Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy (original) (raw)
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In this essay, we propose the notion of ‘Femwork,’ a feminist framework of reassessing and reimagining labour in the digital economy. By integrating this framework into the building of databases and digital systems, we can make inclusivity a default and not an afterthought in our mandates on the future of work.
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Digital labour refers to a range of tasks performed by humans on, in relation to or in the aftermath of software and hardware platforms. On-demand logistics services like Uber and Deliveroo, micro-work venues such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, data transactions generated by social media channels and online retail portals devoted to one-click consumption all comprise digital labour. So do the maledominated workplaces of high-tech firms with long hours and oblique Human Resources policies in an era of #MeToo revelations. Digital labour is intrinsically bound to physical space and to hardware, even when it is classified as 'immaterial' in nature (Fortunati, 2018). Very few workplaces now exist without dependency on the mobile devices, computer sensors and data servers upon which software operates. Feminist scholars have successfully highlighted the role women play in the front line of technology assembly (Pun, 2005; Nakamura, 2014) as well as computer science and programming (Hicks, 2018). Underpaid female and migrant labour, some of it located in electronics assembly plants in East Asia and Eastern Europe, is the labour that powers the internet and its necessary hardware (Sacchetto and Andrijasevic, 2015). Inhumane working conditions and the pressure of untenable production speeds in manufacturing became visible in 2010 when fourteen workers at Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple located in mainland China, committed suicide. Since then, more workers at Foxconn have 'jumped' to their deaths and thousands of others have protested their plight via work stoppages, wildcat strikes and organised mobilisations (Qiu, 2016). Next to this vast army of underpaid offshore workers, 'free labour' is the defining feature of the digital economy (Terranova, 2000). In the early days, volunteer moderators in the USA engaged by America Online spent thousands of hours making the internet 'safe' by investigating complaints and grievances and keeping harassment and abuse in check (Postigo, 2009). Today such work continues, largely uncompensated, with women of colour, queer and trans people joining other minority activists to moderate online interactions and call out a constant stream of sexist and misogynist content (Nakamura, 2015; Roberts, 2019). Even workplaces that functionally rely on moderation work do so with the help of 878929F ER0010.
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Digital environments are usually not designed for use by those in very different cultural contexts and continue to cater to the ‘typical users’ - usually middle class, male and in the Global North. In addition, the understanding of privacy, surveillance, protection, and visibility are dominated by epistemologies from the West, which view subjects from the Global South as requiring training to use technologies that may be intuitive to populations in developed countries. Drawing on an understanding of the collectivisation of marginalized women workers in the Global South, particularly the Indian subcontinent, we suggest that digital communication technologies can help such workers strengthen their position in a global supply chain to demand freedom from exploitative neoliberal practices. But this is only possible if we centre the social lives of women workers when designing applications, and address the gaps in research regarding the needs, aspirations, and negotiations they face when encountering technological interfaces. And conversely, the design of such interfaces must call on a more diverse, situated imagination of the user, whose interaction with technology is moderated by patriarchal cultures, restrictive gender norms, and very specific political and economic realities.
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Despite widespread interest in the changing technologies, economies and politics of creative labour, much of the recent cultural production scholarship overlooks the social positioning of gender. This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 18 participants in highly feminized sites of digital cultural production (e.g. fashion, beauty and retail) to examine how they articulate and derive value from their passionate activities. I argue that the discourses of authenticity, community building and brand devotion that they draw on are symptomatic of a highly gendered, forward-looking and entrepreneurial enactment of creativity that I term ‘aspirational labour’. Aspirational labourers pursue productive activities that hold the promise of social and economic capital; yet the reward system for these aspirants is highly uneven. Indeed, while a select few may realize their professional goals – namely to get paid doing what they love – this worker ideology obscures problematic constructions of gender and class subjectivities.
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This article explores the gendered dynamics of labouring on digital labour platforms and gives voice to women gig workers. Millions of women worldwide find work through digital labour platforms, yet remain largely invisible within the expansive digital labour research agenda. The analysis is built from original interviews with 49 women in the UK using a range of popular remote crowdwork platforms (including PeoplePerHour, Upwork, TaskRabbit, Freelancer) to access desk-based, white-collar gig work from home. The article makes three original contributions. First, it widens the analytical focus of the digital labour research agenda to recognise the role of workers’ gender identities and uneven household gender divisions of care in shaping the operation and outcomes of digital labour platforms, in ways that remain ‘hidden in the cloud’. Second, in contrast to widespread celebratory claims that platforms disrupt stubborn gender labour market inequalities, the analysis identifies signific...
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For a feminist approach to design, we first provide an overview of the gendered nature of global value chains and the precarities that result, and discuss the possibilities of collectivization opened up by networked digital tools, leading to feminist design technologies, particularly in the context of emerging economies. We then offer a roadmap for a new approach to the design of communicative interfaces that draws on an understanding of the lived experiences of women workers at the margins. This roadmap envisages a three-fold pathway to change, driven by (1) insights from feminist perspectives, (2) a focus on engagement of the most marginalized, and (3) principles of ethical design.
challenging the invisibility of sex work in digital labour politics
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This article adds to the debate on digital labour by including sexual labour, a feminised form of work that is traditionally excluded from official labour statistics and mainstream labour politics because of the embedded sociolegal, cultural and political context that defines female sexual labour as illegitimate work. This exclusion has been extended to digital labour politics. This article draws on a four-year multi-method qualitative study in the UK, which in part focused on sex work mediated and managed by digital platforms. Drawing on and adding to the literature on women's digital entrepreneurialism, I argue that digital sex workers embody an 'entrepreneurial subjectivity' and narrate ideals of flexibility and choice. However, on closer inspection, digital platforms shape and manage the labour so that agency over labour practices and processes become coerced choices. keywords technology; digital labour; sex work; gig economy; digital sexual labour; platforms; platform-managed labour; gig work 879749F ER0010.1177/0141778919879749Feminist ReviewRand
The Sage Handbook of Human-Machine Communication, 2023
Contemporary discourse on technology design privileges new media artefacts as those designed for purposes suited in developed nations; as private devices used for various leisure activities. On the other hand, communication technologies in developing nations acquire a position of being tools for development, while leisurely use is considered to be merely anecdotal (Arora & Rangaswamy, 2013). Patterns of use which are taken for granted in industrialised nations where publics have adopted legacy communication technologies may not reflect in the cultural use by publics in developing nations. Existing research, although sparse, suggests that in these contexts, children may share their parents’ devices, and wives may share devices belonging to their husbands (Weilenmann & Larsson, 2002; James, 2011). Therefore, it can be said that while smartphones may be personal, they are not always private. In this chapter, we examine digital platforms as intermediaries between women and their work in an emerging gig economy in India via a feminist framework. These digital platforms can be leveraged as spaces to collectivise for rights in a precarious labour market, as sources of valid information, and as a tool to connect with various stakeholders. However, platforms designed in a Western context for commercial purposes do not adequately represent the cultural use by women labourers in India. We argue that these differences are not only driven by economic restraints but contextual cultural cues, patterns of ownership, and geographies of the home (McDonagh, 2018). With this context, we provide recommendations to decolonise design to make platforms ethically responsible for use by women’s labour collectives in neocolonial societies like India.
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The Future of Digital Work: The Challenge of Inequality
IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2020
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