The working life of ‘logged labor’

Logged labor is becoming the new norm.

Excerpted from Ursula Huws:

“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.

This might seem overly dystopian. After all, it can be argued, the kinds of work that are now increasingly managed by online platforms have always been precarious. When was taxi-driving or freelance copy-editing ever secure? By what stretch of the imagination was cleaning or running errands ever regarded as a regular job?

One way of looking at the recent exponential growth of online platforms in service delivery is to see it as a formalization of the informal economy, with the transparency of an open market replacing the old word-of-mouth methods of finding work, and the replacement of unrecorded cash-in-hand payments by trackable online payments, opening up at least the possibility for taxes to be collected and fairness to prevail.

….

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.

Any occasion may be interrupted by a ping on the smartphone, indicating that a summons to a meeting has popped up in your calendar or that a task awaits completion in your inbox. Woe betide you if you forget your username or password when the time comes to act on it: much easier to stay permanently logged in, whatever the security implications.

This is not just a substitution of one kind of communication for another. 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.

You need a database with everybody’s details in it? Don’t waste money on a data entry clerk. Make all users fill in the online form and enter their own details. You need to be sure that a project will be completed on time? Make all team members log their hours as they go along and introduce penalties for failure to meet targets.

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 model has penetrated many industries and occupations, introducing the paradox of work that is both more formalized — designed to meet standardized performance targets, from volume of content published to sales made, or fine-tuned to function in a complex multinational firm — yet more precarious.

But capitalism requires not just standardization but innovation. And innovation is messy, involving trial and error, sudden bursts of creativity, and false starts.

An increasingly common resolution of this apparent contradiction is, for many capitalist organizations, to put this kind of activity into a sort of black box, hedged around with external controls and involving a minimization of risk.

The trend is towards the development of new products and processes — as well as many aspects of research — to be located in specialist departments or outsourced altogether, with work organized on a project-to-project basis and carried out by temporary teams.

This is a model that has long characterized creative industries, where workers have traditionally come together to produce a particular film, play, or album, and it has spread to video games, software development, and many other applications.

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.

There are even more marked similarities when it comes to low-paid service workers. There is little difference between working on call for a supermarket, warehouse, café, or hamburger chain — waiting for the boss to call you in for work — and watching the smartphone, wondering when the next job from TaskRabbit, Hassle, Handy, or Uber will come in.

One difference between being a freelancer and being an employee is theoretically that the former has more freedom to say no. But in these days of unpaid internships and online theft of intellectual property, for those without rich parents or spouses to lean on, this is increasingly coming to resemble Anatole France’s famous freedom to sleep under bridges and beg in the streets.

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.

Bringing larger swathes of the workforce into open markets produces more, not less, differentiation. It does not reduce the importance of specific skills and talents. On the contrary, it accentuates it. Employers are able to pinpoint their exact requirements and target potential workers with great precision, setting them in direct competition with each other, often regardless of location.

The workforce is atomized, but workers are generally substitutable for each other only within the constraints of particular skill sets.

Introducing a formalized and atomized market in a situation that has previously been relatively closed brings new winners as well as new losers. What is catastrophic for a freelance graphic designer or a licensed taxi driver in New York or London may well be a life-changing opportunity for an arts graduate in Pakistan or Bolivia or a newly arrived migrant whose only asset is a car. Designating them all as members of a common precarious class does not magically whisk away the real difference in their material interests.”

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