work

This page looks at work, employment and industrial relations in digital environments.

It covers -

• introduction
• telework
• technologies and tools
• visions and realities
• unions and activism
• discipline
• recruitment
• agents, employees, entrepreneurs

     introduction

Barry Jones' 1999 address on The Information Revolution in Australia: Its Impact On Politics, the Economy & Society and his Sleepers, Wake! Technology & the Future of Work (Melbourne: Oxford Uni Press 1998) and Jennifer Alexander's The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2008) offer local perspectives for considering work, labour and the big end of town in the age of connectivity. On the Front Line: Organization of Work in the Information Economy (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1999) by Stephen Frenkel, Marek Korczynski & May Tam, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences (New York: Vintage 2007) by Louis Uchitelle, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2007) by John Bogle and The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (London: Merlin Press 2003) by Ursula Huws are less upbeat.

The UK Department of Trade & Industry report on Converging Technologies: The Consequences For the New Knowledge-Driven Economy, Amy Sue Bix's Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2000) and Robert Thomas's What Machines Can't Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1994) are other starting points.

Further to the left is Herbert Schiller's Information & The Crisis Economy (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1986) and Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis In America (London: Routledge 1996), Jeff Faux' The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future — and What It Will Take to Win It Back (New York: Wiley 2006), Shoshana Zuboff's In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work & Power (New York: Basic Books 1988).

Chris Carlsson's deliciously silly Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today (Oakland: AK Press 2008) announces that 'nowtopians' - yet another vanguard of the revolution - are working outside of the capitalist economy to create

A social revolt against being reduced to 'mere workers', to being trapped in the objectified and commodified status of labor power.

New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Post-Industrial America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1998) by Stephen Herzenberg & Howard Wial highlights the changing nature of the workforce, noting that while there were fewer than 5,000 computer programmers in the US in 1960, there were over 1.3 million by 1998, with managerial and professional jobs increasing from 22% in 1979 to 29% of total employment in 1995. It is complemented by the sobering Granny @ Work: Aging and New Technology on the Job in America (London: Routledge 2003) from Karen Riggs.

     telework

Teleworking, despite pontification by cybertheorists, has proved to be neither as personally liberating or as attractive to managers as originally conceived.

'Techno-commuting' has not led to the death of the city, as Joel Kotkin's The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape (New York: Random 2000) and Digital Geography: The Remaking of City & Countryside in the New Economy (PDF) demonstrate. It has not necessarily led to a revival of the Bush, despite hype from NOIE and other new economy boosters. One reason is that the technology enabling transfer of data processing from Sydney to a regional area in New South Wales also enables transfer to Bangalore or Fujian where workers may be more skilled, cheaper and docile. Some of the more ambitious claims made for telecentres are thus misplaced.

In 2007 the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development sniffed that teleworking "is far from as widespread as popularly perceived", noting that 62% of UK teleworkers were self-employed (often in manual trades rather than as 'symbolic analysts') and only 4% of employees were teleworkers.

The greatest concentration of teleworkers is found in construction (23 per cent) followed by agriculture (16 per cent) and business, finance and insurance (15 per cent). A typical teleworker is more likely to be a mature male, white-van-driving, self-employed, jobbing plumber or bricklayer than ... a techno-savvy post-modern-style worker who looks to have just stepped off the set of The Matrix.

In January 2001 the US Department of Labor released a hefty report on Telework & the New Workplace for the 21st Century, with studies by social scientists, economists and technologists. There is another perspective in The Virtual Workplace (Hershey: Idea 1998) edited by Magid Igbaria and Martin Carnoy's Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family & Community in the Information Age (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2000).

Discrimination and the 'family friendly workplace' is discussed in 'Family-friendly Work Practices and the Law' by Belinda Smith & Joellen Riley in 26 Sydney Law Review (2004) 395-426; 'Part-time work and indirect discrimination' by Rosemary Hunter in 21 Alternative Law Journal (1996) 220-222; 'Working part time: Reflections on "practicing" the work-family juggling act' by Beth Gaze in 1(2) Queensland University of Technology Law Journal (2001).

     technologies and tools

The literature on digital technology's transformation of the workplace and work processes is immense.

For collaborative activity there is a useful introduction in Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999) edited by Susanne Bodker & Kjeld Schmidt, Studies in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Amsterdam: North-Holland 1991) by Steven Benford and Computer-Supported Co-Operative Work (Chichester: Wiley 1999) edited by Michel Beaudouin-Lafont.

     visions and realities

Nate Bolt contributed a modish essay on The Binary Proletariat to First Monday. Noah Kennedy's The Industrialisation of Intelligence (London: Unwin 1989), James Cortada's Rise of the Knowledge Worker (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann 1998), White-Collar Sweatshop (New York: Norton 2001) by Jill Fraser and The Electronic Sweatshop (New York: Simon & Schuster 1988) by Barbara Garson are arguably better value.

Net Slaves - True Tales of Working the Web by Bill Lessard & Steve Baldwin (New York: McGraw-Hill 2000) is breathless - and relentlessly anecdotal - but looks at the systems administrators, technicians and others in the underside of the Information Economy. Its site is archived here. Lessard & Baldwin provided a sequel in NetSlaves 2.0: Tales of 'Surviving' the Great Tech Gold Rush (New York: Allworth 2003).

Andrew Ross's more mordant Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (New York: NY Uni Press 1998) features 'Jobs in Cyberspace', a critique that can be read in conjunction with Chris Benner's Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley (Oxford: Blackwell 2002). Audrey Collin & Richard Young edited the provocative collection The Future of Career (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000) exploring occupational training, unemployment, pre-employment training and the nature of work.

There is a pungent critique of the techno-libertarians in Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York: PublicAffairs 1999) and Langdon Winner's 'Silicon Valley Mystery House' in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City & the End of Public Space (New York: Noonday 1992) edited by Michael Sorkin.

For 'McWork' - much of the job creation hailed by economists in Washington, Canberra and London in fact relates to poorly-rewarded and insecure service work - see Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Holt 2001) and Elisabeth Wynhausen's Dirt Cheap - Life at the wrong end of the job market (South Yarra: Macmillan 2005).

Points of entry to the literature on age discrimination include 'Too Many Candles on the Birthday Cake: Age Discrimination, Work and the Law' by Patricia Easteal, Channy Cheung & Susan Priest in 7(1) Queensland University of Technology Law Journal (2007) 93-107; 'Age Discrimination in Law and Practice' by Sol Encel in 3 Elder Law Review (2004) 1-14 and Discrimination Law and Practice (Leichhardt: Federation Press 2004) by Chris Ronalds and Rachel Pepper.

     unions and activism

Until recently there was surprisingly little writing about unions and labour activism in the digital environment.

Online studies include Roger Darlington's 2001 paper The Creation of the E-Union: The Use of ICT by British Trade Unions, Eric Lee's 2000 paper How the Internet is Changing Unions, Stephen Ward & Wainer Lusoli's 2003 Dinosaurs in Cyberspace? British Trade Unions & the Internet (PDF) and John Hogan & Margaret Grieco's paper Trade unions on line: technology, transparency and bargaining power. Hogan's 2003 bibliography and Anne-Marie Greene's e-Collectivism site are of interest.

James Glee's The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism (Boulder: Westview 1997) and Michael Perelman's Class Warfare in the Information Age (New York: St Martins 1998) are provocative or rather silly studies, depending on your bias. Lorraine Giordano's Beyond Taylorism: Computerization & the New Industrial Relations (New York: St Martins 1992) and Ching Kwan Lee's Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2007) are suggestive. We found Eric Lee's The Labour Movement & the Internet: The New Internationalism (London: Pluto Press 1997) unconvincing.

Peter Waterman's paper on Labour@Cyberspace is another academic exercise from Cybersociology magazine. There is a perspective in Jonathan Cohn's TNR article on Amazon.com & the New Economy. Steve Walker's 2001 To Picket Just Click It! Social netwar and industrial conflict in a global economy paper is an homage to netwar theorists such as Arquilla & Ronfeldt.

The Reputation Management page in the Marketing guide on this site looks at 'attack' sites and corporate 'sucks' domains.

     discipline

Writing about workplace censorship features here, along with discussion of social network-related dismissals (eg being 'busted' for content on Facebook and MySpace) and blog-related dismissals.

     recruitment

What of job search in the information economy, where -

• members of the binary proletariat are urged to "pound your keyboard, not the pavement"
• many jobs are short-term, even casual
• there is substantial churn, particularly among 'McJobs'?

The online recruitment industry and internet job search services are explored in a supplementary profile elsewhere on this site. Insights about IT bodyshopping are provided in Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2004) by Stephen Barley & Gideon Kunda and Headhunters: Matchmaking in the Labor Market (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2003) by William Finlay & James Coverdill.

     agents, employees, entrepreneurs

In the interim a discussion of the 'busking' model is provided elsewhere on this site. Crowdsourcing is discussed here.



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