Part 2: Putting tech to work
This is part 2 of a three-part series on the challenges and opportunities for WorkerTech in the UK. To read part 1, go here.
What can technology do about the problems of work?
In the last blog post, I outlined a few of the key features of low paid and precarious work that we should be paying attention to. In this post, I want to explore what technology can and can’t do about these problems.
Digital technology has been transforming work for decades. The recent crop of Future of Work start-ups, including HRTech and CareerTech, have been limited to transforming work for a particular group of workers: those with office jobs, and in professional roles, or those seeking access to them. Low-paid work and sectors are seldom in scope.
The pandemic illustrated in stark terms the essential nature of lower paid work to all our lives. ‘Key workers’ is a phrase that covers care workers, delivery drivers, supermarket assistants and many more. But where technology is used in these jobs, it is usually with little power or control by those on the front line. And, despite some of the more optimistic claims for automation, it’s not always used in ways that remove ‘tedious’ tasks and make time for more human skills. Too often, people are controlled by the technology, not the other way around.
Connection and information
Digital technology excels at a few things. In the context of work, it can create new problems, as highlighted above. But it also has potential to create positive impact: it can connect people together to form communities for shared support, campaigns, organising, or development. It can be a powerful tool for collecting, personalising and distributing information. It can reduce the costs of providing alternative services and products to people, and make it possible to set up alternative employers, scaling in a cost-efficient way to offer a better deal for workers.
In the example of the gig economy, connection might mean a social network for workers to make connections and share information, and provide support; information might mean helping workers to understand their income and expenses, or handle taxes, or how to access and exercise their rights; and alternatives might come in the form of worker co-operatives, offering a different platform for work.
The impact of technology, and whether it achieves a social purpose, is very often down to the power and governance of the technology and the way it is used, rather than anything inherent to the technology itself. When looking for ways that technology can improve working lives, we are therefore looking for characteristics that include:
· Problems deriving from a lack of available and usable information
· Problems that can be solved by connecting people together in new ways
· Problems that can be addressed by providing alternative business models, employers or practices, facilitated by technology.
Creating impact for individuals and collectively
As well as these three ways that technology might create impact, we also consider that the impact might be to help individual workers to improve their experience of work, through individual choices and decisions; or impact by helping a group of people to act collectively.
This leads to a map of potential routes to impact that looks like this:
As well as aiming to address some of the existing problems of the UK labour market for lower-paid workers, WorkerTech should also anticipate future changes and ensure that workers and employers are better prepared for them, and can steer the direction of future change to improve working lives.
Examples of this include:
· The pressing need to improve diversity and inclusivity in the workplace.
· The need to expand green jobs and industries, and shrink carbon-intensive industries, entailing reskilling and adaptation.
· Increasing automation of management, physical tasks through robotics, and data tasks through AI.
· Trend towards greater remote work, with the potential to entrench existing inequalities.
· Fragmentation of work into tasks, gigs and jobs, combined together to make a working life.
· Increasing demands for flexibility to properly balance work and home responsibilities, including caring.
Caveat: technology can’t and won’t solve all the problems of low-paid work.
We should be clear that technology is not always a solution, or even an appropriate intervention for everyone. We have regulation of many aspects of work for a good reason. As work changes to become more flexible and more precarious, regulation needs to adapt to recognise these changes and improve the equality of treatment across the labour market. Unions continue to play a vital role in highlighting problems and negotiating better outcomes.
And there is much to do to identify the risks of technology, and to help regulate its effects on the workplace, something highlighted by a recent Future of Work APPG report on Artificial Intelligence at work (which also highlighted the vital role of unions alongside workers).
Technology rightly sits alongside other ways of improving working lives, not as a replacement for them. But when technology is adding so much to professional work, to management and logistics, why shouldn’t it also be used to benefit the lives of lower-paid people at work.
The next post brings together the issues highlighted in part one and the opportunities that technology creates to identify some specific areas where we think WorkerTech has the potential to create better work.
