Toward a Just Future for Platform Labor
The recently published Pew Research Center report on “Gig Work, Online Selling, and Home Sharing” confirms what many scholars of the so-called “sharing” or “on-demand” economy already knew: The world of platform-mediated labor is variegated and marked by striking class, gender, and racial inequalities.
Some of my colleagues have already provided some insightful commentaries on the report. What I aim to contribute is a brief reflection on how to move forward from here. After digesting what the report tells us about the present and potential future of work, how should we respond?
Some initiatives are hopeful about the efficacy of corporate self-regulation, seeing it as a viable means to achieve social justice in the workplace. One of the most prolific and ambitious efforts to date is the Good Work Code, established by the National Domestic Workers Alliance in response to seeing the market for domestic work move to on-demand platforms. The Code’s eight values serve as a normative framework “that guides us in creating a new economy that works for all of us.” At the time of writing, just twelve startup companies have publicly committed themselves to the Code, and there are certainly good reasons to question the extent to which corporate self-regulation will bring about the desired change. But what I find incredibly important about this initiative is the fact that it actually involves domestic workers — mostly women of color — in the act of drawing up alternative “future of work” scenarios.
One of the key problems with public debates on technology and the future of work has generally been their lack of engagement with the gig workers whose lives and livelihoods are directly affected by changes underway.
Many of these debates happen at conferences hosted by universities and other public and private institutions, which frequently charge hefty registration fees and feature academics, policy experts, and business consultants speaking on topics intimately familiar to gig workers who nevertheless lack meaningful representation and voice. To be sure, I am not against the idea of experts trying to make sense of complex issues that need to be tackled with care and from a variety of different perspectives, but when discussing platform-mediated labor issues, shouldn’t we start by asking how these issues impact the everyday lives of people who actually work on/through these platforms? What is there to learn from their perspectives, their experiences, their needs, anxieties, and aspirations? And who does this “their” refer to anyway?
Fortunately, scholars are starting to differentiate between various types of platforms and their respective workforces, and more ethnographic studies on the divergent realities of platform labor are being conducted and published. Ethnography is eminently suitable to convey these realities in a way that does not simply aim to expose but also works to elicit, provoke, and make things possible in concert with research participants. I believe the urgent task of ethnography is to become attuned to — in order to learn from and contribute to — the myriad of ways in which minoritized gig workers are engaged in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have called “planning.”
Planning, in Moten and Harney’s lexicon, means a form of “militant preservation” in an “ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction.” As they know, impoverished communities of color have for centuries been sharing, collaborating, hacking, and crowdsourcing in order to survive in environments devoid of formal employment opportunities, yet their improvisation and inventiveness have mostly been discarded, if not actively sabotaged and criminalized.
What if we would start our public conversations about the future of work from the vantage point of these communities and the imaginaries they are crafting from their knowledge, skills, and spaces of incubation? What “adjacent possibilities,” or shadow futures, might open up? And how will we — as scholars, worker advocates, policymakers and low-income workers — collectively ensure their materialization and sustainability in a world that only values a very specific (white, tech-driven) version of creativity and innovation?
Creating the condition of possibility for such shadow futures entails two conceptual moves. First, it requires a historical critique of the gendered racism that undergirds the devaluation of current, ostensibly post-racial, forms of paid and unpaid reproductive labor, by tracing this structural violence from the plantation to the platform. Second, it also demands that we reassess the value of supposedly “low-skilled” — because racially feminized — service labor and think about how this essential work of maintenance, care, and support can be arranged otherwise. The parallel material move is thus to experiment with platform architectures that support new forms of cooperation around the work of social reproduction adjacent to — if not exactly outside of — the logic of capital and the market.
Recently, a movement has emerged around the notion of “platform cooperativism,” which reimagines how work is organized by supporting and engaging in the experimental design of worker-owned digital platforms that are decentralized, democratically governed, collaborative, and radically egalitarian. While I consider this movement to be a valuable antidote to the “access trumps ownership” discourse that dominates today’s corporate sharing economy, which perpetuates rather than problematizes wealth inequality by making conditional access to private property the norm, I want to end with two critical aspirations concerning its future.
The first aspiration pertains to the specter of “technological solutionism” that not only haunts venture capital-backed startups but also — albeit to a lesser extent — informs the good life vision of platform cooperativism. Although a collective investment in the dual technologies of open source software and cooperative ownership models may certainly be necessary to imagine “a transparent, democratic and decentralized economy which works for everyone,” it is not fully sufficient. Such an investment in technical and organizational infrastructures needs to be carefully embedded in local environments and their affective, moral, and political infrastructures, all of which are deeply gendered and racialized. While platform cooperativism operates in concert with local organizers and activists, its proponents have a tendency to assume the universal applicability of its solution, which posits collaborative software and cooperative ownership as technologies that have the capacity to move us beyond the antagonisms and inequalities that historically shape particular social settings. This tendency risks a perverse reproduction of Silicon Valley’s own vision of the good life, which equates frictionlessness with social justice.
Second, and finally, platform cooperativism would benefit from a more concerted effort to articulate its relationship to public institutions on a local and (inter)national scale. Its roots in commons-based peer production models and its adherence to self-governance make platform cooperativism a cogent movement that can offer valid alternatives in the increasingly entangled fields of production and social reproduction, but if it aims to build infrastructures that amount to more than temporary autonomous zones, then it will have to rethink how the state can be involved in their legitimation, as well as their maintenance and expansion.
A sustainable and scalable model of platform labor that is dedicated to social justice requires an ongoing collective struggle in which those engaged in planning confront and demand change from those doing policy.
Niels van Doorn is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS), Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His current research examines platforms as new institutional forms that reorganize relationships between civil society, the market, and the state — particularly focusing on the politics of platform-mediated labor. Together with Ellen Rutten he co-founded and continues to chair the Digital Emotions research group at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). He can be reached here and followed there.
Points: For more thoughts on the so-called gig economy — and responses to the new report, “Gig Work, Online Selling and Home Sharing,” from Pew Research Center — see:
- Spike in Online Gig Work by Siddharth Suri and Mary L. Gray
- We’re Not All Entrepreneurs by Brooke Erin Duffy
- Phones, but No Papers by Julia Ticona
- “These Days, Everyone Needs a Side Hustle” by Dan Greene
- Imagining the Sharing Economy by Caroline Jack
