

As you think about your own professional practices, how do you define what constitutes work? How do you think labor should be understood in a networked world? And what does fairness in compensation look like when the notion of clocking in and clocking out are passe?

(This post was originally written for LinkedIn.  Go to the LinkedIn version to engage in the conversation.)

What is the Role of Technology in Human Trafficking?

Networked technologies – including the internet, mobile phones, and social media – alter how information flows and how people communicate. There is little doubt that technology is increasingly playing a role in the practices and processes surrounding human trafficking: the illegal trade of people for commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, and other forms of modern-day slavery. Yet, little is known about costs and benefits of technology’s role. We do not know if there are more human trafficking victims as a result of technology, nor do we know if law enforcement can identify perpetrators better as a result of the traces that they leave. One thing that we do know is that technology makes many aspects of human trafficking more visible and more traceable, for better and for worse. Focusing on whether technology is good or bad misses the point; it is here to stay and it is imperative that we understand the role that it is playing. More importantly, we need to develop innovative ways of using technology to address the horrors of human trafficking.

To date, as researchers at USC have highlighted, there is little empirical research into the role that technology plays in human trafficking, let alone the commercial sexual exploitation of children. As a result, new interventions and policies are being driven by intuition, speculation, and extrapolation from highly publicized incidents. There’s no doubt that all forms human trafficking and modern day slavery are horrible, but if we actually want to help those that are victimized, we need to recognize that this is a complex issue and work to understand how the puzzle pieces fits together. My team at Microsoft Research is trying to untangle technology’s role in different facets of the human trafficking ecosystem, fully recognizing how complicated and messy it is. This is why we need your help.

Thanks to the generous support of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit and Microsoft Research, I’m proud to announce a pool of grant money for researchers who can help us understand critical elements of the puzzle. Please forward this far and wide because we’re hoping to find scholars with the skills, domain knowledge, and passion to really help us interrogate how technology is used in human trafficking. We need anthropologists, communications scholars, computer scientists, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, etc.

In order to help contextualize our RFP, we have prepared a framework document meant to map out one slice of the human trafficking ecosystem: “Human Trafficking and Technology: A framework for understanding the role of technology in the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the U.S.” This document is meant to articulate some of the complex issues and hard questions that we face in trying to understand technology’s role in one aspect of human trafficking. If you’re interested in this space, please be critical and challenge our thinking.

We are also looking to identify scholars who are working in this space, including graduate students and postdocs and researchers whose work is not yet published. Even if you’re not looking for grant money, please drop us a line if you’re grappling with technology’s role in human trafficking.

On a more personal note, I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to work for an organization that is willing to sponsor this line of inquiry. It’s amazing to work with colleagues who are all deeply passionate about really understanding this horrible practice in order to do what’s right. We’re all deeply committed to the importance of research and grounding our decisions in research. And we’re all deeply grateful to all of those out there who are determined to end the violence and oppression that comes with commercial sexual exploitation and modern day slavery.

Thank you! And we look forward to hearing from you!

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Image Source: Brandon Christopher Warren, Flickr