Work without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism (2021) by Phil Jones

​Great study exploring micro-work and a new class of micro-workers, both of which have emerged from the needs of AI, mediated by crowdworking platforms.
 
These new workers are the digital equivalents of the petty proletariat, doing all forms of precarious piecemeal work to sustain bare life. They bear the burden of stagnant economic growth, deindustrialization, and the neo-liberalization of the economy from the 1970s and the subsequent growth of subemployment and informal employment. While informal employment was the norm for the global South, it is now becoming the norm for the Global North as well, and with microwork sites, Jones writes that “platform capitalism brings both the logic and realities of informality to the very heart of accumulation as a new norm” (p. 29).
 
Micro-workers are a necessity for the functioning of AI, but are obscured and ignored beneath the glitzy, hype-based, human-less promise of AI. AI and machine learning requires a large number of data labellers to make the data legible for AI algorithms and microwork platforms step in to redistribute the work to a growing army of precarious micro-workers. A vicious cycle governs this relationship—AI automates portions of jobs, leading to a growing number of micro-workers, who are involved in the further development of AI algorithms. In the process, good jobs turn into unregulated, informal, and badly paid work that is not bound by legal frameworks.
 
The general consensus from neoliberal organizations like the World Bank frames micro-work as a developmental opportunity for the developing world—Jones’ account demonstrates that this is anything but the case. Wages are often unpaid or are gamified into tokens and rewards, long fallow periods of time are spent hunting for jobs rather than completing them, and after all of this, power asymmetries allow employers to withhold wages for workers. In some cases, unbanked workers are paid in gift cards, and “the platform comes to resemble a kind of digital company town” (p. 53).
 
In this new labour arrangement, work undergoes a transformation: just as the artisanal craftsperson in the past turns into a commodified modern worker with limited contributions to the entire production process in the industrialized economy, with micro-work, modern professions “dissipate into a cloud of tasks” (p. 59). As this shift occurs, there is hyper-alienation of workers, “divesting workers of the capacity to know what they are doing and to what end” (p. 65). A troubling conclusion, given the use of microwork platforms by organizations like the Pentagon—some micro-workers in war-torn areas may be involved in the digging of their own figurative graves.
 
Jones ends the book thinking about the form that labour struggle could adapt to in this new world, where there is “a capitalism without unions, worker culture and institutions” (p. 72) and fluid and geographically dispersed working arrangements (p. 84). To this end, he examines a wide variety of global wageless movements, blockades, and strikes that diverge in form, action, and demands from the unions of the past.
 

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