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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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When the app tries to make you robo-scab

When we talk about the abusive nature of gig work, there’s some obvious targets, like algorithmic wage discrimination, where two workers are paid different rates for the same job, in order to trick occasional gig-workers to give up their other sources of income and become entirely dependent on the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Then there’s the opacity — imagine if your boss refused to tell you how much you’ll get paid for a job until after you’ve completed it, claimed that this was done in order to “protect privacy” — and then threatened anyone who helped you figure out the true wage on offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

Opacity is wage theft’s handmaiden: every gig worker producing content for a social media algorithm is subject to having their reach — and hence their pay — cut based on the unaccountable, inscrutable decisions of a content moderation system:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Making content for an algorithm is like having a boss that docks every paycheck because you broke rules that you are not allowed to know, because if you knew the rules, you’d figure out how to cheat without your boss catching you. Content moderation is the last place where security through obscurity is considered good practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

When workers seize the means of computation, amazing things happen. In Indonesia, gig workers create and trade tuyul apps that let them unilaterally modify the way that their bosses’ systems see them — everything from GPS spoofing to accessibility mods:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

So the tech and labor story isn’t wholly grim: there are lots of ways that tech can enhance labor struggles, letting workers collaborate and coordinate. Without digital systems, we wouldn’t have the Hot Strike Summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

As the historic writer/actor strike shows us, the resurgent labor movement and the senescent forces of crapulent capitalism are locked in a death-struggle over not just what digital tools do, but who they do it for and who they do it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

When it comes to the epic fight over who technology acts for and against, we need a diversity of tactics, backstopped by tech operated by and for its users — and by laws that protect workers and the public. That dynamic is in sharp focus in UNITE Here Local 11’s strike against Orange County’s Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa.

The UNITE Here strike turns on the usual issues like a living wage (hotel staff are paid so little they have to rent rooming-house beds by the shift, paying for the right to sleep in a room for a few hours at a time, without any permanent accommodation). They’re also seeking health-care and pensions, so they can be healthy at work and retire after long service. Finally, they’re seeking their employer’s support for LA’s Responsible Hotels Ordinance, which would levy a tax on hotel rooms to help pay for hotel workers’ housing costs (a hotel worker who can’t afford a bed is the equivalent of a fast food worker who has to apply for food stamps):

https://www.unitehere11.org/responsible-hotels-ordinance/

But the Marriott — which is owned by the University of California and managed by Aimbridge Hospitality — has refused to bargain, walking out negotiations.

But the employer didn’t walk out over wages, benefits or support for a housing subsidy. They walked out when workers demanded that the scabs that the company was trying to hire to break the strike be given full time, union jobs.

These aren’t just any scabs, either. They’re predominantly Black workers who rely on the $700m Instawork app for gigs. These workers are being dispatched to cross the picket line without any warning that they’re being contracted as strikebreakers. When workers refuse the cross the picket and join the strike, Instawork cancels all their shifts and permanently blocks them from new jobs.

This is a new, technologically supercharged form of illegal strikebreaking. It’s one thing for a single boss to punish a worker who refuses to scab, but Instawork acts as a plausible-deniability filter for all the major employers in the region. Like the landlord apps that allow landlords to illegally fix rents by coordinating hikes, Instawork lets bosses illegally collude to rig wages by coordinating a blocklist of workers who refuse to scab:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/?comments=1

The racial dimension is really important here: the Marriott has a longstanding de facto policy of refusing to hire Black workers, and whenever they are confronted with this, they insist that there are no qualified Black workers in the labor pool. But as soon as the predominantly Latino workforce struck, Marriott discovered a vast Black workforce that it could coerce into scabbing, in collusion with Instawork.

Now, all of this isn’t just sleazy, it’s illegal, a violation of Section 7 of the NLRB Act. Historically, that wouldn’t have mattered, because a string of presidents, R and D, have appointed useless do-nothing ghouls to run the NLRB. But the Biden admin, pushed by the party’s left wing, made a string of historic, excellent appointments, including NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has set her sights on punishing gig work companies for flouting labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy

UNITE HERE 11 has brought a case to the NLRB, charging the Instawork, the UC system, Marriott, and Aimbridge with violating labor law by blackmailing gig workers into crossing the picket line. The union is also asking the NLRB to punish the companies for failing to protect workers from violent retaliation from the wealthy hotel guests who have punched them and screamed epithets at them. The hotel has refused to identify these thug guests so that the workers they assaulted can swear out complaints against them.

Writing about the strike for Jacobin, Alex N Press tells the story of Thomas Bradley, a Black worker who was struck off all Instawork shifts for refusing to cross the picket line and joining it instead:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/southern-california-hotel-workers-strike-automated-management-unite-here

Bradley’s case is exhibit A in the UNITE HERE 11 case before the NLRB. He has a degree in culinary arts, but racial discrimination in the industry has kept him stuck in gig and temp jobs ever since he graduated, nearly a quarter century ago. Bradley lived out of his car, but that was repossessed while he slept in a hotel room that UNITE HERE 11 fundraised for him, leaving him homeless and bereft of all his worldly possessions.

With UNITE HERE 11’s help, Bradley’s secured a job at the downtown LA Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a hotel that has bargained with the workers. Bradley is using his newfound secure position to campaign among other Instawork workers to convince them not to cross picket lines. In these group chats, Jacobin saw workers worrying “that joining the strike would jeopardize their standing on the app.”

Today (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

[Image ID: An old photo of strikers before a struck factory, with tear-gas plumes rising above them. The image has been modified to add a Marriott sign to the factory, and the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' to the sky over the factory. The workers have been colorized to a yellow-green shade and the factory has been colorized to a sepia tone.]

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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politijohn · 3 months

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Source

Let’s go

#working class #workers rights #solidarity #government #politics #us politics #the left #progressive #good news #gig economy #labor

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iww-gnv · 4 months

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The US Department of Labor (DOL) published a final rule to the Federal Register on Wednesday that would increase the difficulty of classifying workers as independent contractors. If the rule survives court challenges unscathed, it will replace a business-friendly Trump-era regulation that did the opposite. It’s scheduled to go into effect on March 11. The new rule, first proposed in 2022, could have profound implications for companies like Uber and DoorDash that rely heavily on gig workers. It would mandate that workers who are “economically dependent” on a company be considered employees. The rule restores a pre-Trump precedent of using six factors to determine workers’ classification. These include their opportunity for profit or loss, the financial stake and nature of resources the worker has invested in the work, the work relationship’s permanence, the employer’s degree of control over the person’s work, how essential the person’s work is to the employer’s business and the worker’s skill and initiative.

#news #us news #us pol #uspol #us dol #us department of labor #uber #doordash #gig economy #gig workers

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reasonsforhope · 10 months

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Across New York City, delivery drivers are a ubiquitous sight: congregating outside big restaurant chains waiting to collect orders, zooming through the city streets with orders in tow. “The most chaotic time for deliveries is easily during lunch time,” says Elijah Williams, who delivers food for both Uber and DoorDash. “I’ve had up to four orders at one time.”

Mayor Eric Adams recently announced a major change that will deeply impact busy workers like Williams: app-based delivery workers will be paid $17.96 an hour starting July 12th — and nearly $20 an hour by 2025 — marking the nation’s first minimum pay for such workers.

“Our delivery workers have consistently delivered for us — now, we are delivering for them,” he said. “They should not be delivering food to your household, if they can’t put food on the plate in their household.”

The Background

Mayor Adams made the announcement at City Hall, surrounded by delivery workers as well as members of the nonprofit organizations, Workers Justice Project (WJP) and Los Deliveristas Unidos.

Ligia Guallpa, executive director of WJP, expressed her excitement and gratitude.

“This first of its kind minimum pay rate will uplift working and immigrant families,” said [Ligia Guallpa of Workers Justice Project (WJP)] alongside Gustavo Ajche of Los Deliveristas Unidos. “[It will] ensure that workers who keep New Yorkers fed, are able to keep also their families fed too.”

WJP was founded in 2010, and coordinates numerous worker-led programs, including Los Deliveristas Unidos, that aim to improve conditions for low-wage immigrant workers across the five boroughs.

The Details

The current minimum wage in New York is $15 an hour. On average, service workers are paid $7.09 an hour, excluding tips. The new wage is in keeping with a law passed by the City Council in 2021, which requires the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to set a standard minimum rate for delivery workers.

App-based delivery workers are classified as “independent contractors,” which means they’re not entitled to the standard minimum wage that applies to salaried employees’ pay. Instead, delivery workers who work for the big food delivery services, like Uber Eats and Relay, are entitled to just $2.13 an hour before tips — a so-called “tipped sub-minimum wage.”

Research has shown that getting rid of tipped sub-minimum wages benefits not just the workers getting the raise, but the economy as a whole. A 2021 analysis found that states without a tipped sub-minimum wage saw 29 percent growth in their leisure and hospitality sectors, compared to just six percent in states that used the federal tipped sub-minimum wage of $2.13.

...For many of the workers who face hostile roads and unpredictable weather conditions to get New Yorkers their ordered goods, this is a life-changing development.

“This is my full-time job. I get up every day and do this,” says delivery driver Justin Martinez outside the Chick-Fil-A in Washington Heights.

Martinez, 30, is originally from the Dominican Republic. His commitment to completing deliveries, he explains, is fueled by his love for his family.

“This is my way to contribute. I go out, 9, 10 hours a day, do deliveries, and then I can come home,” he says. Martinez first started driving for Uber in 2019 before transitioning to delivering food for Uber Eats and other apps in 2021. He’s excited for the pay wage increase: “Maybe now, I only [have to] go out for 6 hours.”

-via Reasons to Be Cheerful, June 30, 2023

#new york #new york city #nyc #uber #ubereats #delivery app #delivery driver #restaurants #minimum wage #labor #labor rights #united states #eric adams #gig workers #gig economy #income inequality #good news #hope

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socialjusticeinamerica · 1 month

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Uber and Lyft choose to put thousands out of work rather than pay a minimum wage. The gig economy is impoverishing American workers. Oligarchs and corporate assholes want you to be feudal serfs.

#Uber #lyft #corporate greed #minimum wage #oligarch assholes #corporate ssdholes #gig economy #unionize #organized labor labor now

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systemserendipity · 5 months

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When people say the gig economy is fucked, they may not be able to put it enough into persepctive for those outside of that sphere to understand.

Let me paint you a picture.

My partner and I just dashed for about 2 hours. Drove through snow and high winds. Dealt with grumpy retail employees. Navigated the hell that is city-downtown driving. ALL on Black Friday, the day that's supposed to be highest-paying.

Guess how much we made.

I'll wait.

○ ○ ○

$12.

That's it. $6/hour. McDONALD'S pays more than that. More than double, in-fact (at least in NYS).

Uber, doordash, instacart, all these businesses that tout themselves as helpful to the entrepreneurial spirit-- they're all lying to us.

They're using every old excuse in the book to not properly compensate their workers, then crack down on the organizations that could ACTUALLY help them, like unions.

Don't be fooled by propoganda.

Corporations are NOT our friends. Fight for your rights.

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ophilosoraptoro · 12 days

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The End of Freelance? How California's Rules Become America's Rules

youtube

#freelance #gig work #politics #economy #uber #lyft #truckers #california #unions #labor rights #independent contractor #lorena gonzales #biden #san diego #Sacramento #labor unions

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feckcops · 1 year

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Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups

“Updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action), and a description of what happened, such as a ‘strike’ or ‘the distribution of leaflets.’ Other documents reveal that Amazon intelligence analysts keep close tabs on how many warehouse workers attend union meetings; specific worker dissatisfactions with warehouse conditions, such as excessive workloads; and cases of warehouse-worker theft ...

“The new intelligence reports obtained by Motherboard reveal in detail how Amazon uses social media to track environmental activism and social movements in Europe—including Greenpeace and Fridays For Future, environmental activist Greta Thunberg's global climate strike movement—and perceives such groups as a threat to its operations. In 2019, Amazon monitored the Yellow Vests movement, also known as the gilet jaunes, a grassroots uprising for economic justice that spread across France—and solidarity movements in Vienna and protests against state repression in Iran ...

“‘It’s not enough for Amazon to abuse its dominant market power and face antitrust charges by the EU; now they are exporting 19th century American union-busting tactics to Europe,’ Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, a global federation of trade unions that represents more than 20 million workers, told Motherboard. ‘This is a company that is ignoring the law, spying on workers, and using every page of the U.S. union-busting playbook to silence workers' voices’ ...

“‘Amazon's systemic use of military surveillance methods against unionists and activists is deeply alarming,’ said Aubry, who is also a senior member of France's France Insoumise, France's main radical left party. ‘Amazon and Jeff Bezos act as if they were above the law because they have accumulated unprecedented levels of wealth and power. This has to stop.’”

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needlesscontrarian · 10 months

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My dad is the head of PR for an American theme park. I was at dinner with him recently and he told me how recently they had an "influencer day" where they show a bunch of TikTok people around the park.

"We give them a lot of free stuff, but we don't pay them," he said. "We're actually one of the only places I know that doesn't directly pay influencers to come promote us."

Now, on a basic level, this isn't that different from regular advertising. When you're making an ad, you pay actors to look like they're authentically using your product/service and look like they're having a good time. "Influencing" is basically a decentralized version of that disseminated over social media.

There are a lot of ways that this erodes the possibility for organic consumer advocacy over the internet, but I think the most insidious part of this is what it does for labor protections. Actors in ads can get benefits. Doing commercials is a way that a lot of new actors get credits for getting into SAG. It's how a lot of actors make money while looking for steady work.

Not only are influencers poisoning the internet's collective mind with "integrated content," but they're also destroying an avenue for a lot of artists to break into the industry and destroying the hard-earned protections that come with it.

#influencers are just the gig economy for advertising #except the time and associated cost of cultivating an audience makes it completely inaccessible for most people #it's legitimately one of the most soulless professions I can think of #flushing years of labor protections down the drain just to get the bag #and attaching a monetary value to the trust other people have for you

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cuddlycryptid · 5 months

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i love my job lol i just put my head down on my desk and took a 15 minute power nap and nobody gave a shit! unionizing is great but i love when coworkers Actively Don’t Care Abt Any of This

#too bad its only a student position #i could work here forever tbh #i do not dream of labor but i do dream of structured time to write #shoutout to noba for getting me this gig it slaps #wren rambles #wrens life

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charonte-simi · 6 months

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I love that I have an office (adjacent) job again, because my 3 years in the govt taught me how to master the skill of doing absolutely fucking Nothing for hours out of the day and no one noticing or giving a shit

#i still do whats required of me and always look busy whenever someone is near me #but ive figured out which areas of the warehouse i can loiter in and not get in trouble #so long as you keep a spread sheet open. a notebook with scribles on it. and a calculator on hand you can get away with doing fuck all #i love this for me #i feel unbelievably lucky to have gotten here.#i mean yeah i did have to work for it and took the risks needed to land this position #but even still this feels too good for me #$22 an hour is fucking wild i thought id be capped out at $18 for the rest of my life doing actual hard labor #but instead i managed to snag this gig and its so very comfortable #and im still doing some labor and forklift driving and still technically in a warehouse rather than an office #wins all around #simi speaks

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Podcasting "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk"

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk,” about the worst-of-all-worlds created by bossware, where an app is your boss, and you live at work because your home and/or car is a branch office of the factory:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

As with so much of my work these days, the column opens with a reference to the Luddites, and to Brian Merchant’s superb, forthcoming history of the Luddite uprisings, “Blood in the Machine”:

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

As Merchant explains, the Luddites were anything but technophobes: they were skilled high-tech workers whose seven-year apprenticeships were the equivalent to getting a Master’s in Engineering from MIT. Their objection to powered textile machines had nothing to do with fear of the machines: rather, it was motivated by a clear-eyed understanding of how factory owners wanted to use the machines.

The point of powered textile machines wasn’t to increase the productivity of skilled textile workers — rather, it was to smash the guilds that represented these skilled workers and ensured that they shared in the profits from their labor. The factory owners wanted machines so simple a child could use them — because they were picking over England’s orphanages and recruiting small children through trickery to a ten-year indenture in the factories.

The “dark, Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution were awash in the blood and tears of children. These child-slaves were beaten and starved, working long hours on little sleep for endless years, moving among machines that could snatch off a limb, a scalp, even your head, after a moment’s lapse in attention.

(Fun fact: in 1832, Robert Blincoe, one of children who survived the factories, published “A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy” a bestseller recounting the horrors he endured; that book inspired Charles Dickens to write Oliver Twist):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

It wasn’t just that weavers who belonged to guilds made more money — they also enjoyed more dignity in their workplaces, because those workplaces were their homes. Textiles were the original “cottage industries,” in that it was done in cottages, by families who set their own pace, enjoying amiable conversation or companionable silence.

These weavers could go to the bathroom when they wanted, eat when they wanted, take a break and walk around outside when the weather was fine.

This is in stark contrast to life in the dark, Satanic mills, where foremen watched over every movement, engaging in a kind of meanspirited choreography that treated the worker as an inferior adjunct to the machine, to be fit to its workings and worked to its tireless schedule.

The Luddites had some technical critiques of the machines — they argued, correctly, that those early machines turned out inferior products that fit poorly and degraded quickly. But even if the machines had produced textiles to match the hand-looms, the Luddites’ real anger wasn’t over what the machines did — it was over who the machines did it to and who they did it for.

I’ve written that “Science Fiction is a Luddite literature” — it’s a narrative form that can go beyond describing what a machine does, to demanding that we rethink who it does it for and who it does it to. Not all sf does this, but at its best, this is secret sauce that makes sf such a radical form, one that insists that while the machines’ functioning may be deterministic, their social arrangements are up to us:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

That’s what happens when you mix Luddism with SF — but what happens when you mix it with fantasy? I think you get steampunk.

Steampunk has many different valences, but central to the project is an imaginary world where people engaged in craft labor (lone mad scientists, say) are able to produce high-tech goods that are more associated with factories. I think it’s no coincidence that steampunk took root during the first surge of “peer-based commons production” — when craft workers were producing whole operating systems and encyclopedias from their “cottages”:

https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/make-free-love-the-machine-hate-the-factory/

These modern craft workers were living the steampunk fantasy, so beautifully summed up in the motto for Magpie Killjoy’s Steampunk Magazine: “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory.”

https://firestorm.coop/products/2624-steampunk-magazine.html

But then came the second decade of the 21st century, and now the third, and with it, the rise of something very much like the opposite of that steampunk fantasy: a new form of craft labor where the factory is inside the cottage — where an app is your boss, and “work from home” becomes “live at work.”

As with all forms of technological oppression, this movement followed the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve,” starting with people with little social clout and working its way up the privilege gradient to entangle a widening proportion of workers.

Among the first people to experience this was the predominantly Black, predominantly female employees of Arise, a work-from-home call center business that pretends that its employees are small businesses themselves, and so charges them to get trained for each new client, then fines them if they want to quit:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

In Amazon warehouses and delivery vans, we saw the rise of “chickenized reverse-centaurs” — these are workers who must pay for their own work equipment (as with poultry farmers captured by processing monopolists, hence “chickenized”). They are also paired with digital technology (something automation theorists call a “centaur”) but the technology bosses them around, rather than supporting them. The machine is the centaur’s head and the worker is its body (thus, “reverse-centaur”):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

The pandemic lockdowns saw an explosion in the use of bossware, technology that monitors your every keystroke, every click, every URL, every file, even the video and audio from the cameras and mics on your devices, whether or not you pay for those devices.

This is the second coming of Taylorism, the fine-grained, high-handed “scientific” micromanagement of factory workers, transposed to the home, and integrated with sensors that track you down to your eyeballs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Truly, this is the worst of all worlds. We increasingly work for large, distributed factories, and unlike the big companies of the post-New Deal era, we don’t have unions and progressive regulators who can force these big businesses to share the wealth in the form of the “large firm wage premium.”

Instead, we have craft labor at sweatshop wages, under factory conditions, in our own homes and cars. This needn’t be: digital technologies are powerful labor-organizing tools (potentially), but that’s not how we’ve decided to use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

As the radical message of sf tells us, that’s a choice, not an inevitability. We aren’t prisoners of technology. We can seize the means of computation. It starts by being less concerned with what the machine does, and homing in on who it does it for and who it does it to.

Here’s this week’s podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/19/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/

And here’s a direct link to download the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they’ll host your media for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_440/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_440_-_Gig_Work_Is_the_Opposite_of_Steampunk.mp3

Here’s the direct feed to subscribe to my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

And here’s the original “Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk” article on Medium:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

Today (Mar 20), I’m doing a remote talk for the Ostrom Workshop’s Beyond the Web Speaker Series.

On Weds (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the @IFTF’s “Changing the Register” series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A woodcut of a weaver's loft, where a woman works at a hand-loom. Out of the window opposite her looms the glowing, menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' On the wall behind her is the poster from Magpie Killjoy's 'Steampunk Magazine' that reads, 'Love the machine, hate the factory.']

#pluralistic #science fiction is a luddite literature #craft work #love the machine hate the factory #casualization #magpie killjoy #luddites #fantasy #science fiction #steampunk #gig work #podcast #deskilling #child labor #chickenized reverse centaurs

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