ICTC’s Tech & Human Rights Series
The “Future of Work” and Digital Livelihoods for Vulnerable Populations
Original interview took place March 3, 2020
As part of ICTC’s Technology and Human Rights Series, ICTC spoke with Dr. Andreas Hackl, Lecturer in the Anthropology of Development at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Kiera Schuller, Research and Policy analyst with ICTC, interviewed Andreas about his research on digital labour and refugee livelihoods, and the digital economy, international development, and vulnerable populations.
Kiera: Thank you so much for joining me today, Dr. Hackl. To begin, can you tell me how you — an anthropologist — became interested in the digital economy?
Dr. Hackl: My personal interest started with my work in the Middle East. I was working in East Jerusalem as an anthropologist, collaborating with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and working with vulnerable populations. I began to see a growing number of so-called “digital labour interventions” that essentially used technology to seek to support people in vulnerable situations by providing digital labour and creating digital livelihoods. Interested in this, I built upon my original collaboration with the ILO to propose a new research project that would look at the “future of work,” as the ILO was framing it. Then, my interest in the Middle East brought me to look at this topic specifically in the context of the Syrian displacement and the Middle East in general.
Kiera: Anthropologists are not typically the first professionals that people think of when they think of expertise on the digital economy. How does having an anthropological lens shape help you uniquely see, understand, and research the digital world?
Dr. Hackl: Anthropology as a discipline has largely neglected the field of research that is digital labour and topics like online work. While there has been quite a strong digital anthropology focus, it has targeted mostly social media, identity, cultural engagement with online media, etc. The sphere of the digital economy, including digital labour, the gig economy, ride-sharing, etc. hasn’t been looked at much by anthropologists. Yet, on the other hand, anthropology has a unique strength of combining an analysis of (a) how digital forms of work are organized and structured and (b) the local, grounded experience of people who are doing this work or doing this training, which is key. A particular benefit of anthropology is the ability to do research on the ground for extended periods, to really embed in a community and understand people’s perspectives. Unfortunately, a lot of existing and current research on digital labour and work lacks this bottom-up perspective from people’s life-worlds. We need more of this.
Kiera: What is digital labour and how does it differ (or not) from traditional labour?
Dr. Hackl: ‘Digital labour’ is the term that is used to talk about a new form of labour but, in many ways, still carries several trends from traditional labour. For example, digital labour shares many of the same problems that traditional labour does: problems of informality, lack of security, sometimes being indecent work (particularly, for example, in the online gig economy). However, the means of connecting employers to employees have changed: they have been digitized. Yet, at the same time, software engineering, programming, and new tech-driven jobs are also changing the character of work and producing new kinds of work. For example, one thing that is different is scale. Platform work is a great example: platform work is rooted in the process of outsourcing tasks from the Global North so that they can be done by individuals in the Global South. Many platforms are now global in scale, causing workers from all over the world to compete with each other online. So, the scale of competition in the [digital] economy has increased.
Kiera: Are any issues of “digital labour” distinctly new or different from traditional labour?
Dr. Hackl: Many of its problems are the same as those in traditional forms of labour — issues of vulnerable work, insecure work, refugee work. But there are some new elements. For one, geography matters hugely because, with the digital economy, it matters a lot where you are doing the work and what legal/political context you are doing the work in. One big issue is financial exclusion: if you don’t have a bank account, an ID, some way to identify yourself online, or if you are living in a country under U.S. sanctions, or are a Syrian national, then you are unable to work on most of these digital platforms. Digital exclusion and financial exclusion, thus, are closely connected.
“…it is crucial to focus on creating decent work and ensure we are not placing people who take these opportunities in even more precarious positions afterwards — for example, in more unstable work, wasting unpaid hours trying to succeed, or left in debt.”
Although in reality it changes from country to country, many refugees for all the reasons above don’t have the capacity to successfully compete in digital platforms or compete at all in planetary digital labour markets. So ultimately, a fundamental new question is about the role of international norms. Globally operating platforms that outsource work are strongly regulated in some ways but not by strong, traditional labour institutions that can determine bargaining power, access, and better conditions, such as conventional labour unions or other sources of bargaining power. There have been some successful struggles that have succeeded in placing pressure on new digital forms to adapt, but largely global platforms remain underregulated.
Kiera: Let’s talk about inequality. How do you see digital technology most impacting inequality? Who is impacted, where and why?
Dr. Hackl: There are two sides. On the one hand, there is a promise floating around that digital opportunities are a way of decreasing inequalities, particularly if they allow people in the Global South to work remotely when they don’t have local opportunities. However, at the same time, we are seeing that digital economies can increase deeply seated, global patterns of inequality through cheap labour, lack of security, and relationships between workers and buyers of work that entrench a South–North divide.
Kiera: Do you think it is primarily creating opportunities or creating more harmful divides?
Dr. Hackl: It’s not an “either/or” question: both are happening. It is important not to completely reject those emerging forms of work because they may indeed provide work that helps those without alternatives, such as forced migrants or those who struggle to enter local labour markets. Forms of gig, freelance, or online work can potentially provide opportunities. But then again, it is crucial to focus on creating decent work and ensure we are not placing people who take these opportunities in even more precarious positions afterwards — for example, in more unstable work, wasting unpaid hours trying to succeed, or left in debt.
Kiera: Do you see any efforts succeeding in improving the conditions and types of digital labour?
Dr. Hackl: It’s very different to say from one kind of work to another because digital labour encompasses a lot. It’s a wide field. I do feel that in the UK or other Global North countries, there is a growing awareness and growing political engagement with problematic elements of the gig economy that are taking place. One example is the Fairwork project, which tries to pressure work platforms to change their rules and improve conditions by rating different work platforms around the world, including in so-called “developing countries.” And there are cases of civic mobilization, like Deliveroo drivers protesting and Uber drivers protesting. But these efforts, and awareness in general, don’t always result in substantive changes.
Kiera: What do you ultimately hope digital labour or technology can do to help marginalized populations, migrants or refugees?
Dr. Hackl: One potentially positive impact would be to bring income opportunities to people who are struggling to find any adequate local work in the offline labour markets. There could be — and already are — initiatives that focus, for example, on employing Syrians and others with forced displacement backgrounds to work in online language teaching. There are also others who are trying to create their own work platforms that ethically source work in order to try to bring an income to those who wouldn’t otherwise have it. In this way, there is a potential to use digital labour as a force for positive development outcomes. And you see it: in a lot of refugee camps in East Africa and other places, there have been positive signs in refugees becoming entrepreneurs and using digital tools to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Yet at same time, one of the main problems remains the issue of restricted rights to work, and digital labour doesn’t resolve that broader issue; most refugees around the world still face restricted access to decent work. Furthermore, engaging in digital forms of labour might risk making them more vulnerable in a legal sense because working online or remotely may be a legal grey area in some countries, particularly for asylum seekers or refugees. Even though it is often home-based and invisible, if they are not formally allowed to work, they still take a risk that could endanger their status.
“The mobility of digital work can become a way of justifying the ongoing immobility of people.”
Another complexity is the issue of digital labour as a “solution” for some immobile populations, where immobility is the result of exclusionary political regimes. When we think about certain internationally immobile populations — be it peoples in occupied territories or refugees — who are not able to migrate freely within or outside of the country of their choice or find work locally, there can be a general argument that, “Well, if we can just now outsource the work digitally to all those in need of work and have them work online for companies in the Global North, then they won’t need to migrate. Problem solved.” But despite helping them to make an income, such work does not necessarily change their immobility or exclusion; only the work they do, which serves capital elsewhere, is moving. The digital mobility of work does not necessarily improve their human or social mobility. Instead their immobility becomes the main driver for their inclusion into digital economies. In this way, if we look at it in terms of global geographies of inequality, such digital work can also actually reinforce global inequalities, despite helping individuals make a livelihood. The mobility of digital work can become a way of justifying the ongoing immobility of people. Of course, there are also cases where online workers acquired skills and contacts with companies abroad and then managed to become labour migrants and find employment elsewhere, but that is not everyone.
“In the long run, if you think about transforming humanitarian interventions into sustainable solutions, you need to make sure that what you are doing can exist long term in the market.”
There are further inequalities at play here too, even in domestic contexts. For example, there are some initiatives that try to support digital livelihoods by specifically targeting women because, in part, they are based on presumptions that some women must prioritize working from home because of their competing care responsibilities. Online and remote work is seen as “fitting” for women, specifically in certain areas in the world. But we can equally ask whether this does not further entrench gender inequalities rather than resolving them. So digital labour can be a solution, but we also need to check how it reinforces the immobility of certain people and, in fact, solidifies problems beneath inequalities, rather than eroding them.
A final opportunity is to connect the private sector with development organizations in order to create space for more social enterprises that aim to have positive impact in the world. In the long run, if you think about transforming humanitarian interventions into sustainable solutions, you need to make sure that what you are doing can exist long term in the market. So one of the major factors when asking whether businesses or the private sector have a positive or negative effect is whether the effort is just a selective act of charity — a token of intervention — or an honest, long-term sustainable effort to make positive impacts on development that is a core part of their long-term agenda. I don’t think this sustained effort has happened much so far — a lot of private sector involvement is selective. And finally, it is important to use the growth of digital economies and digital corporations to transfer the benefits of digital transformation to those who need support and who need help earning a livelihood and gaining the skills they need to be competitive in the future of work.
ICTC’s Tech & Human Rights Series:
Our Tech & Human Rights Series dives into the intersections between emerging technologies, social impacts, and human rights. In this series, ICTC speaks with a range of experts about the implications of new technologies such as AI on a variety of issues like equality, privacy, and rights to freedom of expression, whether positive, neutral, or negative. This series also particularly looks to explore questions of governance, participation, and various uses of technology for social good.
