CH 8 Unions

Workers

Disabled crowd workers = workers
Adjunct professors = workers
Unpaid interns = workers
Digital workers with a criminal record = workers
Logistics workers in Amazon’s warehouses = workers
Miners of rare earth crystals in Nigeria, China, and the Congo = workers
Migrant workers in ports = workers
Turkers = workers
Day laborers outside Home Depot = workers
Working stiffs in Foxconn’s Shenzhen factories = workers
Temps, freelancers, TaskRabbits, low wage day laborers = workers
Designers or developers on oDesk, 99designs, fivver = workers
Workers!

The Future of Workers in the Post-Internet Age

On a delightfully warm day in June I walk through the lavish entry halls of New York University’s Bobst library to meet Kate Donovan, a librarian at the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. Right in the spirit of the Wagner Act, after opening the door to the archive I’m faced with an almost life-sized painting of a worker. Artists don’t seem to do these anymore, I hear myself think. Really, where are today’s representations of workers and where can we read their poetry or listen to their song? What’s behind this absence? Perhaps all of us, with minor variations, placed in front of screens faintly moving our hands, doesn’t lend itself to artistic exploration. But there’s more to that.

Deeply animated, Donovan, talks about the archive: the recent struggles of The Taxi Workers Alliance in NYC[1], and the textile strike in Lawrence (Massachusetts) in 1912, which involved some 20,000 workers. The International Workers of the World (IWW) union that led the strike was also the only union that opened its ranks to skilled and unskilled workers, African-Americans, and women. And, of course, she mentions that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of their leaders. Carefully, Donovan pulls out publications by the IWW including the One Big Union Monthly and the Little Red Songbook, which popularized songs like “Solidarity Forever.” I ask Kate Donovan about her take on the future of workers and unions and she responds that the heydays of labor unions will not return any time soon.

The future of work could be that there will be none. We are hearing reports of robot chefs in China, restaurant chains that call on guests to order through an iPad menu, hospitals that open their doors to robotic surgeons, and Google that sends out jaunty videos of blind people boarding their self-directed cars. Amazon purports to have plans to use drones for the delivery of packages but far more likely, unmanned Google vehicles will soon take on such work. And yet, according to some accounts, the jury is still out if indeed processes of automation will actually replace workers in the long run or if they are merely shifting the workforce to incumbent industries.[2]

On the one hand Donovan clearly has a point, I’m yet to meet a 20-year-old who could chime in with “Solidarity Forever.” But there have been extremely encouraging developments over the last few years. Being a New Yorker, let me start with the fact that New York City introduced a Paid Sick Leave Law. Or, think of California’s Paid Family Leave, and Seattle’s minimum wage of $15. And in 2013, nationwide, Walmart employees put on the first “prolonged strike” with at least 500 retail employees walking out over the 10 days leading up to Black Friday.[3] And to add to the list of almost unimaginable things to happen, on May 15, 2014, fast food workers around the world — from New York City to Mumbai, Paris and Tokyo, coordinated a global strike by picketing workplaces like McDonald’s, Burger King, and PizzaHut. This was part of a $15 minimum-wage campaign that led to protests in 150 cities in the United States and all across Europe. Workers object to being trapped in McJobs without guaranteed hours, benefits, paid sick leave, and holiday pay. Or, take China where workers are just not taking it anymore. In the spring of 2014, for two weeks, 40,000 workers at Yue Yue Industrial Holdings didn’t return to the assembly line where they were supposed to produce athletic shoes for Adidas and Nike. Workers mobilized on the mobile messaging app Weixin, after the company refused to pay them their mandated Social Security payments (Levin).

Overview
At this point, let me tell you where I would like to take you, in hopes that you will follow along.

First, I will offer some consideration about the future of the worker. This is not just a discussion about the future of work. I’m not talking merely about new business models and how to regulate them appropriately but instead I’m asking who is watching out for the worker whose life is inevitably changed by these new ways of working.

Next, I will ask why things are so fucked up and bullshit, to go with the Occupy Wall Street slogan. What is the social imaginary behind the shift of labor markets to the Internet? This is about inequality, and I’m sure you saw that one coming.

Third, I’m pointing to the elephant in the room, asking if unions are in fact irrelevant to most of the workforce, or, if they will be still able to protect the tens of millions of workers whose daily activities can only be described as digital labor in twenty or thrity years.

I will delineate a number of obstacles that unions would have to overcome to meaningfully protect this workforce. This also leads me to a discussion of the definition of union in the first place. I will briefly address the question if computers or “the Internet” (as if such thing even exists in isolation) should just go to hell. Are they to blame?

Let me also enlighten you as to what I’m not doing and what follows. I’m not following the Facebook exploitation thesis[4], calling for wages and unions for the “playboring produsers.” But I do not wish to belittle Berardi’s The Soul at Work but I do think that the focus should be on the most exploited workers in the realm of digital labor. Here, I’m talking about what I labeled as crowdmilking, the toil of the poorest workers on Mechanical Turk and other sites who try to survive on two or three dollars an hour.

In what amounts to a conclusion, I will by no means lay out the blueprints of the future of unions. I don’t think anybody can say with any certainty where unions should go next. All I hope to accomplish is to offer some inspiration by discussing novel organizational formats, social movement unionism, broader strategies, and design interventions that aim to help workers.

2. A Future Not Just of Work but of the Worker
It is more than likely that we will look back to this digital and global era, understanding it is a drastic turning point for the nature of work and the way in which life is organized. In hindsight it will be easier to see how lifestyles had to shift in order to accommodate this restructuring of work.

From the United States to Europe, there is a growing abundance of “future of work” think tanks focusing on everything from the ethics of crowdsourcing (some of corporate research in the US is focused on that) to the future of service unions, the latter being of interest in the EU. But one can spend days listening to presentations about the “future of work” without hearing any considerations about the worker, or about the ways in which these emerging forms of work are changing the quality of life for the worker.

In his book The Future of Work,[5] MIT Business School professor Thomas Malone describes the open workplace that manages to “harness democracy” as being central to the future and he closes with a reminder that human values shouldn’t fall to the wayside. Otherwise, the terminology in the business community is much about being disruptive, self organized, self managed, and obviously, peer-to-peer! Add to that, the 360° personality that can come to full fruition in a predominantly I-95 market, a market that is all about flexibility, choice, and a happening lifestyle.

You’ve probably come across the somewhat mind-blowing linguistic trapeze acts by corporations aiming to do away with terms like “worker.” You know, let’s just do away with unpleasant connotations of sweating bodies. Companies like TaskRabbit invite us to think about workers as “rabbits,” which is just as absurd as calling retail workers, “associates.” Mechanical Turk used to refer to “providers” or “turkers.” But also AMT workers sometimes refer to each other as “turkeys.” Some might say that there is some brutal truth conveyed when workers are reduced to or equated to animals.

The future of work, so we are told, is about becoming warriors of our own creativity, micro–entrepreneurs seeking Do It Yourself employment, jockeying from one gig to the next without surety of payday. It is remarkable how freelancing and the gig economy à la Zaarly.com[6] are sold as “lifestyle choices.” I am not at all denying that some freelancers enjoy the latitude that this way of working can sometimes afford. But at the same time, there needs to be an acknowledgment that an escape from the tedium of a stable job is only a motivator for part of that workforce, which is otherwise mandated into such flexible casualization and craves stability.

In many contexts, workplace submissiveness and decorous attire mater far less today. What counts is “flexibility,” “excitability,” “personal responsibility,” and “communication skills.”

I mean, we know them. The unpaid intern, the crowd worker, the “creative” engaging in speculative design work on 99designs[7], the volunteer, the artist, the adjunct, the office temp responding to emails after hours. These are the digital workers.

In the not-too-distant future there will be far fewer “jobs,” and obviously few if any “careers.” The corporate dream of the shift from the W2 market to the I95 freelance market is immanent. Companies like Workmarket.com aim to take the precarity of the freelance worker and solidify that arrangement in the context of one single employer. Wisconsin governor Scott (Koch) Walker would give them a warm welcome.

The traditional employer-worker relationship, which came with rights for the employee, will be an artifact of the past. People will sustain themselves through various occupations with multiple income streams, none of which will be stable. Acknowledging these realities by extension also means conceding that the methods of the labor movement have become defunct. Industry “disruptors” have taken over fields that have been historically the site of labor struggles. Just when organized labor got a foothold with hotel workers and taxi drivers, companies like Airbnb and Uber challenged those industries. As a result, we have to acknowledge that digital labor — as part of a much broader development that includes processes of globalization, union busting, deregulation, casualization, the proletarianization of professions, and much more- set back the clock for organized labor to the second half of the 19th century when the 80–hour workweek was still the norm.

3. Continuities
Some labor intellectuals will throw their arms in the air and claim that this is the exact same old dynamic of labor— the same exploitation, the same sweatshops that we’ve seen for hundreds of years — there is nothing new under the sun. Old work patterns resurface in emerging forms. And to them I would say that I do see a change in the nature of work and that technology is central to the future of work and the worker. Work is, of course, never isolated from health, politics, culture, and finances but as it turns out, all of these processes are at their core, deeply impacted and shaped by technology and the Internet. This doesn’t mean that everybody is working on the Internet; it’d be absolutely absurd to think that all work is now digital or “immaterial.” That is by no means the case. But you do have to consider and acknowledge that technology drives the logistics behind almost workplaces at least in the United States — from Walmart, and Amazon, to Uber. There are many continuities — putting-out systems, homework industries, sweatshops economies — but work is not the same as it ever was.

4. Why You Should Care
Digital labor, even when narrowly considered, is the daily reality for at least 10 million people.[8] By now, you will have heard it many times; it is not uncommon for workers in the crowdsourcing industry to make as little as $2-$3 an hour on average. CrowdSPRING and Amazon taught us that much. Is it really possible that the fruits of your digital labor don’t even amount to the cost of your monthly Internet connection? That is indeed what is happening to some workers. The future of work on the one hand is that: contingent employment and an extremely low-income workforce that is desperate and entirely replaceable. But on the other hand, there are also crowdsourcing companies that do act ethically and that do pay their workers minimum wage based on the country in which they reside.[9] The argument that the crowdsourcing industry would go to rack and ruin if minimum wage would be introduced has always been baseless, it needs to be complicated by the fact of the profitability of such companies.[10]

Thinking about the future of work, it is hard to miss the Twitter feeds, websites and pages of newspapers that are filled with reports about the innovation spurring from the “gig economy,” and so called “sharing economy,” –TaskRabbit, Sweetch, Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb. Before you pour the next cup of coffee, a new app invades another industry, changing the work situation for thousands of people within months. Spokespeople for the commercial side of the “sharing economy” frequently associate themselves with the Occupiers of Wall Street, the brave protesters in the streets of North African countries (yes, you may have heard this being discussed as the Arab Spring) or the Spanish Indignados. There is, in fact, a connection to these insurrectionary squatters but it’s not the one that upstarts have in mind. It’s not that they both want to “make the world a better place” but that those young protesters are actually affected, propelled you might say, by their own joblessness, their own economic desperation. And there is also a very genuine connection between those protesters and the efforts of unions to become more relevant. It’s called social movement unionism, which takes the role of unions beyond organizing workers around work place issues such as pay by engaging in a wider political struggle. Unions and other organizations then, support each other.

To hell with the Internet? No way! One thing is important to clarify at this point. While automation and the introduction of emerging technologies are changing the nature of work, thereby threatening the livelihoods of workers, “technology” and “the Internet” are not to blame. They are, however, already part of developments that lead to economic injustice. They can be instruments of inequality.

5. Things Are Still Fucked Up and Bullshit
Hold your breath and then consider the fact that from April to June 2013, American banks had their highest-ever quarterly profits with $42.2 billion.[11] That is the quarterly earnings, mind you. Then compare that to the wages for American workers that started to stagnate in the late 1970s while the pay rates for executives in the financial sector and homeland security, insurance CEOs, football coaches, university administrators at let’s say University of Phoenix, increased to such heights that they are barely fathomable for the average person. Rich doesn’t even begin to describe it. Digital labor played a role in creating these fortunes. And then don’t forget the absolute unwillingness of the 1% to pay even a tiny bit higher taxes.

6. “The Warmer Weather Helps!”
When I’m talking about a social vision behind the shift to digital labor, it is one that successfully rids society of the middle class. Take, for instance, the latest book, Average Is Over, by economist, and Koch-brother-ideologue Tyler Cowen in which he predicts that there will be a superclass, a “hypermeritocracy,” of 10 to 15% making over $1 million per year and the rest of the population will be driven down toward wages of $5-$10,000 annually. When asked whether people would accept this, Cowen responded: hey, many people are happy in Mexico making much less. “They hardly qualify as well-off but they do have access to cheap food and very cheap housing. Their lodging is satisfactory, if not spectacular, and of course the warmer weather helps.”[12]

Maybe Walter White should run a “Hunger Games” advice column along those lines. In Breaking Bad, Walt, a high school chemistry teacher, finds an irresistible solution to paying his healthcare bills: cooking up crystal meth. Alternatively, the poor can just rent out all of their belongings through the “sharing economy” and split their uneaten food through Leftoverswap.com.

Many of us may simply feel helpless, which makes us passive (what’s the point?). And indeed, alone, we are helpless and mobile phones in many ways exacerbate the problem. Worker cooperatives and any kind of association or coalition can become a good starting point to hack or jailbreak the union but as long as we don’t live with the fallacy that our interests are solely our own, as long as we don’t see them as collective interests, it will be impossible to find political solutions.

Already today, a two-income household in which both earners hold what would have traditionally been considered middle-class jobs does no longer facilitate a middle class living.[13] It certainly appears as if the top 10% that Cowen is referring to, are not willing to even throw a bare bone to the underclass; their best offer is: nothing.

Instead of outrage and anger, Italian post–workerist theorists like Bifo respond to this situation with a kind of mystic miserabilism and obscurantism, which leaves no prospect for a future at all.[14] Instead of a cancellation of their future, it is prudent for workers who seemed unorganziable thus far, to fight for their survival, and quality of life, for a family-supporting living wage, and employer-financed healthcare, affordable housing, schools, and decent public transportation.

7. Reinventing Organized Labor

It wouldn’t be the first time that workers who were deemed unorganizable were in fact represented by unions eventually. Think of Cesar Chavez’s use of consumer boycotts (e.g., against non-union lettuce, grapes) which led to the unionization of migrant workers in the late 1960s.[15] Or, consider the organization of sex workers, the fight for the rights of migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates, and the successes of Walmart employees.[16]

Let’s draw the public imagination to these questions rather than Google’s fleet of cutesy self-driving cars. This fight, as the word suggests, will require a sense of antagonism but it will also call for experimentation with new forms of mutual aid. Language about “new collectives” is making the rounds. But are these the people who rent their spare bedrooms to each other or should we think about “new collectives” in the tradition of resistance groups with Billy Bragg singing “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?”[17] Or, reflect, if you will (and that’s not just the “boys”), on the Zapatistas who, just two decades ago, used tactical media in their war against the Mexican government, which had signed NAFTA. Their response was the formation of local alliances committed to self-sufficiency.

The economic shifts that I am describing are by no means abstract and they are not arbitrary or related to an abstract crisis that nobody could influence. Laws and rules that are made by the government and corporations enforce the ideology of austerity, which aims to cement inequality. If you are willing to follow me along those lines, then you will understand the shift of marketplaces to the Internet as being instrumental to make this vision a reality.

Another player in this game is the system of higher education, at least the developments around commercialized massively open online courses (MOOCs). They are disconcerting precisely because they remove institutional credentials that have traditionally been part of the bargaining power of workers when they are negotiating with an employer. But there is more. With the introduction of courses that can cater to hundreds of thousands of students, it becomes easier to close community colleges, which have traditionally served the poor. Now, let the poor eat dog food, learn from canned video online while the hyper-elite is still able to get an exquisite education, rubbing shoulders with their peers. Distributed learning, in its commercialized form, contributes to Tyler Cowen’s vision of the near future. The early forms of MOOCs, in the 1990s, were not polluted by such commercial imperatives — they had the learner in mind, which demonstrates that the problem isn’t with massively open online courses, the concern is with the ways in which they are increasingly married to a commercial vision.

You can see that this is not the world of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford for whom it was an impetus to make production processes more effective because Ford, at least, understood his workers also as consumers of his products. (Even hecto-millionaires can only buy so much.)

8. “Empower elites and reevaluate government”
At this point you may wonder how we possibly got here. Well, we could go back to the recent past, the mid-1990s to 2000, a period that was marked by digitalization, the widespread introduction of personal computers, the domination of an ever smaller group of globally-operating corporations, the proliferation of mobile phones, high-bandwidth, and cheap computing power. And all of that set the stage for industries that finished the work that Thatcher and Reagan started in the 1980s when they touted individualism and self-reliance while reducing social spending, creating shockwaves of austerity, and destroying the spirit of unionized flight traffic controllers and miners, thereby calling to question the very idea of the effectiveness of unions. Perhaps that is what right-wing acolyte Newt Gingrich hand in mind when he celebrated the “upward spiral of the Internet in the 1990s as a way to empower elites, help to build new businesses, and reevaluate forms of government.” (Turner 9)

But you can also start by thinking about the implosion of the Soviet bloc following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the absence of a living comparison to another social system, the class of owners didn’t have to fear the mass exodus of workers who would sign up to join some Communist cause by storming their suburban chalets. This was a time of intensified deregulation and the opening up of global markets with the former Socialist republics now also being up for grabs. With that as a backdrop, over the past 60 years, we have seen the steady decline in union membership with today, only public institutions still being strongholds of the unions.

9. The State of Unions
Some of the crisis of unions has to do with public perception, with what we think when we are thinking about unions. Arch-libertarian billionaires such as the Koch Brothers put politicians such as Wisconsin’s Republican Governor‎ Scott Walker[18] on the payroll to ensure strongly anti-union policy. That also shapes the public image of unions.

Considering all these developments, should anybody be surprised that on the face of it at least, the crowdsourcing industry hasn’t seen much opposition from workers but there are some sites of resistance in the making. They include class action lawsuits against crowdsourcing companies[19] who misclassified workers, technological interventions such as simple browser plug-ins that help workers to connect with each other, worker cooperatives, social movement unionism, and much more.

One thing is clear, in the face of unregulated markets, worker exploitation, the desolation of the middle class, extremely unstable work arrangements, the misclassification of workers, the increasing isolation of individual laborers, and the land grabs of the ideology of individualism, self-reliance, flexibility, and choice— solutions have to be found that help workers to watch out for each other.

At this point, I don’t think that anyone can say what exactly these will be. Nor do we know if traditional unions will play a central role in this discussion. From today’s perspective this seems unlikely. Traditionally, capitalist owners were facing a mass of workers, frequently represented by a union. Today, there are anonymous individuals, facing anonymous employers, in some cases. Unions cannot easily represent workers through firm-by-firm collective bargaining because workers have contracts with more than one company at a time.

10. Are Traditional Unions Passé?
Are traditional unions outright passé? Who will watch out for the workers in Bangkok, Beijing, Toronto, and Cleveland if unions cease to do so? Who will ward off the acidic effects of capitalism on their lives? Unions could fight for the recognition of invisible sites of work and obscure forms of employment that are classified as independent contract work. They could take a stand for guaranteed basic income, and shorter working days. They could lobby for the application and enforcement of Federal Labor Law online.[20] (Or, for regulation that matches the realities of contemporary work. It cannot be based on the ideas of a full-time position in a setting like The Office). They could also celebrate and promote ethical crowdsourcing companies that do pay a living wage to their workers. They could lobby for more time for thinking, dreaming, and imagining.

Unions could also inform workers of their rights, fight for more ecologically sustainable work environments, challenge their status as independent contractors with coordinated campaigns, and document as well as publicize unfairness. They could push for fair labor standards, respect, clear, professional communication between “employers” and “independent contractors” and perhaps they could demand a more inclusive definition of employment to reflect the described changes in the nature of contemporary work (Cowie).

What do we even mean when we say “union.” At a Stanford conference on Entrepreneurship in the early 1980s, the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs stated that “A lot of people ask if Silicon Valley is ever going to be unionized … I say everybody’s unionized … There’s much greater union here than I’ve seen anywhere.”

Is it really surprising that Steve Jobs, in the 1980s, pretended that he did not know the meaning of the word union? Today, the discussion should start with a reexamination of what the term union actually means. Are we thinking about democratic institutions of working-class self-organization or are we willing to also look, more broadly, at new forms of coalitions and associations and organized networks[21] that don’t look or feel anything like traditional institutions.

Do unions imagine their future in relation to the tens of millions of workers around the world that are out of the reach of their protection? What do we make of the workers in the gig economy (e.g., Taskrabbit), or the 42 million freelancers in the United States? Do Japanese labor activists acknowledge the 20,000 workers who die every year of death by overwork (i.e., Karoshi)?

In 20 to 30 years, traditional trade unions will be irrelevant to most of the workforce if they don’t go through a revival and reorientation, facing the realities of work in the 21st century.

In the United States, the Freelancers Union, founded in 2001 by Sara Horowitz, offers health insurance to its 225,000 members: temps, freelancers, part-timers, and other precarious workers who are not insured by their employer. Rather unhelpful critiques of this union usually perform the perennial argument that such union makes the precarious work of these freelancers more bearable by offering them health insurance and pension fund solutions, which in their view postpones the overthrow of the entire capitalist system. From my perspective, such rejection is unhelpful, to be polite. In fact I welcome the Freelancers Union simply because it brings together workers; I welcome it for its potentiality of political struggle.

A complicating factor for the Freelancers Union has been the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care), which led to a $2,000 average increase in annual premiums for Freelancers Union members after an initial one-year waiver,[22] which puts the central, most significant benefit of this union to the test.

11. Social Media or Whatever
The rather obvious union discussion that I am not going into here, is that about social media tools for worker organization. These tools, as useful as they may be in some contexts, are still predicated on the assumption that one can identify workers and that they all reside within the bounds of the nation state. But like I said earlier, these are not the days of On the Waterfront where the union controlled hiring in the docks. Today Marlon Brando, a.k.a. Terry Malloy, would be on Facebook but we wouldn’t be able to identify him as worker because in much of the crowdsourcing industry, workers and employers are anonymous.

Sure, Foxconn workers could use Qzone, or RenRen to inform other workers in Shenzhen about union campaigns but it wouldn’t be very wise as employers could immediately identify the leaders and everybody else involved and they could easily retaliate. This, then, is a good moment to point to the existing social networks for activists Crabgrass, which is built to protect activists. In this field of labor organizing there is also the coworker.org platform, which organizes around workers rights, offering opportunities to build networks of employees, which can be mobilized repeatedly. The AFL-CIO[23] offers its own tools for work organization including Fixmyjob, and Organizewith.us.

One way to start would be to connect the struggle of online workers was existing movements like the National Domestic Workers Alliance or the workers in the fast food industry. While there are, of course, differences, precarity unites these occupations. Guy Standing now even offers a “Precariat Chapter.”

12. Current Challenges to Organizing
What are some of the key obstacles to organizing in this changed landscape? Let’s start with scale. Elance, which now also includes the former competitor oDesk, manages somewhere between 5 and 6 million deeply individualized workers who are geographically distributed. Such scale is a serious challenge.

Automation is also a pressing, if not at all new, issue — just take the acquisition of the robotics company KIVA through Amazon, paving the way for the replacement of workers in its fulfillment centers with robots. Here we are: Amazon workers are paving the way for the future of shopping while experiencing the future of labor already today.

In addition to gender, race, and nationality, identity is an added critical obstacle. Just like workers in a fast food joint, some digital workers might only sign on for five hours per week and don’t even think of themselves as workers. NYU professor Ross Perlin reminds us that a full-time intern might still identify herself as a student, interning is just a transitional occupation. At Mechanical Turk, many people get busy after their regular job is done; interviews have shown that they do it instead of watching television or playing video games. They don’t think of it as “work.”

And then there is the coolness factor, the kind of John Wayne frontier saga of techno-utopia. It’s considered hip to toil for a Silicon Valley company. Also for gold farmers, those play-workers in World of Warcraft, the lack of clear divisions between work and play, work and entertainment, softens the tensions around labor. It’s Tom Sawyer’s whitewashing the fence for the 21st century.

And you can add to that some legal challenges, which might include the legal recognition as a “community of interest” because the workforce is transnationally distributed and is situated in different cultural backgrounds, speaking dozens of different languages among them, which apparently precludes it from becoming a recognized bargaining unit in the United States.[24] Professor Ursula Huws reported successful organizing drives of “e-workers” in the Caribbean and in Brazil but she emphasized that such efforts have always been limited to national boundaries. It seems entirely thinkable to have two national unions for Mechanical Turk workers, one located in India and the other in the United States. Vincent Mosco and Katherine McKercher discussed the dream of one big union of unions that converges various forms of solidarity worldwide (Mosco and McKercher). A problem with such proposal would be that many workers may not want to be represented. Memories of The Wobblies are resurfacing as well. “AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL.”[25]

Who’s calling for regulations, situational changes, and unionization? To complicate things further, there is no visible class-consciousness, or even political consciousness of most workers. In the Making of a Cybertariat Ursula Huws writes “It is apparent that a new cybertariat is in the making. Whether it will perceive itself as such is another matter.” (Huws and Leys)

13. Preventing Exploitation

And if that wasn’t enough, many workers resent being represented by outsiders. This, of course is an important point that was encountered by labor organizers throughout history. While I have performed micro-task-work, it is true — I am not spending 24 hours, seven days a week, working on Mechanical Turk. Is it ethically defendable for me to speak to this issue? Am I permitted to call this work exploitative, for example? Things might get even more problematic when academics speak out from their privileged class position. Instead, I wonder what it would look like to open up spaces for workers without telling them what to do. Mechanical Turk workers are assembling in various forums but one of these forums has received more notoriety: Turker Nation.[26] Here, while workers frequently express disillusionment or frustration with particular employers, they angrily reject any suggestions of worker solidarity or boycotts against Amazon and mostly resist the language about “exploitative working conditions.” On Turker Nation a worker wrote:

[There] are requesters I will NEVER do business with, unless I make a mistake along the line. (That can happen) Those requesters want to use and abuse us by not paying a living wage. It’s exploitation. I REFUSE to work for a person like that.[27]

Surely, it’s clear that it might be problematic for academics to walk up to the factory gate, so to speak, and shout “You are being exploited!” And if workers don’t immediately surrender, accusations of false consciousness follow suit. On the one hand, I do deeply respect the individual worker as human being who makes choices and has opinions but at the same time, I am convinced that society should not tolerate exploitative working situations. Alan Wertheimer insists that society is justified to prevent exploitative actions from happening because they are inconsistent with important social values; exploitative transactions are wrong and should be prohibited by society even if the worker has willingly entered into a transaction because exploitation has harmful effects also on others, not just the workers, and it is justified to prohibit such work on behalf of the worker. (Wertheimer 245)

Up to this point, I discussed if unions in their current form are relevant to workers in emerging industries online. A logical last step is the question what to do about all of this. Ross Perlin writes that “tactics like the individual strike (indeed unionization itself) may prove ineffectual, while precarious workers instead discover other pressure points: mass actions on- and off-line, ‘occupations’ of all kinds, perhaps even new species of electoral politics.”(Perlin)

Not discounting a new species of electoral politics and street action seems pertinent to me. Don’t forget the great victory of 2012, when the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was defeated in the US House of Representatives.[28] Labor politics is to also be brought into the fold of Internet politics: while we are demanding open data, Internet neutrality, and the use of open source programs, tens of millions of people are being taken advantage of in the ghettos of Amazon.com and other sites.

Another possible inspiration can be taken from the activist strategies of ACTUP in the 1980s. Activist illegally entered the press offices of the company that produced HIV drugs, sending out press releases stating that the company would drastically lower the price for these murderously priced drugs. What could such physical assertion of resistance mean in the case of digital labor? The Precarious Workers Brigade, a British collective, proposes to identify precarious workplaces, right out there in the city, and to then print stencils that could be used to identify them. Their slogan: “print, cut, locate, spray!” To remember that the mysteriously hidden workplaces online also have a physical backbone, possibly in your city, is an interesting and possibly fun way to think about pathways to resistance. Amazon.com’s headquarter, for example, is located at 1516 2nd Ave in Seattle. Enjoy.

The Precarious Workers Brigade also suggests so-called “People’s Tribunals on Precarity[29]” as an effort to speak out, collectively listen, and discuss remedies and verdicts. They recommend such tribunals in work–related situations where “systemic injustice, normalized to the point of intractability, lies beyond the reach of existing labor and employment legislation and policy.” [30]

14. Technological Design Interventions

Lastly, I’ll address a small but growing ecosystem of technological design interventions that aim for the attention of the press and that connect workers.

Turkopticon, for example, is a Firefox plug-in with the goal of bringing together Mechanical Turk workers.[31] 7000 of them are already using it. The tool, named a bit tongue-in-cheek after Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, is designed as a social support system for AMT workers. It allows them to connect and evaluate the employers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, especially identifying those who consistently don’t pay workers, severely underpay them, or don’t respond to them after rejecting work..[32] If sufficient numbers of workers would join Turkopticon, employers on AMT might actually have to care about their reputation among the workforce. Turkopticon is a response to the fact that on AMT workers have very little recourse when employers reject their work. In fact, the terms of operation defined by Amazon specifically condone employers rejecting work while still using it anyway, without any explanation.

“A lot of the workers [on AMT are] specifically not interested in unions, although worker-run forums like will do certain kinds of collective actions like boycotting bad requesters,” Turkopticon co-founder Lilly Irani reports “It may be that the word ‘union’ has become too politically charged. … As work changes, the organizing has to change.”[33]

15. In lieu of a conclusion

Like I said before, I’m not in a position to lay out blueprints for the future of unions or anything of that nature, but perhaps others can build on the initial ideas that I presented here.

I would like to call on all whistleblowers to publicize nuts-and-bolts accounts of underpaid and dangerous work. Take the spirit of WikiLeaks and Anonymous to the fight for better work conditions and a better life for all.[34]

Take the modes of your distress at work and turn them on their head. In the context of the sharing economy, there’s so much talk of wasted resources, and companies are being built on your shoulders, by accessing your resources, your bandwidth, your spare bedroom. Spin that logic around, let’s copy and subvert their tools and think about watching out for yourself and others by crowdsourcing your coalition, by using their rooms, and parking lots, and power drills, and cars, and by building tools that suck up their bandwidth. Let’s try it that way around.

Take inspiration from the workers in Greece who form worker cooperatives, fab labs and hacker spaces that collaborate with unions. And sure, let’s napsterize the teamsters with peer-to-peer technology, anonymity gear like Tor, Liquid Feedback, and “hashtag activism” but social media tools will not save ya.

Crowdfund your actions. And why not, let’s gamify worker organization. Let’s hand out badges for talking to other workers, not just performing work a little better. Embrace Turker Nation, Turkopticon, CloudMeBaby, and the Freelancers Union. Rejecting all existing formations while hanging on to some quixotic notion of an ideal union will not help in answering to all that is wrong with hidden digital workplaces.

Let’s not get stuck in micro-criticisms, obfuscation, or melancholy. Let’s not focus so much on the success of individual actions but rather be mindful that more and more people are joining the ranks, immediate success isn’t the only goal. Long-term strategies are needed for the (digital) labor movement.

The Wobblies used song and poetry, they popularized The International; I mean, you probably can hear it now — Pete Seeger, Red Square, and Billy Bragg. Does 4Chan’s B-board become the engine of viral media, of labor memes? Let’s take that idea out for a dance. Let’s not take anything as unchangeable. And, let’s be clear: without outrage, conflict, and protests, new forms of solidarity and mutual aid cannot emerge.

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