Ch 10 Legal Gray Zones

Confronting the Legal Gray Zones of Digital Labor

[CALLE, PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT YOU RETAIN THE FORMATTING IN YOUR VERSION. BOLD NEEDS TO BE BOLD ALSO IN YOUR DOCUMENT.]

The protective shield of the employment relationship has been cracked; 21st-century labor law, rather than watching out for workers, is stuck in the 19th century. The norm of full-time jobs is plunging and the contingent workforce is growing ever more. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that its June 2014 survey of households showed that 1 million people got part-time jobs with 237,000 of them stating that they would prefer full-time jobs. (Forsyth) Current labor law inadequately reflects the shifts of labor markets to the Internet, thereby leaving an ever growing segment of the working population unprotected.

A recent survey by the U.S. Department of Labor showed that 53 million people work in contingent positions. “Contingent work” is a term used to describe temporary workers, independent contractors, as well as freelancers. A research report by the American software company Intuit proposed that by the year 2020, forty percent of the American workforce will be “contingent workers”. [1]

Within that group of contingent workers, we also find those who toil for some of the more than 145 online outsourcing marketplaces. CrowdFlower has some 5 million registered workers and the Chinese online freelance platform Zhubajie/Witsmart can claim almost 12 million workers. [ADD CITATION PAGE 18 The World Bank — The Global Opportunity in Online Outsourcing https://www.dropbox.com/s/iq1ch2e0lv6pc3s/The%20World%20Bank%20-%20The%20Global%20Opportunity%20in%20Online%20Outsourcing.pdf?dl=0 ] Even when we calculate that not all of the registered workers are active, this is a workforce of significant size.

Currently, the blossoming of labor platforms is fueled by outdated labor law and legal gray zones of the Internet. Over the long term, however, owners and policy makers need to understand that platform capitalism is not sustainable if it does not consider the social standards for workers.

Appallingly, in the face of the fast-tracked erosion of worker rights, the upper echelon of the American legal community and government regulators demonstrate a wait-and-see attitude. Even the enforcement of existing protections under the Federal Labor Standards Act is hardly a given. The global index of worker rights violations created by The International Trade Union Confederation includes the United States and Kenya on a list of thirty countries with systematic violations of worker rights.[2]

[CALLE, MOVE THIS TO FOOTNOTES: Observers with a libertarian streak might wring their hands in joy; they wouldn’t trust government to get it right in any case. More progressive–leaning forces are distressed by this war against worker rights. They are disappointed by the United States government’s neglect of millions of people who punch in and out of work through iPhone or Android apps. For a segment of the left, any attempt at reform means that capitalism becomes more bearable, which merely postpones the ultimate goal of its demise.]

For employers and platform owners who knock around workers, the chance of getting caught is very small. The Republican Party is waging a war on worker rights by not granting the Department of Labor the resources needed to employ a sufficient number of federal inspectors. Just consider that in 1941, there was one federal inspector for every 11,000 workers. As of 2008, one inspector was responsible for 141,000 workers. Three years later, in 2011, the Department of Labor had just one thousand inspectors responsible for one hundred thirty million workers in seven million enterprises. “The average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year,” political scientist Gordon Lafer estimates. (Rubin)[THIS CITATION IS OFF: THIS IS THE LINK — THE NAME IS ROBIN, NOT RUBIN. I ADDED IT TO ZOTERO SO YOU SHOULD HAVE IT, TOO http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/the-republican-war-on-workers-rights/?_r=0] Strategic understaffing means that employers who violate labor regulations only have a very small chance of getting caught and even if they get busted, the worse that can happen to them is having to return the wages owed. Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect, puts it this way: “If you rob someone’s house, you will probably go to jail. If you rob someone’s wages, you might have to repay the wages. Or maybe not.” Imagine the deterrent effect if the worst penalty for someone caught robbing a bank would be having to give back the money. [ADD CITATION http://buff.ly/1DZIa4v]

Already in chapter 2, I explained the need for a typology of emerging forms of digital labor, and consequently, my questions center on two specific forms of digital work, namely crowd work and data labor.

The first part of this chapter is dedicated to crowd work. Without being a legal professional, I am identifying they key regulatory issues in this chapter. These include 1) the classification of crowd workers as independent contractors vs. employees, 2) related class action suits brought about by workers, 3) the issue of a minimum wage (or living wage) floor, 4) and an understanding of crowd work as “industrial homework.” I am proposing the widening of the definition of employment to allow more workers to benefit from the legal protections that come with employment. And aditional approach would be give all citizens the same rights without tying it to a particular work relationship. I’ll conclude the segment on crowd work with a proposal for a Bill of Rights for Crowd Workers.

The second part of this chapter is about legal interventions in the area of data labor. I’m arguing that regulators should revisit the French “Colin/Colin” tax proposal.

In the conclusion , I will argue that Universal Basic Income would positively impact the future of crowd work and data labor. I’ll ask how Universal Basic Income would solve some of the problems of platform capitalism while not addressing others. This chapter is an invitation for activists, legal scholars, and policy makers to carry forward some of these discussions. I am starting with a set of questions.

1)What is holding back regulators?
Since 2010, legal scholars like Miriam Cherry and Alek Felstiner have extensively written about digital labor. Alek Felstiner cautions that “our broken and outdated legal regime simply doesn’t accommodate new labor models very well.”(Felstiner, “Working the Crowd” 55) He continues: “Our work laws are so far of touch with the modern physical labor market, never mind virtual work that they quite simply don’t function very well. We cannot afford to exacerbate this problem.” (Felstiner, “Working the Crowd” 55) Miriam Cherry characterizes one of the consequences of the failure of the legal establishment to address the realities of 21st century work:
“The ultimate result is a fuzzy gray market for casual click work services, where there is practically no regulation.” (Cherry 1090) But ethnographic work has shown that some Turkers are not in favor of government regulation of MTurk because they are concerned that such interference may lead to the closure of the platform [ADD CITATION TITLE PAGE 45 — Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2531602 ]

Alek Felstiner does not sound hopeful about the prospect of the situation of digital workers changing any time soon. He writes that “there are virtually no cases and few indications in the literature as to how courts might approach regulation of the ‘cyberspace workplace.’” (Felstiner, “Working the Crowd” 27) For the most part, Felstiner faults the “wait and see” group of legal scholars that suggests that the phenomena associated with digital labor simply have not yet settled down in their development. Consequently, this groups suggests that legal scholars should wait and see what the true nature of this work really is.

Internet exceptionalism is a variation on this theme- the suggestion that the Internet is a completely new and different “cyberspace” that exists outside of society and does not have to comply with the law. The concept refers to the separation for the roughly four-decade-old network from the daily struggles about class, race, and gender. Internet exceptionalism implies legal”real world” frameworks do not apply online and that the struggles of those who are powerless and exploited by platform owners are separate from those of barristers, adjunct professors, or nail salon workers.

Internet exceptionalism is by no means a novel idea; it can be traced back to the early 1980s when cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson coined the term cyberspace which was consequently associated with the Internet. Cyberspace seemed so excitingly separate from real life. Gibson, in Neuromancer, described cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators.” [ADD CITATION OF GIBSON’s NEUROMANCER page 69 IT’s IN ZOTERO] In 1996, John Perry Barlow, who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, iterated a libertarian spirit of separateness in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.“ (Barlow). In the same year, a judge described the Internet as “a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human common occasion.” (Szoka and Marcus 165) Also in the late 1990s, Republican politician Newt Gingrich warmly embraced cyber libertarian ideas projecting that they could pave the way for work environments that would be “unburdened” by government regulation. This has become eerily true and the understanding of the Internet as a completely new medium, outside the gates of society, left its mark on policy makers. It’s worth the reminder that whether a worker toils for a nail salon, Amazon warehouse, or Crowdspring, her body will get tired and hungry. She’ll have to take care of car payments, medical bills for her children, and student debts (not to talk of saving for retirement). Digital work makes the body of the worker invisible but no less real or expandable.

2) How justified is the projected certainty of the owners of crowdsourcing systems who are claiming that workers are independent contractors instead of employees? Can crowd work, and more broadly digital labor, be understood as “industrial homework”? Which consequences would that have?

The question whether or not workers are independent contractors or employees is at the heart of the labor conflicts in the crowdsourcing industry. For the uninitiated, the question of misclassification might seem overly technical, inessential, or even esoteric. But as you will see, decisions about the classification of workers have far reaching implications for them and for the companies, which might make themselves vulnerable to lawsuits [3].

Some people prefer contract work because they value the schedule and location flexibility. But consider for one moment that recognized as statutory employees, workers qualify for protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which was established in 1938. Specifically, the FLSA requires employers to pay at least minimum wage and overtime. And there is more: following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits managers from showing bias based on the age of employees. Furthermore, there are protections against prejudicial behavior based on disability, and then there is also the Medical Leave Act. Lastly, let’s not forget about The National Labor Relations Act, which grants employees the right to organize. While many of these legal rights have been undermined on a state-level (just think of Wisconscin’s “right-to-work” law), independent contractors are not protected by any of these laws. A recent survey of on-demandworkers, highlighted their desire for health insurance, retirements benefits, paid sick leave and vacation days, disability and unemployment insurance [ADD CITATION from http://www.requestsforstartups.com/survey title: 2015 1099 Economy Workforce Report PAGE 72]. In the crowdsourcing sector, independent contractors are not only facing massive minimum wage violations, they are rightsless.

The attorneys for the crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower are adament about their claim that their workers are independent contractors, not employees. In the absence of a contract and control of the work process, this is a clear case, they argue. One the one hand, it is true that crowdsourcing is different than the forms of labor abuses that the U.S. Congress sought to regulate with the Federal Labor Standards Act. Professor Alek Felstiner cautions, however, that crowdsourcing companies shouldn’t be too sure about the legality of their claim that these are independent contractors because that assertion has never been tested in the courts. “Contrary to the expectations of vendors such as Amazon, and many crowd workers, claims to employee status are not presumptively barred or inherently invalid.” (Felstiner, 46) To that point, legal scholar Miriam Cheery found that already “in June 2008, the Internal Revenue Service issued a private letter holding that greeters for the Electric Sheep Company in the virtual world Second Life were employees, rather than independent contractors.”(Cherry 1080)

The question of how to classify workers doesn’t only play out online, of course, it also impacts the realities of workers in Amazon’s warehouses. Here, the German service worker union Ver.di wants Amazon workers to be classified as retail employees while Amazon insists that they are logistics workers. Strikes in various Amazon warehouses followed these tensions.

3) Widening the Definition Employment
How does US federal law define employment? A person is generally an employee if the employer has the right to control that person’s work process. In the case of an independent contractor, the employer does not control the process but prescribes the end result of the work process.

Federal Law offers four tests to distinguish between an employee and an independent contractor. A very abbreviated version of these tests states that in cases where the employer supplies the tools necessary to execute the work and is able to control the work process, the relationship can be characterized as employment. In addition, employment is defined by a workplace that is provided by the employer. Lastly, the laborer only works for this one business; he or she has to be economically dependent on the particular company.

Independent contractors, by contrast, work without supervision; they are specialized and skilled. In the case of independent contract work, management has no control over the work process and the engagement with the company is only for a limited period of time.

Solo workers shoulder the material backbone for crowd work while platform owners provide the cloud computing infrastructure. Crowd work is largely performed at home or in cafes, on an unprecedented scale, in real time, with workers providing their own means of production necessary to boot up their laboring activities.

But it is worth reminding readers that the Fair Labor Standards Act was established in response to the Great Depression/The New Deal and that it was specifically designed at a time when workers toiled in physical, employer-owned workplaces. Almost eighty years later, the nature of work has changed for millions of Americans and workers worldwide, and these changes are not reflected in the law.

United States labor law, and the definition of employment in particular, lags behind the realities of 21st century work. The United States Department of Labor clearly recognizes the shortcomings of the current, legal definition of employment: “in substance, the law is based on a nineteenth century concept whose purposes are wholly unrelated to contemporary employment policy.”[5] Their recommendation for redefinition of employment is focused on the actual economic relationships on the ground rather than the tests that I described above. Speaking to the situation of millions of contingent workers, however, the Office of the Secretary of the Department of Labor stated that “it is beyond [their] means to recommend a full policy program in this emerging area of concern.” [6]

An additional site of contestation concerns the question of whether or not digital labor should be considered “industrial homework.” If crowd work would be accepted as “industrial homework,” minimum wage and overtime laws would apply. The Department of Labor defines “industrial homework” as “production by any person in a home, apartment, tenement, or room in a residential establishment, of goods for an employer who permit such production…” (U.S. Department of Labor). Whether or not digital labor would count as “industrial homework” would depend on the willingness of courts to accept that today, digital services and goods are part of the labor landscape.

Companies, interested in minimizing labor costs will rearranging their work processes in a way that deprives workers of the aforementioned protections under Federal law [4]. Going forward, one way to cover more workers by the traditional protections offered by Federal Law, would be to test the legality of the classification in several courts. This will help workers who do indeed work under circumstances that resemble employment. If the FLSA would be applied to crowd work, for example, time for setting up equipment, and waiting periods in preparation for work would be compensable. At the same time, many scenarios of work will simply not fit into this framework, leaving us simply with the fact that there is a drastic increase in the number of independent contractors and other contingent workers. Subsequently, more than sixty million people may be deprived of worker rights by the year 2020 in the United States alone.

Rather than trying to argue that all of these workers are actually employees, which would be an uphill struggle, we might rather want to focus on broadening the definition of employment. Such definition would need to be cognizant of 21st century work realities. When rethinking legal protections for today’s workers, be that Uber drivers or crowd workers, we should keep a keen eye on the protections that were afforded to workers through employment.

By now, I clarified how much hinges on the definition of employment and how a 19th century framing of the employment relationship, will leave 40% of the American workforce without significant legal protections.

Jeff Howe, who coined the term crowdsourcing, wrote on his blog that Mechanical Turk “gives us a snapshot of a depressing future in which legions of click–slaves toil away at identifying duplicate webpages for less than minimum wage.”(Howe) In 2009, shortly after his participation in The Internet a Playground and Factory conference, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, wrote a NewsWeek article titled “The Internet Creates a New Kind of Sweatshop.” In the article, Zittrain wrote that new forms of digital labor are cashing in on the post-financial crisis and that they “could also usher in a new era of digital sweatshops.” (Zittrain) But later, Zittrain, put some distance between himself and the language of sweatshops, emphasizing that he did not pick the title of the article. The CEO of CrowdFlower, Lucas Biewald, wryly commented that “the great thing about digital work is it’s really hard to make a sweatshop out of digital work. It’s really hard to force someone to do work, you can’t beat someone up through a computer screen.”(BBC News) Is the language of sweatshops really overstating the situation of workers on CrowdFlower or Mechanical Turk? The U.S. Department of Labor definition sweatshops as a “place of employment that violates two or more federal or state labor laws governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers’ compensation …” (Hapke 2) On Mechanical Turk, minors are working to earn game credits, and there are no minimum wage or overtime payments for workers. Technically, calling AMT a sweathop might be inaccurate, but it draws attention to workers who work under dicey conditions.

Various scholars including Felstiner have argued that legal intervention can only protect the organized efforts of crowd workers who would have to complain and jointly help to alter the future of the information economy. (Felstiner, “Working the Crowd” 65) As long as workers do not express their outrage and organize, the chances for changes are minimal.

4) Lawsuits by Workers
In October 2012, Christopher Otey, a crowd worker for CrowdFlower filed a class action lawsuit against the company in the United States, arguing that CrowdFlower as one of the largest crowd sourcing companies failed to pay minimum wage — currently, $7.25 an hour— to its American workforce under the Fair Labor Standards Act.[7] Like I mentioned, CrowdFlower’s lawyers insisted that none of their ‘cloud workers’ are employees; they are ‘free contractors.’ The company pays some of their cloud workers no more than $2 per hour. In California, the state where CrowdFlower operates, the minimum wage is $8 per hour. In San Francisco, CrowdFlower’s home city, the minimum wage is $10.55. The case was pending a motion to be dismissed because the court, situated in San Francisco where this globally operating company was founded, might not have jurisdiction. (“Otey Vs. CrowdFlower”) Late in 2014, the case was settled. (CALLE CREATE CITATION FOR THIS AND ADD HERE http://wtf.tw/ref/otey.pdf]

In addition, a class action suit was filed by a group of Yelp reviewers in October 2013. The reviewers claim that their writing, their uncompensated labor, is vital to the existence of this site, and that therefore, they should be considered employees of Yelp. (“Panzer v Yelp”) [CALLE, I CANT SEE IF THIS IS THE SAME SOURCE BUT IF NOT, PLEASE ADD THIS AS CITATION http://ia902302.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.cacd.596534/gov.uscourts.cacd.596534.docket.html IT IS IN ZOTERO UNDER TITLE “Case docket…”]

It is one discussion whether or not the FLSA applies to crowd workers such as Otey; that is for judges to decide. But a larger number of such lawsuits would draw more public attention to the dark sites of digital labor.

5) Minimum Wage Floor
At this point, it is also crucial to understand that workers, rather than demanding minimum wage, should really press for living wages. Minimum wage was meant as the minimum level of payment that would protect particularly vulnerable workers from poverty. It was designed to guarantee a basic standard of living. In theory, a minimum wage should reflect the needs of workers and their families as well as the cost of living.

The concept of a living wage refers to the minimum income necessary for worker to meet needs such as housing, closing, and nutrition. In the United Kingdom, the standard is generally in reference to a person that is working 40 hours a week without extra income. Based on a living wage this person should be able to afford the basic quality of life, which includes payments for food, utilities, transportation, some recreation, childcare, and one course of continuing education. Living wages, following this definition, does not include saving for retirement or repaying any kind of debt.

Minimum wage, as cemented by the law, is currently not at all covering those basic needs of many workers who are dependent on it. Instead, these workers have to rely on government programs to survive. A living wage calculator, designed at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology determined that in New York City, a family with two adults, one of them being the sole earner, and two children would need to make at least $10.60 an hour to live in poverty and $22.32 to earn a living wage. The minimum wage is currently $7.25.[8]

Currently, the majority of the workers who toil in labor platforms are based in the United States, Asia Pacific, and South America. It is clear that changes of the U.S. legal system, wouldn’t directly bare on workers in those other countries. The same argument could be made for the European Union. But before asserting the irrelevance of legal changes within the United States with regards to the digital labor situation, we also need to consider that most labor platforms like Amazon are headquartered in the US. If the American crowdsourcing industry would accept minimum wage standards, this would positively affect the situation of workers worldwide.

Thus far, in this chapter, you followed reflections about the here and now of digital work. What follows are more long-term goals.

In this chapter I’m thinking about government regulation and possible responses by policymakers. So far, I reflected on the definition of employment and the role of Internet exceptionalism. I will continue with a short analysis of the Colin/Colin tax proposal, a fascinating French update for corporate tax law for the 21st century. Next, I will discuss why Facebook, Amazon, and Google should be treated as utilities that are regulated just like gas and electricity companies. I will conclude with an introduction to the idea of Universal Basic Income, which would start to address many of the problems with data labor and crowd work.

I started out this chapter by pointing to an estimated sixty million Americans who will be without worker rights by the year 2020. Alek Felstiner suggests mandatory and enforced wage floors for crowdsourcing companies (Felstiner) but without the outrage of workers, little will happen. Companies would be wise to voluntarily establish more habitable, sustainable labor markets. They should commit to paying fair wages/living wages; it might also benefit in the end (Felstiner). Worker associations can lobby on behalf of crowd workers; they can attempt to establish benefits, handle disputes, inform crowd workers of their legal rights, and serve as a clearinghouse for campaign activities (Felstiner, “Working the Crowd” 65)

At the same token, workers could file class action suits against large crowdsourcing companies. Workers can fight for a recognition of their transnationally situated workforce as a “community of interest,” , for example. While they might not get a favorable decision, “pursuing an appropriate litigation strategy against a carefully selected target might yield groundbreaking new doctrines for virtual work.” (Felstiner, “Working the Crowd” 64)

I am now concluding my section on crowd work with a proposal.

6) Toward a Crowd Workers’ Bill of Rights
In the spring of 2014, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a document that calls for accountability on the Internet where rampant privacy violations by large corporations and the NSA have been a common occurrence. In a proposal for a Magna Carta of the Web (a Bill of Rights for the Internet).[11] Berners-Lee calls for affordable access, protection of personal user information, and the right to communicate in private. He evokes neutral networks that don’t discriminate against content or users, freedom of expression, and decentralized open infrastructure (Fitzgerald). Soliciting the support of groups and institutions, the inventor of the Web started a campaign under the title “The Web We Want.” [CALLE CITATION http://webwewant.southbankcentre.co.uk] While Berners-Lee’s proposal comes with plenty of star power — Edward Snowden endorsed it and Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself is no stranger to social capital himself — it is by no means the first draft of such a document.

It is stunning, however, that over the past decade all of the proposals for such Bill of Rights relating to the Internet have been privacy-obsessed and labor-blind. A Brazilian proposal for a Bill of Rights for the Internet originally suggested in 2009, was signed into law by Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff in 2014. [CREATE CITATION BASED ON THIS General Debate of the UN. “UN General Assembly General Debate of the 68th Session — Brazil:”. Retrieved 29 September 2013. http://gadebate.un.org/68/brazil/] The proposal cements the principle of net neutrality, which means that network operators must treat all traffic equally. Brazil “Internet law” also legally protects the privacy of Brazilian Internet users by prohibiting providers from abusing user data. (“The Net Closes”)

Tim Berners-Lee might consider to amend his Magna Carta to accommodate a framework for dignity and justice for paid work in the deregulated marketplace of the Internet, broken down by nation state corresponding to the legal jurisdiction. Adherence to such bill could become a point of competitive advantage for upstarts. But while asserting such basic rights is honorable, how would they ever be enforced and by whom? In the European Union, the Passenger Bill of Rights defines the rights of passengers and spells out enforcement mechanisms in the case of flight cancellations, delays, or overbooking.[13]

But a Crowd Workers Bill of Rights, just like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is not legally binding. Nonetheless, since 1948 the latter has been adopted by many national constitutions. National and international law has been influenced by this declaration and many local institutions have adopted parts of it. While not directly enforceable, a Bill of Rights for the Internet could become a compelling instrument when applying moral pressure on governments and platform owners alike.

We can also take cues from the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights that was passed in New York State in late 2010, granting nannies, housekeepers, and others working in private households basic legal rights like 1) a day of rest every seven days, 2) the right to overtime pay after 40 hours of work in a week. (New York State Department of Labor).

In a 2013 paper, Lily Irani and Six Silberman, elaborated how they arrived at a “Worker’s Bill of Rights” by placing a task on Amazon Mechanical Turk asking workers to articulate such Bill from their perspective. Some of the workers responded that they “felt that their work was regularly rejected unfairly or arbitrarily,” and that such Bill of Rights should include minimum wages, as well as fair and timely payment. [CALLE- THE CITATION IS: https://www.academia.edu/2413463/Turkopticon_Interrupting_Worker_Invisibility_on_Amazon_Mechanical_Turk TITLE IN ZOTERO: Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk PAGES 4–5]
In 2014, a group of Turkers and researchers authored a set of guidelines for ethical research on Amazon Mechanical Turk tat could inspire a Bill of Rights. The section on fair payment is particularly eye-opening. [ADD CITATION http://wiki.wearedynamo.org/index.php?title=Fair_payment]

We might also take Ross Perlin’s “Intern Bill of Rights“ into consideration. Proposed in his book Intern Nation, Perlin asserts that all interns deserve 1) fair compensation for their work, usually in the form of wages or dedicated training, 2) the same legal protection as all other workers, 3) the same basic workplace benefits such as sick days and extra pay for overtime. Interns, Perlin writes, must not to be forced to take an unpaid internship and must not be required to pay in order to work. Interns should be treated with dignity and respect by coworkers and supervisors (Perlin 250).

A Bill of Rights for Crowd Workers should demand

• that crowd workers, consigners, and platform owners should be able to communicate and treat each other with dignity and respect.

• fair payment starting with the establishment of a minimum wage floor,

• the abolition of child labor,

• fair working conditions to include accurate classification, prompt payment, and protections against wage theft.

Moving on from crowd work to data labor, let’s consider the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which authored A Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users in 2010. Here, EFF demanded the right to quit/ exit a given platform completely, te right of control over one’s data, and the right to informed decision making. (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

Prior to the EFF, a group of Internet experts, academics, lawyers, journalists, activists, and students came together to phrase a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, publicly asserting that all netizens are entitled to certain fundamental rights, which include the clarity of terms of service, the control of users over the sharing of their data, and the predictability of privacy change.[12]

A proposal by a group of scholars calls for a People’s Terms of Service Agreement for Facebook. This narrower agreement would be a collectively negotiated contract that reflects some common consumer priorities. “Interested users and consumer advocates would publicly debate their consensus priorities and then drop them into a model contract.” (Melber). The proposal further suggests that contracts could be unilaterally altered and that users have the right to have all of their materials permanently deleted. Users, they suggest, should have a right to compensation for commercial use of the user’s names or likeness, and that they have “the right to confidentiality, meaning that companies promise not to disclose personal information to third parties unless users meaningfully opt into such disclosure for each party.” (Melber).

The recent discourse about privacy has overshadowed the debate about the Internet as a portal for traditional labor exploitation — what I call crowd fleecing. While all of the mentioned proposals echo similar concerns about intellectual property, permanency, transparency, and security, an understanding of the situation of online workers is undoubtedly absent. Online workers should enjoy the same protections as workers who do not use the Internet as the exclusive interface for their daily toil. We need a common standard that would allow us to evaluate and improve digital labor.

The responses to these various proposals for a Bill of Rights for the Internet have been mixed. At first, the call for such a bill may seem vague and possibly inconsequential. Could such expression of human consciousness in the digital age really change the power imbalance between users and intermediaries? Could there be sufficient public awareness of such Bill of Rights?

In the second part of this chapter, I am investigating regulatory in relation to data labor. I’ll first suggest that the French tax proposal, that was isued in 2013 should be revisited and then conclude the chapter with an introduction and discussion of the idea of Universal Basic income.

The French “Internet Tax”
When I first read about the Colin/Colin tax proposal I was deeply moved. The second discussion focuses on the fascinating proposal by the French government, which targets Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, asserting that these companies are profiting from the data of the French population without being taxed accordingly.

In 2007, in a blog essay with the title “What the MySpace Generation Should Know about Working for Free.”(Scholz) Here, I suggested that the data of users of social networking services like MySpace (if you still remember that) are being turned into profits. Two years later, this topic was much discussed at the Internet as Playground and Factory conference at The New School [9]. While the idea of users being active agents in the digital economy is part of mainstream discussions today, few have offered realistic proposals in response to this expropriation scheme. What is proclaimed and offered as a free service is in fact exceedingly expensive in terms of its social costs as we are paying dearly with our data and with privacy intrusions that go far beyond our wildest dreams. Some, including the artist Laurel Ptak, have called for wages for our data labor but while I think that that’s an honorable suggestion, I ultimately don’t think that Facebook would pay the users that it expropriates.

Ptak’s pays homage to the Wages for Housework campaign by the International Feminist Collective in Italy in 1972, which according to Kathi Weeks “sought to contest the invisibility of domestic work and its moralization, to redress those its devaluation as work and its overvaluation as labor of love.” (Weeks 124) In her book The Problem with Work, Weeks clarifies that it isn’t at all certain that the campaigners for wages for housework really wanted what they were asking for. The demand, quite literally, for wages for housework apparently only appears once and even there it is immediately put to question by the campaigners themselves. Weeks writes, “The demand for wages was conceived not only as a concrete reform, but as an opportunity to make visible, and encourage critical reflection on, the position of women in the work society — both in the wage labor system and in its satellite, the family.” (Weeks 129) In other words, the demand of wages should be understood as a provocation that leads to reflections that expose invisible labor. In similar ways, Ptak’s piece could be simply understood as a way to contest the invisible labor of platform capitalism and point to the supporting role of digital laborer who are bidden behind the algorithm.

Highly relevant to this discussion is hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson who suggested a system of micro-payments already in the 1960s, as part of his project Xanadu. Nelson’s rule number nine for the project was: “every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies (“transclusions”) of all or part of the document.” (Nelson) The idea is fascinating: in a noncommittal world, people may not want to pay for a subscription to an entire magazine online; they may rather be willing to pay only for the amount of characters of a given text that they actually read. According to Nelson, the unit of payment would be “content scrolls,” which would precisely refer to the amount of text that the reader actually scrolled through. Let’s say, you could read the first paragraph of an article in the side that this is not for you and then not pay for the rest of the piece. The project has come to new prominence because it was also promoted in Jaron Lanier’s latest book Who Owns the Future, but such micro-payment set up which require the system other than the current World Wide Web and it also seems impractical and a bit tedious, it’s hard to imagine that people would adapt to it.

Companies like Facebook and Google should be regulated. When Mark Zuckerberg admitted got it right: “we think of ourselves as a utility.” (Kirkpatrick 160) This is by no means a new idea, in other industries, let’s say telecommunications or electricity; when industries grow, they often start to get regulated. It is evident that Facebook, while being a publicly traded company, has not become more socially responsible. With far over one billion users, government protections for users of Facebook should start at the federal level. The question is just what regulation would look like. Rather than the demand for Facebook to pay its users, it would make more sense to call on goverments worldwide to tax platform owners based on the value that citizens of given countries generate for them.

The French government asked Pierre Collin and Nicolas Colin to draft a report on the taxation of the digital economy. Collin et Colin write: “Inspiring startups are global corporations disrupt entire industries with a intensive use of IT, innovative business models, iterative design, and the powerful leveraging of data originated by user activity. And yet official statistics utterly failed to measure all this. … Our inability to add data as a primary economic category, just like goods and services,” is one of the reasons for this failure. (“Corporate Tax 2.0”) Therefore, the report suggests to reform corporate tax, which its authors characterize as fair because it only taxes companies that are profitable.

In a nutshell, they suggest to tax platform owners like Facebook/Google based on the monetized data generated by French citizens on French soil. With Marc Andreessen, Colin poses “the digital economy is eating the world.” Collin & Colin compare this tax to the concept of a carbon tax, which grew out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They would “tax 1) any company 2) that collects data through regular and systematic monitoring 3) from lots of users based in France …” (“Corporate Tax 2.0”) This proposed tax system would acknowledge that users in any particular country — France in this case- are part of the operation of companies that offer supposedly free services online. In other words, one more time, companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon would be taxed based on the volume of data generated by the French population, which they ingest, as these data are part of the economic operation of these companies. I would assume that it is a relatively trivial task to determine which data truly originated in France and which are simply Francophone. Given the reality of social democracies in Europe at least, where taxes indeed translate into social benefits for the population, such taxation of intermediaries would at least be a starting point.

In the conclusion that follows I’ll introduce a new topic, that of Universal Basic Income, which in many ways responds to the problems I raised in both sections of this chapter. Universal Basic Income speaks to problems with data labor and crowd work alike.

Conclusion: Universal Basic Income and the Sustainability of Crowd Work
Many younger workers in the on-demand economy are covered by health insurance, presumably because of Obamacare, which lets children stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they turn 26. [ADD CITATION RFS 1099 Economy Workforce Report http://www.requestsforstartups.com/survey?ref=producthunt] In that sense, Obamacare might have a positive effect on platform capitalism. If the basic needs of worker are covered, they would be able to engage in low-paying crowd work. In the same way, Universal Basic Income could help to cover the basic needs of workers.

The basic idea behind Universal Basic Income (UBI) is for the government to send money, every month, unconditionally, without regard to needs, employment status etc., to each individual citizen. Checks would not be sent to “family units” but to all individuals, starting toward the end of adolescence. And while this may sound far-fetched, basic income seems to be feasible according to a fairly large number of studies. But of course there are many people who oppose the idea. It is ridiculed as an intellectual past time, pie in the sky, willy-nilly allocation of undeserved wages, and a big fat disincentive to look for a job. Politicians might strategically argue that the idea will never get traction. They might ask who would carry the burden for all those “ freeloaders,” or scroungers? At the same time, it should be clear that UBI does in fact have strong support in citizen groups all over the world.

Today, supporters of the idea of Universal Basic Income include the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri, the French social theorist André Gorz, the American philosopher Michael Hart, the British economist Guy Standing, and the American Women’s Studies Professor Kathi Weeks. Jeremy Rifkin who suggested that this basic income should be paid in exchange for voluntary work performed for recognized nonprofit organizations. But the roots of this idea can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century, to Thomas Paine, the idea of compensation for all, the 1960s and 70s National Welfare Rights Organization in the United States, to Nixon, McGovern, Milton Friedman and many others. You could imagine that entire wings of the State Department could be shut down. Kafkaesque arrangements for the approval of needs-based social benefits would be made redundant under this simple system. Libertarians and conservatives appreciate the elimination of bureaucratic government waste, as they would put it. As you can see, there are supporters in both political camps but the devil is really in the detail.

In 1962, Milton Friedman proposed a so-called negative income, also based on a monthly payment plan but importantly, his plan was based on need. Seven years later, Richard Nixon suggested a “family assistance program,” which never came to pass. As you can see, while not so many Americans will be familiar with the idea of guaranteed basic income, the idea has an extensive history in the United States.

The United States presidential candidate George McGovern called for a program that was similar to Nixon’s plan. He called it the Demogrant. The labor historian Jefferson Cowie describes McGovern’s program as follows: McGovern “promised $1,000 to every single person in the United States — men, women, and children from the filthy rich to the destitute poor. A family of four, for instance, would receive $4,000 (over $20,000 in 2009 dollars), and there would be no welfare; their tax obligation would begin at any dollar earned beyond $4,000. Plans to redistribute money to the poor through various “negative tax” schemes were everywhere on the political landscape of the early seventies — from Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, to congressional Democrats who had been advocating $3,000 to $4,000 grants to the poor, to more radical redistributive plans of the National Welfare Rights Organization (which wanted to guarantee every family $6,500 per year). McGovern’s “giveaway” was going to be available to all citizens (quietly recouped from the stable and affluent through taxation) and was, in reality, little different than Milton Friedman’s negative income tax that had been a pet project of the conservative movement.”(Cowie)

We know that McGovern’s campaign failed and clearly some critics of the Demogrant considered it to be a disincentive for people to even look for a job. But today, we can refer to one study of minimum income in rule Manitoba, for example, that found that there was only a slight reduction of work effort: 1% for men, 3% for their wives, and 5% for unmarried women. The only people that worked considerably less were new mothers who decided to spend more time with their infants as well as teenagers who had to take care of family members. Basic income does not idscourage people to work but it “enables them to refuse work and reject ‘inhumane’ working conditions.” (Gorz 83)

The idea of basic income simply acknowledges the reality of globalization and automation, just think of truck drivers, doctors, lawyers, waiters, gas station attendants, chefs, journalists, and even farmers who are elbowed out of their jobs by cow milking robots. Overall, because of increasingly flexible labor markets, workers are faced with the growing level of economic insecurity and uncertainty about their future. Or, think about the classification struggles that I described earlier in this chapter. How are workers supposed to plan their lives, and think ahead, when the ground is constantly shifting? Old Social Security systems are less and less able to protect workers and in the context of all of this, the proposal of guaranteed basic income tries to make sense of the actualities of 21st century labor. Gorz sums up the situation by saying that “unemployment, poverty and absolute destitution are spreading.” (Gorz 89) He gives the example of the system introduced by Japanese car firms in the United Kingdom. In this system, Gorz writes, “the ‘employees’ are not employed, but are required to be permanently ‘on call.’ They will then be employed when the company needs them, being paid at the agreed hourly rate for only the few hours or days they work. This marks a return, more or less to the day laborers of Dickensian times.” (Gorz 93) Based on the increasing unavailability of steady jobs or work for all citizens at all, Gorz extrapolates that “the right to sufficient, regular income will no longer have to depend on a permanent occupation or a steady job.” (Gorz 73) For Gorz, the actual problem isn’t a shortage of work, but the failure to distribute the wealth, which is now produced by capital employing fewer and fewer workers.

Proponents of basic income majority have suggested that everyone should receive the equivalent of unemployment support in a given country. In Alaska, the state government uses a part of its profits from the sale of oil to pay all Alaskans $878 once a year. Some Native American tribes who operate casinos, specifically the Cherokee, use the profits from these operations to disperse payments of several thousand dollars twice a year. Would it really be so unthinkable to take the Alaskan model and apply it to California with all its budgetary troubles. Couldn’t technology companies agreed to pay just a small percentage of the profits into a fund that will then be used to support people living in California? The Cherokee and Alaska examples are not the only ones. They are experiments with universal basic income in countries like Canada, India, and Namibia, too. And let’s not forget Switzerland, which has two groups that lobby very actively in the French and German parts of the country. In 2013, these groups had reached 126,000 signatures as a result of a initiatives in support of basic income. The delivery of these signatures to the government triggered a nationwide popular referendum on the topic of basic income at the level of roughly $2800 a month.

The idea of basic guaranteed income is by no means a panacea for all problems related to platform capitalism but it should be understood as a question of social justice and power. It would shape new social bonds and social cohesion beyond the wage relation.” (Gorz 80) Gorz calls for a multi-active life in which professional work and unpaid activities supplement and complement each other, it’s a shift from a work society to a culture society. For Gorz, the vision “is to shift the center of gravity of everyone’s lives so that, from now on, business and work for economic ends have only a subordinate place.” (Gorz 74) The refusal of work, for Weeks, “is a matter of securing not only better work, but also the time and money necessary to have a life outside work.” (Weeks 13)

In my opinion, basic income board acknowledged the work of unpaid domestic workers, including many of the digital laborers that I’m discussing in this book, and it would indeed completely change the situation at least for the poorest workers on Mechanical Turk or CrowdFlower, to name just to companies. There would be much less of an incentive to work for two or three dollars an hour and the wage floor might be lifted to a more dignified level. What is absolutely essential to the idea of basic income, is that is unconditional and at the sustenance level, as the German proposal suggested. Anything below that, which would still put workers into the position of having to scramble for the additional income, would be merely as subsidy for large corporations. This would be an extension of the scheme that is run by Walmart, which pays its workers so little that they have to live off government support. (You may remember that one Walmart collected food for its employees last Thanksgiving so that they would have something to eat for this holiday.) If implemented in the wrong way, however, basic income would merely support more exploitation, more crowdfleecing.

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