“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the platforms are fragmenting and rendering invisible the labour that is necessary to make the algorithms work.”

Roberto Ciccarelli interviews Antonio Casilli on digital labour and platform capitalism while refuting the “end of work”. Originally published in SP’s The Bullet.

Roberto Ciccarelli: Antonio Casilli, a professor at Télécom ParisTech, is considered one of the leading experts in the capitalism of digital platforms. He is known for his pioneering research on “digital labour,” refuting the apocalyptic common-sense notion that is proclaiming the end of work as such because of automation.

Roberto Ciccarelli (RC): In Italy there has been a lot of discussion about the firing of two IKEA workers, Marica in Corsico and Claudio in Bari. They were fired because their lives could not fit into the algorithm that governs the workforce. Have we gone back to the 19th century?

Antonio Casilli (AC): The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid, as it imposes seemingly “scientific” measurements and evaluations, which can resemble the old industrial manufacturing. The key difference is that the workers, in exchange for their submission to this discipline, are not getting the social safety and the political representation that they obtained before in exchange for their subordination. This new Taylorism has all the disadvantages and none of the old benefits. The workers are caught within a contradiction in terms: subordinate and precarious at the same time.

RC: After the Amazon strike in Piacenza, you advised the unions that they should also pay attention to data politics, not only to labour policy. What does that mean?

AC: In Piacenza, only the visible tip of the iceberg was seen. That was a strike in a physical location, for better working conditions in connection to tangible assets. There is a whole other part of Amazon that for years has been engaged in struggle. I am thinking of the micro-jobbers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a system for the creation and training of artificial intelligence that is powered by micro-workers, people paid piecemeal, only a few cents, for data, image and text management tasks. These workers must organize themselves for better compensation and more humane working conditions. In this case, trade unions need to recover lost ground, because the “Turkers” perform tasks that are too small for them to take into account.

RC: Are the unions doing this?

AC: Yes, although there are several different initiatives at the moment working at the national scale. In Germany, the metalworkers of IgMetall have provided a platform for these workers’ claims: FairCrowdWork. In France, the CGT has created Syndicoop, which helps trade unionists to organize employees around a campaign. In Belgium, there is SMart: a cooperative, not a trade union, which works with freelance workers and also with home delivery workers (“riders”). A process is taking place in which the classical trade unions are seeking to “platformize” themselves, while the cooperatives develop services on a mutual basis for workers on the platforms.

RC: From the struggles of Italian “riders,” the demand emerged that they should be put on the same contract as logistics workers. Is it the same in France and in other countries?

AC: In the on-demand economy, the services based on real-time platforms and products are the focus of a major legal and political dispute regarding the contractualization of workers. Up to now, the goal has been to regularize their position in a common sector contract that would apply to the area covered by the platform. In the case of Uber, in America, Europe and South Korea labour struggles are converging toward calling for their recognition as urban transport workers. For Amazon, workers are seeking the application of the common contract for postal workers. The action plan still needs to be widened further.

RC: Widened how?

AC: By recognizing all the micro-work done by the “click workers,” even those paid a few cents per piece to accomplish tasks such as managing data, images or texts. Their work is useful for machine learning, for teaching a machine how to learn and creating artificial intelligence.

RC: And how can this be achieved?

AC: Everything is tied to the quantity of information produced, and to how and to what extent the platforms are taking advantage of this production of data. Uber takes between 20 and 40 per cent on each transaction that takes place on its platform, and is fully aware of the value that is being produced. Some of the wealth produced must be redistributed to the workers on the platforms. While this wouldn’t be a wage, such a redistribution would be more equitable than the existing situation.

RC: What are other examples of digital micro-work?

AC: There are many. It is a global market that counts at least 100 million workers. In China, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, platforms and services exist that are little known in Europe. These workers do a very wide range of jobs that allow Western digital economies to function. In these countries, you can find the Google search engine evaluators (raters). They are the workers who check whether the results of a search are appropriate and correct the range of results by adjusting the algorithm. There are also the content moderators on Facebook or Youtube, who spend their days judging whether particular videos or photos respect the platforms’ terms and conditions. They teach the filtering algorithms what content should be censored. We can also mention the “click workers” who are sharing, “liking,” and promoting advertising or celebrity videos, for which they are paid even less than a cent per click. These people are the real fuel behind viral marketing, which brings the most famous brands to life on the social networks.

RC: The on-demand economy is also a reputation economy and an economy of attention, where the figure of the consumer is central. How can workers involve consumers in their claims?

AC: First of all, by recognizing that the consumer performs the same type of labour as the Deliveroo delivery person or the micro-task worker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

RC: What is the labour that the consumer performs?

AC: They produce data as well. This data is used to train artificial intelligence. The consumer produces a critical mass of exchanges and transactions that allow the platform to exist on the market. A consumer is an active and crucial part of the existence of the algorithm. They carry out a large amount of productive actions every day, which are similar to those of digital workers. Even the users on Youtube are doing video moderation for free, by reporting those that are not appropriate. Anyone who uses Google is training the algorithm of the search engine to learn the terms most often sought based on the words entered into it, by us and by others. The consumer is a producer. The boundaries between these economic actors are converging, to the point that we can say that when a platform doesn’t want to pay you, they call you a “consumer,” while, if they are willing to pay you (a little), they call you a task worker or micro-worker.

RC: You mentioned “free labour.” What is the role it plays in the digital economy?

AC: This “free labour” was already defined by Tiziana Terranova 20 years ago. Even then, being online was labour, because it produced content for websites and for the sites that were called “portals” at the time. Over the past decade, this idea of ​​free labour has changed, as we realized that the platforms aren’t just buying and selling our content — most importantly, they are buying and selling our personal data and personal information: which brands we like, or what time we usually listen to music; or where we are, using GPS. The free labour of the internet user is not creative work, but rather work done without awareness, and much less satisfactory, as it is invisible. As such, it is alienating, to the extent that we do not realize what the data is useful for, and how it will be used, when we solve a “captcha” on Google or add a tag to an image on Instagram.

RC: What is this data used for?

AC: It is used to produce monetary value for the large platforms that buy and sell information, but it is also used to create value for automation: to train artificial intelligence, teach the chat boxes to communicate with humans, and create virtual assistants like Siri on the iPhone or Alexa on Amazon, who speak to us and help us make choices, or even make them instead of us.

RC: So, is digital labour the common characteristic between the struggles of the bicycle messengers on Foodora or Deliveroo, those of Amazon workers and those in the countries of the “click workers”?

AC: Yes, these struggles are united by a different form of labour than those we have been accustomed to in the last century. Today, digital labour is done through digital platforms, which must be considered a type of productive organization. In addition, these platforms are both companies and markets. Amazon is a more traditional company with a brutal culture of labour discipline, as one can see, for example, in their warehouses, but also in their offices. But Amazon is also a market, a marketplace based on an enormous catalogue of products and on a less well-known form of commerce: that of data. Deliveroo is the same: It is an enterprise, with employees and tangible and intangible resources, and at the same time it is a labour market that connects customers, productive tasks and delivery workers. In this case, the platform uses an algorithmic type of matching, creating a relationship between different subjects. For Amazon, the relationship is between those who produce an item and those who buy it.

RC: You are a supporter of a universal basic income. How would it be able to protect the workforce engaged in digital labour, as intermittent and precarious as it is?

AC: By recognizing the data labour that goes through the platforms. This has already been argued by a report by the French Ministry of Finance in 2013, and in a report by the Rockefeller Foundation last year. The digital giants should not be taxed on the basis of how many data centers or offices they have in a country, but on the basis of the data produced by the users of the platforms. If there are 30 million Google users in Italy, it is fair to tax Google based on the profits they made from these users’ activities. In this way, one could fund a basic income, arising from the digital labour that each of us carries out on the internet or on the mobile apps we use. •

Antonio Casilli is a professor at Télécom ParisTech. He has written, among other books, Qu’est-ce que le digital labor? Editions de l’INA in 2015 together with D. Cardon; Stop Mobbing (DeriveApprodi, 2000); and La Fabbrica Libertina (Manifestolibri, 1997).

The post Workers are the Heart of the Algorithm appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The only caveat from the P2P Foundation point of view is that, it still assumes that capitalism is the only system that creates value, but counter-balanced by investments of the state in the human economy. What is still lacking is an understanding of how the commons itself is a value creation engine, that needs to be recognized.

See our own approach via our report: Value in the Commons Economy.

And without further ado, here is …

Marc Saxer:

Ever since the Second Industrial Revolution petered out, global capitalism has faced a demand crisis. If you think that all we need now is to stop austerity and spend our way out of the crisis, think again. Over the past few decades, developed economies were kept alive through artificially created demand. The inflation of the 1970s, the public debt of the 1980s, the private debt of the 1990s and the quantitative easing of the 2000s were all strategies to inject future resources for present consumption. Even if the dystopian vision of a world without work does not come true, workers’ waning consumer power can no longer fuel growth. This means progressive hopes for a Keynesian revival or a return to Fordism are misguided.

Progressives must find new answers to the challenges posed by the digital revolution. In a global economy, rejecting technological innovation is not an option. But the new technologies should also be embraced in their own right: the automation of dirty, dangerous, physically demanding tasks is set to improve workplace safety and satisfaction.

Yet, digital capitalism is ripe with potentially fatal contradictions. Mass un- and underemployment could aggravate the demand problem to a point where the world economy implodes. If digital automation continues to threaten the security and dignity of the majority population, the current revolt against globalism will only be a small foretaste of what is to come.

What we need is a new development model for the digital age. Front and centre of this new model must be the need to create decent livelihoods. Our best chance to create decent livelihoods in the digital age is the Human Economy.

The Human Economy is composed of two interwoven economies. The digital capitalist economy, which generates the surplus needed to remunerate work for the common good. And the human commons, which creates the consumption demand needed to keep the digital capitalist economy going.

Decent jobs: Make the workforce fit for the digital economy

In the digital economy, entrepreneurs will hire humans to perform new tasks. Human work also continues to be in demand in the service industries, from tourism to entertainment, from design to fashion, from food to arts and crafts and from research to development. To realise this potential for decent human jobs, the skills of the workforce will have to be permanently upgraded.

Decent livelihoods: Remunerate work for the human commons

The human economy needs to be built around the recognition of human contributions to the common good. Millions of livelihoods could be generated in the human commons, from health services to elderly care, from child raising to education, from providing security to generating knowledge. However, many of these tasks, which are beneficial for society, do not generate enough income in the capitalist economy. In order to create decent livelihoods, remuneration mechanisms for these tasks must be created.

Five policies to bring about the Human Economy

1. Level the playing field for human work. Under fair conditions, there is still a need for humans to work together with Artificial Intelligence, robots, and algorithms. By shifting the tax burden from labour to capital, the playing field can be levelled for human workers. We need to explore how robots and data can be taxed with the aim of delaying the rationalization of work until new livelihoods are created.
2. Invest in full capabilities for all. Humans excel at communication and social interaction, creativity and innovation, experience and judgement, leadership and foresight, flexibility and learning. Harnessing these talents is the industrial policy of the Human Economy. To fully explore human talents, our education systems need to be fundamentally overhauled. To allow for the necessary public investment in public goods, the austerity paradigm must be reversed.
3. Boost consumption demand through basic income. The debate over the best way to boost consumption demand has sparked the first political battle of the digital age. The opposing camps in the debate over basic income run counter to the left-right formation characteristic of the industrial society. On one side, Silicon Valley techies who seek to boost consumption demand, Davos billionaires who fear the coming of the pitchforks, neoliberals who want to cut back the welfare state, corruption fighters who seek to cut out the middleman, and Marxists who dream of the end of alienating work in the leisure society; on the other, unions who defend their role in collective bargaining, socialists who smell a Trojan horse to do away with social security, economists who warn against moral hazard and social justice advocates who fear social exclusion. As the debate shows, the usefulness of basic income schemes will depend on their design, and many alternative approaches are being introduced. The Institute for the Future calls for Universal Basic Assets, e.g. entitlements to open source assets such as housing, healthcare, education and financial security. Yanis Varoufakis calls for a Universal Basic Dividend, financed by a Commons Capital Depository.
4. Distribute sources of wealth more evenly. If robots replace humans, then the question is: who owns the robots? In an economy where capital increasingly replaces labour, capital ownership needs to be democratized. Richard Freeman suggests a ‘workers share’ could spread the ownership of companies amongst employees to make them less dependent on wage income. An alternative can be Sovereign Investment Funds which could re-socialise capital returns.
5. Remunerate socially beneficial work. If the digital capitalist economy fails to create enough jobs, the state needs to play the role of employer of last resort. This economic necessity may become politically useful. In the vertigo of change, more effort is required to strengthen social cohesion. The state can encourage such contributions to the common good by remunerating them.

The social democratic path to the human economy

Creating decent livelihoods in the digital age will require massive investment in public goods. Generating the revenue to pay for these investments is not an easy political task. While the rich too often find ways to dodge taxes, the poor cannot afford to pay them. The middle classes, feeling abused by the “self-serving elites” and the “entitled poor,” are in open revolt. This is the political reason why the tax burden must be shifted from labour to capital.

In the political economy of today, however, the proposed policy shifts will certainly be an uphill battle. Whether the political economy of digital capitalism will be more conducive for the Human Economy is an open question. On the one hand, distributed technologies and the networked economy have the potential to democratize the means of production. On the other hand, the unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of digital platform companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon points to the opposite direction.

The bizarre alliance around basic income schemes indicates a window of opportunity. Digital capitalism is reshuffling political fortunes, and progressives should go out of their way to build coalitions around the need to boost demand. After half a century of supply-side economics and cost-cutting politics, putting incomes back into the centre of economic thinking is an opportunity progressives must not miss.

Building the Human Economy is not a technical task, but the outcome of political struggles. Only a broad societal coalition will be able to implement the necessary policy shifts. To build this transformative alliance, we need a platform onto which as many communities as possible can come together. This platform cannot be a smorgasbord of policies, but a narrative which explains how we can make the digital transformation work for everyone.

What could this narrative sound like? Amidst the conflicts over sovereignty, identity and distribution transformation, we need to strengthen the foundations of solidarity among all members of the society. This can only be done through a new social contract for the digital society. This social contract needs to be brokered around a compromise between all stakeholders.

The Human Economy offers such an inclusive compromise. In essence, it transcends the conflict between capital and labour by making human capital the engine of the economy. For capital, the Human Economy offers a solution to the existential threat of collapsing consumption demand. For the working population, the threat of mass unemployment is mitigated through decent livelihoods. And for political decision makers, the looming threat of social unrest is relieved.

The social democratic path to development, in other words, creates the necessary demand to sustain the digital economy, the social security people need to embrace permanent change, the political stability required for the implementation of disruptive reforms. The social contract for the digital society, in a nutshell, is to provide full capabilities to everyone who is willing to contribute to the common good.

Originally published on socialeurope.eu

Photo by fumi

The post The Human Economy: Creating Decent Livelihoods In Digital Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“What, then, can be done to improve the state of digital work for the millions being enrolled into it? How do we counter the structural transfer of risk and responsibility from firms onto precarious workers?

The strategies that both Guy Standing and I point to, recognize that there is no going back. We are never going to be able to recreate the ‘labourist’ model of the mid-20th century. We may never again see lifetime jobs. But, what is it that we should then be striving towards?

Firstly, we need appropriate data. Guy rightly noted that our current statistics are unfit for purpose, and we need data that more carefully measures, who, where, and what is happening in the digital economy.

Second, and relatedly, I pointed to the need for more transparency in the value chains of digital work. Over the last few decades, we have seen how the Fairtrade movement has shed light on previously hidden parts of commodity chains, encouraging companies to curb distasteful work practices in factories and farms. We could thus similarly imagine a ‘Fairwork’ movement to make sure that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are held accountable if digital sweatshops enter into their own virtual production networks.

Third, we could perhaps re-envision what digital ‘spaces’ of resistance might look like. Even though a lack of physical co-presence inhibits the ability of workers to identify one another, the same networks that are mediating their work can be harnessed to create digital picket-lines.

So, much in the same way that geographically co-present picket lines aim to disrupt the ability to conduct business as usual, digital ones could be formed to disrupt the digital presence of employers (think, for instance, of the ability to ‘Google-bomb’ the web-presence of employers).

These are also potentially fruitful conditions for the creation of some sort of transnational digital workers union or trade secretariat. This would need to be an organisation with more ambitious aims that the current Freelancers Union (which helps workers to navigate unstable networks of work rather than attempting to change them in any significant way). But none of this gets us past the issue that workers still end up competing with each other in digital markets to sell their labour power. There is a keen sense amongst workers that if they withdraw their labour, someone else on the other side of the world will quickly take their place.

Fourth, the geographically dispersed nature of digital work marketplace has also made it hard to regulate effectively. But it’s worth remembering that only a few countries in the West are home to the vast majority of clients, and it is potentially in those places that regulations could be enacted or enforced about how clients should treat, and interact with, their workers.

Think, for instance, of ensuring that public bodies like the Gangmasters Licensing Authority have a remit that includes digital work. Or Guy Standing, relatedly suggested requiring taskers to have written contracts, curbing the power of customer ratings, and banning exclusivity clauses. In short, we need the State to intervene if we want workers to have more bargaining power.

Finally, it is worth remembering that it isn’t the existence of marketplaces themselves that are creating demand for digital work. Marketplaces simply offer a bridge between the supply and demand and allow it to be realised. In doing so, they extract rents from every transaction and set key rules that govern how workers and clients interact with each other.

(Fifth). But other kinds of geographic bridging of the supply and demand for digital work are possible. Just as there have previously been both consumer and worker-led pressures to transact with cooperative building societies and supermarkets, we’re seeing the beginnings of moves to create and work with cooperatively owned digital platforms.”

[Lead image credit: Justin Morgan (cc)]

The post Five Strategies To Improve the Conditions of Digital Labour appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Deadline for abstracts: 21 October 2016
Submissions via website: http://www.ilpc.org.uk

Digital Transformations of Work: Labouring in the Digital Economy

“Digital technologies have provided the links for multinational companies (MNCs) and global production networks (GPNs) to shift production across organisational and national boundaries, creating new global divisions of labour and removing work from nationally-constituted regulatory frameworks. Increasingly, online labour markets such as Upwork or PeoplePerHour, offer the platform infrastructure for the outsourcing of work and the managerialisation of freelancing and independent work at a distance, questioning notions of working time, value and control.

Recent studies have attempted to theorise a political economy that considers these digital transformations in contemporary work (e.g. Huw’s, 2014; Dyer-Witheford, 2015). From this perspective, the discussion of labour in terms of the digital economy has both re-materialised concepts such as immaterial labour and the knowledge economy, in the face of the impoverishment, precarity and crisis experienced by those labouring in digital economies – and, on the other, uncovered new challenges for the study of work and workers’ organisation and resistance, for example, the use of data storing and processing and communications technologies as forms of productivity measurements in the workplace (Moore and Robinson, 2015).

This stream will question the implications of this evolution from a labour process perspective. This stream will be the point of contact between scholars researching digital transformations of work in management, organisation studies and the sociology of work with the potential to involve others from cultural studies, critical media theory and the sociology of media.

We welcome contributions that examine:

• New employment relations in the gig or platform economy (e.g. Uber; Deliveroo);
• Crowdsourcing and new forms of labour;
• “Gamification” and the distinction between work, labour and play;
• The integration of data, digital metrics and algorithms into work processes;
• Control and data-related managerialisation;
• Digitisation and the ability to measure previously intangible aspects of work;
• Digital technologies, workplace flexibility and the intensification and extensification of labour;
• The commodification of digital labour and the role of free and unpaid labour in online regimes of accumulation;
• New jobs, new professional identities;
• Resistance and trade union organisation;
• Policy and regulation of digitally-mediated work;
• Methodological challenges and how to study digital work.

Potential contributions may include:

• empirical research that looks at processes of digitisation on work;
• empirical research that studies new forms of labour brought about by digitization/digital technologies;
• theoretical papers that consider how we might conceptualise digital labour, or the digitisation of labour from a labour process perspective;
• theoretical papers on the political economy of platforms;
• methodological papers on how to address the study of labour in the digital transformation;
• comparative labour process analyses of in digital contexts”

More details can be found here.

Photo by Joan-Marie E

The post Digital Transformations of Work: Labouring in the Digital Economy (ILPC 2017) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A Relevant Past for a Digital Age?

The post Video of the Day: A Relevant Past for a Digital Age? appeared first on P2P Foundation.