How digital labor is a modern-day sweatshop
Research Question: What opportunities are missed for people who participate in “Cyber Sweatshops”?
There are millions of people that work in the digital media industry, but many of them are participating in what many call a “cyber sweatshop” where they are are not getting paid for their work. Some of these sweatshops boast of flexible hours and being able to do your work on your own time without actually calling it work, but others have close to ninety-nine hours a week of labor. How is a person supposed to live while working that many hours a week and not get paid one cent for their labor; they cannot. One big “cyber sweatshop” is AOL, a web portal and online service provider, where there was a lawsuit filed from the thousands of unpaid volunteers that run their chats, clean obscene posts from message boards, and catch people violating the terms-of-service conditions (Margonelli 2017). These people not only make sure everything is running smoothly, but they are also what makes up the community of AOL (Margonelli 2017). While these people are volunteering their time to be a part of something they may enjoy or feel is important, what are they missing out on in the real world?
The most obvious thing that these people do not receive is a paycheck for all of their labor, and if they do decide they are fine with being a volunteer then they are still missing out on the opportunity to work someplace that would be willing to actually hire them and pay them. They also miss out on opportunities to hone their skills in multiple different areas allowing them to branch off and try new things in the workforce. The biggest opportunity they are missing out on, in my opinion, is the ability to be independent and make the money they need to not have to miss out on all these opportunities.
In the AOL community, they do get pay for their work, but it is only at $21.95 a month that has some special CL-only enhancements, which was good enough for the workers until now (Margonelli 2017). Seven of the former leaders from the community asked if the Department of Labor would find out if AOL actually owes all their workers’ wages back, and two of them decided to file a complaint against AOL in a court of Law (Margonelli 2017). It did not end there, though, multiple people came forward and joined the lawsuit, but there were still thousands that decided to stay with AOL. With their decision to stay, however, they are missing out on the opportunity to change the course of the system and fight for something that will allow them to have a livable wage. These events show that there is a backlash to the glorifying and glamorization of digital labor and shows that it is not all that it is cracked up to be, it “highlights its continuities with the modern sweat-shop and points to the increasing degradations of knowledge work” (Terranova 2000). Digital labor is a form of a sweatshop that needs to be revealed for what it really is to all who are already involved or choose to be involved with it.
Works Cited
Margonelli, Lisa. “Inside AOL’s “Cyber-Sweatshop”. Wired, Conde Nast, 4 June 2017, https://www.wired.com/1999/10/volunteers/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.
Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”. Project Muse, Summer 2000, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzlNbYYWRMSHQ1ZURGtzMUdfMHM/view. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.
“New AOL Logo, Designed by Wolff Olins”. Logo Desing Love, 10 July 2018, www.logodesignlove.com/aol-logo. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.
Boyle, Jen. “Theory in a Digital Age: Rise of Digital Labor”. Paris of the Plains: Jazz in Kansas City, http://scalar.usc.edu/works/index-2/rise-of-digital-labor. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.
