Digital Workerism: Technology, Platforms, and the Circulation of Workers’ Struggles

The use of digital technology has become a key part of contemporary debates on how work is changing, the future of work/ers, resistance, and organising. Workerism took up many of these questions in the context of the factory – particularly through the Italian Operaismo – connecting the experience of the workplace with a broader struggle against capitalism. However, there are many differences between those factories and the new digital workplaces in which many workers find themselves today. The methods of workers’ inquiry and the theories of class composition are a useful legacy from Operaismo, providing tools and a framework to make sense of and intervene within workers’ struggles today. However, these require sharpening and updating in a digital context. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for a “digital workerism”, understood as both a research and organising method. We use the case study of Uber to discuss how technology can be used against workers, as well as repurposed by them in various ways. By developing an analysis of the technical, social, and political re-composition taking place on the platform, we move beyond determinist readings of technology, to place different technologies within the social relations that are emerging. In particular, we draw attention to the new forms through which workers’ struggles can be circulated. Through this, we argue for a “digital workerism” that develops a critical understanding of how the workplace can become a key site for the struggles of digital/communicative socialism

“We are a service class”: a workers’ inquiry into the class composition of service commodity production during the unreal interregnum

It is half a century since the British workers’ movement went into decline. This downwards trajectory was not reversed by the financial crisis of 2008 – in fact, if anything, it was accelerated by it. Levels of working class self-organisation and collective action in the sphere of production remain at historic lows. This lack of activity has left us trapped in a long decade of crisis, subject to a deeply unequal balance of class forces. This thesis makes two contributions to understanding how this impasse might come to an end by focusing on the class composition of one fraction of the contemporary British working class: young, low-paid, service workers who are disconnected from the institutions of the workers’ movement. First, it develops an original theoretical framework for the analysis of class composition on the basis of a 3-part model (technical, social, and political). This framework uses original readings of Marx, the socialist feminist tradition, and Lenin in order to analyse working class organisation in the sphere of production through a consistent system of categories founded in the materialist analysis of social relations. Second, it presents the results of a workers’ inquiry made up of three case studies into three separate workplaces in Brighton. This study found a class fraction which is subject to intense systems of managerial control – but which also has the capacity to throw those systems into disarray. Below the surface of the service sector, many of the conditions necessary for a rapid shift in the balance of class forces are present. What’s missing is a subjective spark – a spark which could be provided by the significant minority of workers who are sympathetic with political militancy, and whose agitation might prove capable of starting a process of associational amplification through which the fraction first struggles for their immediate economic interests, and then leaps into the fight for their more fundamental political ones. Such a leap, if merged with the concerted efforts of socialists to create mechanisms for the expression of this antagonism at the political level, might offer some hope, as the long post-crisis decade comes to an end with an unparalleled global interruption of capital valorisation as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic

Platform work, exploitation, and migrant worker resistance: evidence from Berlin and London

For migrant workers who do not have access to other means of income, the platform economy offers a viable yet exploitative alternative to the conventional labour market. Migrant workers are used as a source of cheap labour by platforms – and yet, they are not disempowered. They are at the heart of a growing platform worker movement. Across different international contexts, migrants have played a key role in leading strikes and other forms of collective action. This article traces the struggles of migrant platform workers in Berlin and London to explore how working conditions, work experiences, and strategies for collective action are shaped at the intersection of multiple precarities along lines of employment and migration status. Combining data collected through research by the Fairwork project with participant observation and ethnography, the article argues that migrant workers are more than an exploitable resource: they are harbingers of change

A Typology of AI Data Work

This article provides a new typology for understanding human labour integrated into the production of artificial intelligence systems through data preparation and model evaluation. We call these forms of labour ‘AI data work’ and show how they are an important and necessary element of the artificial intelligence production process. We draw on fieldwork with an artificial intelligence data business process outsourcing centre specialising in computer vision data, alongside a decade of fieldwork with microwork platforms, business process outsourcing, and artificial intelligence companies to help dispel confusion around the multiple concepts and frames that encompass artificial intelligence data work including ‘ghost work’, ‘microwork’, ‘crowdwork’ and ‘cloudwork’. We argue that these different frames of reference obscure important differences between how this labour is organised in different contexts. The article provides a conceptual division between the different types of artificial intelligence data work institutions and the different stages of what we call the artificial intelligence data pipeline. This article thus contributes to our understanding of how the practices of workers become a valuable commodity integrated into global artificial intelligence production networks

Politics by automatic means? A critique of artificial intelligence ethics at work

Calls for “ethical Artificial Intelligence” are legion, with a recent proliferation of government and industry guidelines attempting to establish ethical rules and boundaries for this new technology. With few exceptions, they interpret Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics narrowly in a liberal political framework of privacy concerns, transparency, governance and non-discrimination. One of the main hurdles to establishing “ethical AI” remains how to operationalize high-level principles such that they translate to technology design, development and use in the labor process. This is because organizations can end up interpreting ethics in an ad-hoc way with no oversight, treating ethics as simply another technological problem with technological solutions, and regulations have been largely detached from the issues AI presents for workers. There is a distinct lack of supra-national standards for fair, decent, or just AI in contexts where people depend on and work in tandem with it. Topics such as discrimination and bias in job allocation, surveillance and control in the labor process, and quantification of work have received significant attention, yet questions around AI and job quality and working conditions have not. This has left workers exposed to potential risks and harms of AI. In this paper, we provide a critique of relevant academic literature and policies related to AI ethics. We then identify a set of principles that could facilitate fairer working conditions with AI. As part of a broader research initiative with the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, we propose a set of accountability mechanisms to ensure AI systems foster fairer working conditions. Such processes are aimed at reshaping the social impact of technology from the point of inception to set a research agenda for the future. As such, the key contribution of the paper is how to bridge from abstract ethical principles to operationalizable processes in the vast field of AI and new technology at work

Platform Worker Organising at Deliveroo in the UK: From Wildcat Strikes to Building Power

It has been five years since the first strikes of Deliveroo workers in London in 2016. Since then, workers have continued to organise. The campaigns have involved five different aspects: first, wildcat strike action; second, networks and internationalisation; third, union organising with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB); fourth, legal campaigning; and fifth, wider leverage campaigns. What is less understood so far is the different strengths and weaknesses of these aspects, and how they have contributed to the build of workers’ self-organisation and power at Deliveroo. This article explores the different aspects and considers the effectiveness of each. It concludes by considering what can be learned from these struggles for the understanding of platform work and trade union organising today

Platform Worker Organising at Deliveroo in the UK: From Wildcat Strikes to Building Power

It has been five years since the first strikes of Deliveroo workers in London in 2016. Since then, workers have continued to organise. The campaigns have involved five different aspects: first, wildcat strike action; second, networks and internationalisation; third, union organising with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB); fourth, legal campaigning; and fifth, wider leverage campaigns. What is less understood so far is the different strengths and weaknesses of these aspects, and how they have contributed to the build of workers’ self-organisation and power at Deliveroo. This article explores the different aspects and considers the effectiveness of each. It concludes by considering what can be learned from these struggles for the understanding of platform work and trade union organising today

The cycle of struggle: Food platform strikes in the UK 2016-18

This chapter presents a survey of food platform strikes in the United Kingdom (UK) between August 2016 and 2018. It uses a combination of surveys, interviews and ethnographic data to develop a thorough and in-depth understanding of the workers movement from the perspective of workers themselves. There is an epistemic problem facing any analyst of food platform strikes: informal action organised through primarily invisible worker networks is hard to identify from the outside. Class composition was developed as a framework to make sense of the findings of inquiries, putting forward theory of how classes are formed and relate to each other under capitalism. The framework developed by Italian workerists focused on the technical composition of the labour process and its relation to the political composition, or forms of struggle, of workers. Workers drove up and down the street, with horns blaring and chants directed at the headquarters

The Poverty of Ethical AI: Impact Sourcing and AI Supply Chains

Impact sourcing is the practice of employing socio-economically disadvantaged individuals at business process outsourcing centres to reduce poverty and create secure jobs. One of the pioneers of impact sourcing is Sama, a training-data company that focuses on annotating data for artificial intelligence (AI) systems and claims to support an ethical AI supply chain through its business operations. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at three of Sama’s East African delivery centres in Kenya and Uganda and follow-up online interviews, this article interrogates Sama’s claims regarding the benefits of its impact sourcing model. Our analysis reveals alarming accounts of low wages, insecure work, a tightly disciplined labour management process, gender-based exploitation and harassment and a system designed to extract value from low-paid workers to produce profits for investors. We argue that competitive market-based dynamics generate a powerful force that pushes such companies towards limiting the actual social impact of their business model in favour of ensuring higher profit margins. This force can be resisted, but only through countervailing measures such as pressure from organised workers, civil society, or regulation. These findings have broad implications related to working conditions for low-wage data annotators across the sector and cast doubt on the ethical nature of AI products that rely on this form of AI data work

Platform work, exploitation, and migrant worker resistance: Evidence from Berlin and London

For migrant workers who do not have access to other means of income, the platform economy offers a viable yet exploitative alternative to the conventional labour market. Migrant workers are used as a source of cheap labour by platforms – and yet, they are not disempowered. They are at the heart of a growing platform worker movement. Across different international contexts, migrants have played a key role in leading strikes and other forms of collective action. This article traces the struggles of migrant platform workers in Berlin and London to explore how working conditions, work experiences, and strategies for collective action are shaped at the intersection of multiple precarities along lines of employment and migration status. Combining data collected through research by the Fairwork project with participant observation and ethnography, the article argues that migrant workers are more than an exploitable resource: they are harbingers of change