Defining digital work

Having defined the general conditions of platformization in the previous chapter, in order to understand the emergence and the various forms of these new categories of workers, it is now necessary to distinguish the specific challenges and opportunities of various types of digital labour. If the pivotal role of digital platforms as the intermediating infrastructure, able to allow a wide array of users to interact with each other with the aim of extracting data and producing various forms of value, is not questioned as an essential feature of digital labour (Srnicek, 2017; Casilli, 2020), some divergence still persists today in relation to a number of other defining features.

The main disagreement concerns the presence of an explicit economic relationship, that is, the attribution of a monetary remuneration: some scholars only identify digital labour with platform-mediated activities involving some form of remuneration (Huws et al, 2016; Wood et al, 2019; Aloisi and De Stefano, 2020), while others do not see remuneration as a fundamental feature (Fuchs, 2014; Casilli, 2020). According to the first group of scholars, digital labour is the set of paid activities, organized and controlled by online platforms (Huws et al, 2016). According to the second group, it comprises the broader set of activities whose processes of data extraction (‘datafication’) serve to develop automatic learning and train artificial intelligence (Casilli, 2020). In the latter definition, therefore, digital labour encompasses a vast array of platform-mediated activities, located on a continuum ranging from unpaid and underpaid activities to flexibly remunerated activities. For these scholars, the generated content and the generated content classification activities that users perform on social networks are, for instance, a key component of digital labour, which they define as ‘social labour on the net’ (Casilli, 2020; see also Fuchs and Sevignani, 2013 for a similar interpretation), the datafication of which generates economic value. As Casilli (2020: 80) puts it: ‘users’ creations, behaviours, and data are routed through digital technologies in value-producing activities. These activities are forms of labour inscribed in social relations, as their [economic] value derives from users’ interactions and cannot be conceived other than as a collective act’.

‘It’s interesting, the second-generation Arabic-speaking group in the area; that’s a very interesting group to work with and not necessarily easy’, Janet offered in response to my question about whether there are some groups of service users that are more responsible than others. At first she referred vaguely to ‘certain cultural groups’ but, like most of the staff I had spoken to, was hesitant to elaborate.

Janet was one of the frontline staff I interviewed from the local community service sector. I asked Janet to explain her response and – as if given license – she continued at length:

She suggested that the low ‘participation rate’ of second-generation Arabic speakers in welfare services was down to this self-assurance, a mistaken perception that ‘they already know more’. Perhaps they don’t need the services because they already have extensive social networks, she speculated, but then ‘the results of the children’s achievement’ suggest otherwise.

Later, however, reflecting on the fairness of the welfare system, Janet suggested that second-generation Arabic speakers arrogantly expect rather than refuse support. She described being approached by a new migrant mother who was ineligible for a support programme. The woman had a young child and was unable to work due to an illness, but her husband worked. The woman complained that it was unfair that mothers who drive big, expensive, petrol-guzzling cars can access the programme when her family relies on one income for five people but was not eligible:

We are very pleased to introduce the next volume in this book series, Understanding Work and Employment Relations. Following on from Cecile Guillaume’s monograph Organizing Women: Gender Inequalities in French and British Trade Unions, Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age by Donatella della Porta, Riccardo Emilio Chesta, and Lorenzo Cini is the second text to be published in the series.

This series has been designed as a space for both monographs and edited volumes to highlight the latest research and commentary in the academic field of employment relations. The series is associated with the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA), which marked 70 years of existence in 2020. The series seeks to draw on the expertise of the membership of BUIRA and contributions to its annual conference, as well as employment relations academics from around the world. Employment relations is a mature field of study and continues to be of relevance to academic and practitioner audiences alike. BUIRA recognizes the broad nature of the field of employment relations, and acknowledges that the field of study is constantly developing and evolving. BUIRA regards employment relations to be the study of the relation, control, and governance of work and the employment relationship. It is the study of rules (both formal and informal) regarding job regulation and the ‘reward-effort bargain’. These issues remain relevant today, in an era where the standard employment relationship has become increasingly fragmented due to employers’ pursuit of labour flexibility, and we see the continued expansion of the gig or platform economy. Employment relations (and adjacent research areas including human resource management and the sociology of work) is taught widely in universities around the world, most commonly in business and management schools and departments. The field of study is multidisciplinary, encompassing law, politics, history, geography, sociology, and economics. Human Resource Management (HRM) has a tendency to focus uncritically on management objectives, without exploring issues of work and employment in their wider socio-economic context, and has its disciplinary roots in psychology, whereas employment relations retains a strong critical social science tradition. As scholars in this area we feel that there is a need for regular, up-to-date, research-focused books that reflect current work in the field and go further than standard introductory texts.

The phrase ‘a hand up, not a handout’ has long been used to sum up a model of welfare that aims to curb social spending and cultivate hard-working citizens who can take care of themselves. In 2019, former Australian coalition prime minister, Scott Morrison, wheeled out the phrase to celebrate the success of more than two decades of welfare-to-work policy in Australia (Curtis, 2019). He pointed to evidence not of poor Australians living better lives, but of the number of people who had dropped off the welfare rolls and the number of penalties that had been issued by welfare agencies. The country’s lowest payments, Newstart Allowance (NSA) and Youth Allowance (YA), had not increased in real terms in over 20 years. But the requirements and sanctions attached to payments had become more farreaching and stringent over this time. The Morrison government seemed more committed to doling out moral and monetary punishment than lifting people out of poverty.

Two decades earlier, British prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, used the phrase to sum up a different way of doing welfare that promoted individual responsibility and opportunity above rights and protection (White, 1999). This was sold as a ‘third way’ between the post-war protective welfare state and a hands-off neoliberal approach (Giddens, 1998). The aim of social welfare thus shifts from expensive redistribution to productive investment in the capacities of citizens, transforming welfare states from ‘safety nets into springboards’ (Best, 2013: 110). Poverty is reimagined as vulnerability and multifaceted exclusion from the mainstream; complex problems are said to require dynamic and pro-active interventions that provide short-term relief and change individual behaviour to make citizens more resilient in the long term. In this context, community is positioned as better suited to respond to the diverse needs and preferences of individuals without the State stifling their independence.

The idea that public benefits and services should come with strings attached to mould the behaviour of recipients has taken hold across the global North and South, although the tone and shape of policies varies across time and place (Dwyer, 2019). In high-income, predominantly English-speaking countries with advanced welfare states, these ideas are tied to the argument that ‘passive’ welfare breeds inactivity and irresponsibility and entrenches welfare dependency.

Hasan, a Pakistani father and husband and self-described family man, steadfastly refused to reach out for assistance with day-to-day living despite the pressure his family was under while awaiting the verdict of their asylum application. He expressed his unwillingness to claim support as a refusal despite his lack of entitlement to social security, which he dismissively lumped together with charity: ‘I would rather die than I will go to a charity thing or help or grant or anything’, Hasan told me.

Kat, an Aboriginal woman on the Disability Support Pension (DSP), described her growing confidence dealing with welfare agencies as a strength, because ‘Aboriginal people can feel more intimidated’ in those situations. She was determined to impart to her teenage children a willingness to ask for help and not suffer alone: ‘I think it’s okay to ask for help and then that’s how you learn to help yourself. I’ve always told the boys, “Don’t ever be afraid to ask for anything”.’

Jasmin, a single parent who was raised in Hong Kong, avoided telling people she received the Parenting Payment (PP), but accepted it with a stoical complacency – she’d take it if it were available, but if not, bad luck: ‘If they gave me [welfare] it’s a bonus, if they don’t give me, that’s life. That’s what support should be like.’

Hasan, Kat and Jasmin (whose names have been fictionalised to protect their anonymity) were all conscious of stereotypes about asylum-seekers, Aboriginal people and single mothers as opportunistic parasites on the welfare system. And they were all struggling, albeit to different degrees, to make ends meet. Navigating the welfare system involved walking a tightrope between principles and pragmatics.

This book is about how people living at the sharp end of Australia’s welfare system, like Hasan, Kat and Jasmin, negotiate the cultural assumptions and practical hurdles of contemporary social support. This is a context in which social security payments are deliberately meagre and come with strings attached and hoops to jump through; where the reigning cultural tropes of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘personal responsibility’ compel those in need to perform a balance of deference and dependence, resilience and resolve.

Digitalization of labour and global value chains

It is necessary to investigate digitalization as a global phenomenon that responds to the new logics of capital accumulation and expansion in terms of both space and time. While Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have enabled the rise of a network-based company structure, they have also triggered new forms of division of labour and a new organization of production. Technology and labour are distributed in global value chains that are based on different phases and different contents of production and take place in specific places. At the same time, far from being a linear process, technological innovation and global production chains are constantly being reshaped by economic and political processes, which take place at different specific nodes.

Structural changes triggered by the new phase of digitalization compels us to take a critical look at the relationship between work and technological innovation. The new forms of work, new production processes, and new services introduced by digitalization and platformization need to be understood as specific social phenomena that form part of a more general process of global economic competition involving both traditional industries and new companies. Temporal acceleration and constant connectivity are two of the main principles of the new world of work shaped by digitalization, which through outsourcing and offshoring is extending its networks of production into new areas of the globe. Although most of the implications of this process are global, a focus on specific sectors is essential in order to avoid the shortcuts of deterministic and unilinear hypotheses. Indeed, contradictory dynamics are at work at different levels of this process. This is especially the case in a highly fragmented, specialized, and constantly changing international division of labour in which State, transnational institutions, traditions of industrial relations, and worker power operate.

In the current networked configuration of international production and trade, the expansion of digital technologies in terms of both space and time needs to be investigated through the analysis of its ‘global value chains’ (Gereffi et al, 2005). This involves looking at the complex phases of production that are distributed across several areas of the world. One of the main emerging labour divisions implies the formation of a centre (or ‘head’) of the chain, which governs and directs knowledge work, designs productive and managerial innovation, and the articulation of ‘arms’ that organize, execute, and perform manual work and material production.

Sabha got far more worked up by the topic of incivility than welfare entitlements, acknowledging the Parenting Payment (PP) (partnered) and Family Tax Benefit (FTB) she received with complacent pragmatism. The mother of three had lived in Australia for the last 15 years after migrating to marry her Pakistani-Australian husband. Family benefits supplemented earnings from her husband’s work as a security guard. Like most of the people I interviewed, she named following the rules as the main obligation of citizenship: ‘I think follow the rules and everything comes in rules, the traffic lights and when you go to the bank you need to make a queue, this kind of small things make a big difference. If you did these things you feel good and your country will be much beautiful.’

Sabha compared Australia with Pakistan, where she had grown up:

For Sabha, following traffic rules and etiquette expressed mutual regard and the commitment to be civilised. But the orderliness of life in Australia was not the country’s main drawcard for Sabha. She missed her family and wanted to return to Pakistan, but said she never would. Her husband had diabetes and healthcare and medicine was free here, in Australia, and expensive in Pakistan. Her children’s schooling and future was here, and she wanted to stay with them. The care about others expressed through public order and the care for others provided through the welfare state for Sabha symbolised Australia’s status as a civilised country.

Listening to Sabha talk about the importance of giving way at the intersection brought to mind Ghassan Hage’s (2003) fable in the final chapter of his book, Against Paranoid Nationalism.

Social movement and industrial relations studies: concluding reflections

Labour mobilizations have been springing up and spreading all over the world in recent years, marking a new era of worker resistance and labour unrest that have specific characteristics depending on their location and function in the world economy. This has even been the case in the so-called Global North, where labour conflicts had been considered to be pacified (Arrighi, 1996). The new geographical expansion of world economy and the rise of the new phenomena of capital accumulation in semi-peripheral and peripheral areas of the world triggered new forms of conflict and labour unrest (Silver, 2003).

In the recent processes of digitalization, some of these mobilizations have exhibited a new profile with regard to two crucial aspects: the sectors where they have taken place and the characteristics of the collective actors:

• • They have arisen in innovative technological sectors of so-called ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2017), meaning in new sectors created (or revitalized) by the introduction of platforms. These are a techno-productive infrastructure that intermediate between producers and consumers, whose value-creation is based on the extraction and analysis of data.

• • These mobilizations have been characterized by the adoption of innovative forms of action and organizing, involving atypical workers who developed collective solidarity through their online and offline mobilizations, which mostly occur outside of the traditional channels of trade union organizations.

The worker mobilizations addressed in this volume, which took place in the specific sectors of work on-demand via apps, developing then some comparison with crowdwork, fulfil such criteria. Our study contributes to shed light on the peculiar forms of organizing and action as well as the identity formation processes of these workers. In particular, we have considered the mobilizations of AMT workers in the global context, and those of Amazon drivers and food-delivery couriers in the Italian context. Combining insights from social movement studies and industrial relations we have addressed three main areas of reflections: the structural transformations that trigger labour protests; their organizational forms, and the production of solidarity during collective action.

First of all, we looked at the changing forms of labour introduced by digitalization.

Couriers

IC1 Interview with food-delivery courier – Turin, 16 June 2018

IC2 Interview with food-delivery courier – Milan, 5 July 2018

IC3 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 17 September 2018

IC4 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 18 September 2018

IC5 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 18 September 2018

IC6 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 18 September 2018

IC7 Interview with food-delivery courier – Milan, 6 July 2018

IC8 Interview with food-delivery courier – Turin, 16 June 2018

IC9 Interview with food-delivery courier – Milan, 6 July 2018

FN1 Field notes from participant observation at the national couriers’ assembly – Bologna, 15 April 2018

Drivers

ID1 Interview with Regional Secretary – FILT-CGIL Lombardia, Milan, 13 March 2019

ID2 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18 March 2019

ID3 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18, March 2019

ID4 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18 March 2019

ID5 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18 March 2019

FN1 Field notes from participant observation at the Worker Assembly Buccinasco, Milan, 10 April 2019

FN2 Field notes from participant observation at the Worker Assembly Toffetti – Milan, 9 April 2019

FN3 Field notes from participant observation at the Worker Assembly Via Lombroso – Milan, 15 April 2019

Key Australian benefits and pensions

Reem was a second-generation Lebanese-Australian single parent living solely on Parenting Payment (PP) (single). ‘I hate it, to tell you the truth’, she told me. ‘I hate asking for money, I hate asking for help. I would love to be able to do it on my own and to earn my own money. I just don’t feel comfortable with it. Yes, I do receive money from Centrelink, but I don’t feel comfortable.’

Like Reem, the people I spoke to often qualified their answer by expressing their discomfort when I asked how they felt about receiving welfare payments. Rhetoric about welfare recipients as ‘dole bludgers’ and ‘tax burdens’ insists there is little comfort to be taken in social security. Being comfortable with receiving welfare payments would betray an unforgivable sense of entitlement or lack of aspiration. Reem offered her feelings of unease as testament that she did not take income support for granted and was not resting on her laurels.

Like many studies of class inequality before it, shame ran through a number of my interviews. It was sometimes named outright, but more often expressed as failure, inadequacy, defensiveness, exposure or a sense of being misunderstood. The single mothers I spoke to were among the most keenly aware of being judged. Jasmin acknowledged that PP (single) helped supplement her part-time work and provide for her young children, but she avoided judgement by not telling people about it. She knew first hand how judgement worked: ‘Before I had kids when I had a full-time job that’s how I looked at single mothers too. I thought single mothers were just sitting in a coffee shop drinking and popping out kids. That’s what I thought so I know they’re judging me.’

Jasmin implied that part-time work shielded her from the judgement – ‘That’s why I work’ – but she still ‘felt useless’ going from full-time employment to working part time and having children: ‘It’s different. From full time to part time, from making all this money, now I’m making $700 a fortnight and getting welfare.’ Devaluing the work she was doing didn’t seem to eat away at Jasmin, but it niggled at her sense of satisfaction and achievement.

I was in the thick of my fieldwork when Struggle Street aired in 2015. The television documentary about poverty in the western Sydney suburb of Mount Druitt was controversial from the outset. Before its release, residents who participated in the show accused it of ridiculing them in a promotional video that showed them passing wind, swearing and shouting. A convoy of garbage trucks converged on SBS studios – a public broadcaster – to protest the ‘garbage programme’ and to tell the public ‘we love Mount Druitt’. The Mayor of Blacktown City Council, which encompasses the suburb, accused the producers of encouraging participants to perform certain activities to manufacture the drama. After its release, public commentators debated whether the show was a classic example of ‘poverty porn’ or an unflinching portrait of ‘life on the fringes’.

Described by the producers as a ‘fly on the wall documentary’, Struggle Street relied on the candour, generosity and performance of the residents who told their stories and agreed to be followed by the camera. The details of their hardship – the everyday disruptions and obstacles – rang painfully true to my own experience of growing up poor, and living with friends and family who remained so. I was struck by how readily they lay bare the details of their lives before the camera, how the details were offered as justification of why they lived like they did, and why their lives hadn’t turned out differently.

Sixteen-year-old Bailee, for example, provides a matter-of-fact account of family violence, homelessness, depression and attempted suicide. She leads the film crew through her vandalised public housing flat, so trashed that the lease had been terminated, leaving her homeless again. Later, the camera stays with her as she explains to a local youth worker that she was raped after being kicked out of home at 13, and that she started using ‘ice’ (a form of methamphetamine). The male narrator (David Field), with his broad Australian accent, insists on a cliched commentary that imposes on the mundane directness of her account – ‘and that’s how it is when you’re on the fringe’.