The rise of the planetary labour market

Mark Graham writes about the emergence of a planetary labour market, where new technologies have allowed more jobs to be outsourced from developed to developing economies — including the grisly work of content moderation.

By Mark Graham

2018 will be the first year in human history in which a majority of the world’s population is connected to the internet. The internet is therefore no longer a network that primarily connects wealthy people in wealthy countries. The rest of the world is quickly coming online, and now only about a quarter of the world’s internet users are European or North American.

One of the most significant implications of this connectivity for many people outside of the world’s economic cores is the creation of a planetary labour market in which millions of jobs can now be done from almost anywhere on Earth. A mass migration of labour, but not of people.

Some of the impacts of this planetary labour market are being observed in the most unlikely places. Last year, I visited an artificial intelligence training centre in a rural town in Central Africa. Getting there involved a day long drive from the nearest international airport into a region that, at first glance, appeared worlds away from the global economy. It was here, in a place where many people still live in thatched huts, where a lot of the roads are unpaved, and where few families possess any of the technological gadgets of the contemporary world, that workers are helping to build some of the world’s most advanced technologies and services.

In a large open plan office with hundreds of desks and computers, one of three shifts of workers are crammed together into the building. They spend eight hours a day doing highly repetitive work like matching names to photographs of minor celebrities that they’ve never heard of, or identifying objects on photographs of suburban American streets in cities that they will never go to. What these tasks have in common with the dozens of other routines performed in the room is that computers cannot yet perform them as effectively as humans. Real people are needed to structure, classify, and tag an enormous amount of unstructured information for companies using machine learning algorithms in products like autonomous vehicles and next generation search engines.

What is most interesting about this work is that the workers themselves are never actually told much about what they are doing. They know, for instance, that they need to repeatedly tell a computer what the difference between a tree and a building is; but are never told anything about the end client, such as their name, location, what they need all this information for. This is the ultimate in alienated labour: people doing work for companies they know nothing about, building products and services they will likely never use.

Here it is worth remembering that some of what we are seeing now is far from new. The mass outsourcing of manufacturing from high wage to low wage economies began in the 1970s. The 1990s likewise saw a significant amount of jobs outsourced and offshored in the IT services sector. In both of those industries, outsourcing firms faced substantial risks and costs to reconfigure their production networks to take advantage of what some people referred to as a ‘global reserve army’ in distant labour markets. However, the planetary labour market that some firms are attempting to build today is qualitatively and quantitatively different from previous rounds of outsourcing in three primary ways.

First, the nature of work itself has changed. One outcome of computerising and digitising almost every profession has been the increasing modularisation and standardisation of work. Currently, a lot of digital work is what you might think of as the low hanging fruit of modularisation and standardisation: jobs like transcriptions and data entry. However, there is no reason why ever more processes from all sorts of other jobs couldn’t be modularised and broken up into chunks to be outsourced. With enough pressure to cut costs, so called ‘higher skilled’ professions like teachers, lawyers, and doctors could all see parts of their work processes standardised. This fact contributes to the commodification of labour power by allowing work to be traded at the level of the microtask. As an employer, you can more easily hire on a per click or per task, rather than per person, basis. This is visible nowhere more than on global online outsourcing platforms such as Upwork.com or Freelancer.com that connect clients with workers anywhere in the world, sometimes to do tasks that might only take a few minutes. Those two platforms alone have a combined potential workforce of 38 million people on them from almost every country on Earth.

Second, and while this may sound tautological, a core reason why we are heading towards a planetary labour market is because the market for a lot of labour is now truly planetary. In the past, labour markets needed bounded places and times for employers to find workers and workers to find jobs. But with most people in the world now connected to the internet, some of the spatial barriers that once defined labour markets are now less relevant. This is not an argument that geography is irrelevant. Far from it. What need would we have to outsource and offshore jobs if wage levels, skills, and the availability of workers in every place was the same? Economic geography therefore matters more and matters less at the same time.

So if we accept the first point, that ever more types of work can be outsourced, and the second point, this outsourcing can happen to ever more places, we arrive at a third. Namely, that a lot of jobs are becoming extremely footloose. To switch the location of a job from one place to another can now be as simple as sending some emails or clicking some buttons. There is often no need for companies to build factories or offices, train workers, or even pay local taxes. A small business in London can hire a freelance web developer in Mumbai one day and Manila the next. By quickly, cheaply, and almost seamlessly moving its production networks around the world in this way, the small business in London leaves behind no fixed infrastructure and no visible traces in the cities in which it was once an employer.

The hundreds of workers in Central Africa now training the next generation of autonomous vehicles, and the millions of distributed online platform workers in other locations around the world, are examples that show us not that work will go anywhere on the planet, but that it can. And while we have had a world marked by worries about offshoring for decades, we have never had one characterised by mass digital connectivity, or by labour commodified to such a high degree that it can be so easily and quickly transmitted across space.

One could argue that this planetary labour market carries the potential to accrue significant benefits for both labour and capital. Employers can find workers for any imaginable task, and workers are longer constrained by the limitations of their local labour markets. Indeed, the African machine learning trainers had highly sought after jobs. They earned above average wages and received job perks like free lunches and on-site childcare, a significant improvement from almost anything else available in the local labour market. However, this example of a responsible employer sadly appears to be the exception rather than the rule. When labour is treated as a commodity that can be easily bought and sold, it becomes economically irrational for the millions of employers engaging in outsourcing to invest meaningfully in workers. The employers in online outsourcing platforms, for instance, almost always tend to place the burden and cost of training, infrastructure, and risk upon the worker themselves. The global competition within a planetary labour market exerts huge downwards pressure on wages and working conditions. It is not uncommon to find instances of people working for below national minimum wages, or working 48 hour shifts because a highly precarious work environment makes them concerned about when they’ll get their next gig. And as production networks quickly shift and reconfigure themselves across the surface of the globe, with jobs moved out of a place as quickly as they were moved in, it matters little to employers if labour power is left unused.

Every year hundreds of millions of new people from ever poorer segments of the world’s population connect to the internet and, like the rest of us, they will be looking for decent work. Indeed, by 2035, the vast majority of the world will likely be online, even the world’s very poorest populations. The world’s poor will be thrust into the same globe spanning context of competition with everyone else. But the situation described above is but one example of how capital, labour, data, computers, and a globe spanning communication network can be interlinked.

None of this should be taken as an argument for autarky or a return to a geographically more bounded world of work. Just because a labour market can be everywhere does not mean it is nowhere, and this is why we need to continue working towards strategies that operate at a range of spatial scales to counter some of the worst problems associated with planetary-scale competition. We need regulation tailored to key source and destination countries of work; we need transnational agreements that set minimum standards; we need global alliances of workers and their advocates; we need international strategies of worker resistance; we need to look to nascent plans to create more democratic and worker owned digital companies and platforms; and we need transparent standards that signal to consumers whether employers acknowledge their moral responsibility to their workers. It is on that last point, that I am working with colleagues in the UK, South Africa, and India to launch what we are calling the Fairwork Foundation. We have brought together stakeholders (workers, unions, platforms, policy makers) in order to set core principles for ‘fair work’ in the platform economy. We are turning those principles into scores and an annual league table that will show how well, or poorly, each platform scores in every country. In the spring, we will launch our first South Africa rankings, and we currently are seeking support to begin a UK pilot. Our hope is that these rankings will reward platforms that treat their workers well.

The Fairwork Foundation is just one attempt to think about how to grapple with a world in which there are few protections for many of the world’s digital workers. And the coming into being of a planetary labour market ultimately means that governments, trade unions, civil society, and international organisations must all rise to the challenge of not just thinking globally, but also acting globally if we want a future world of work that is anything but a race to the bottom.

Note: This text is adapted from the original by Mark Graham that appeared in NS Tech, a division of the New Statesman. This article originally appeared in the following RSA report (Dec 2018): A field guide to the future of work