PROLOGUE
The emergence of a digital economy lays bares new contradictions between capital and labour on the strength of infrastructural power overwhelming labour struggle for mankind wellbeing on this planet.
The commodification of products and services – and the soul of human sociality – by capitalism is the worst form of exploitation of earth resources, and the expropriation of human dignity.
1. CAPITAL IN DIGITIZATION
The alliance of capital and digitization is reshaping the landscape of labor.
We are to sight the foundation of digital economy through its various IT/IS platforms. We want to see the infrastructure of a digital economy as empowered capitalism. We intend to illuminate the digital economy entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control as the core of capitalism. We are to visualise the infrastructural platform power as the brute force of digital capitalism. We are witnessing the hardened infrastructural power in owning and controlling labour: the place where you work, the job that you work, the way how you work, why you are working in that place, and to whom you are working for.
This changed environment means workplaces have changed by the introduction of digital technologies. Parts of a single labor process can be moved around the world through the supply chain (Foster and Suwandi) with dire implications not only for workers’ workplaces or corporates’ sites, but for the working class as a whole.
An ecosystem of digital labour economy has emerged over the past decade – transforming the very domain of capitalism and labour aspirations. A widespread view is that the dominance of venture-capital-backed whether in the form of ‘angel investment’ or hedge funding (example: Softbank), innovative technologies (examples like 5G and AI) and proprietary platform firms (Amazon and Grab) are directing and redirecting economic processes that urge every working class to rethink and recreate how this digital infrastructure should be treated as a public good, and not as a capital venture in exchange for surplus value in furtherance of exploitation by capitalism locally, and in a wider context, by monopoly-capital as part of neo-imperialism.
With financial markets rewarding platforms for successfully evading labour-law responsibilities, the stakes for reshaping the trajectories of platform capitalism are higher than ever. Without a matching social and political challenge, it will be impossible to avoid a future of work where a drop to the bottom is the only option: where the power of labour shall be suppressed widely or will be exploited deeply, and where the space and scope for labour-market structures shall diminish or become impossible to sustain or be forever foregone.
We aren’t retreating to an old business-as-usual world with defanged labour movements, but has to ensure the working class labour beginning to redefine, recreate and reimage those proprietary digital infrastructural platforms as a public good.
2. INTERESTS OF CAPITAL
Digital platforms have been effective in pressuring regulators around the world to develop legislations favourable and conducive to their business strategies but at the cost of workers’ rights, (see Proposition 22 California case favourable to Uber, Lyft et. al., see APPENDIX: A). We cannot push for a just platform with plea for fair work if public discourses around it are shaped by the interests of capital as a force majeure.
Secondly, this digital economy nowadays embracing telephony mobility, logistics, food and mail delivery in a Gig-economy is increasingly becoming so pervasive and dominating to the functioning of our national economies and our everyday lives that it is not just a corporate capital behemoth but a infrastructural power itself, by itself, and for itself.
Thirdly, this new and enhanced system of the platform business model dominates not only how production is organised and processed, but also how it is distributed and valued. In this model, digital platforms also begin to push other more traditional infrastructures and legacy enterprises to adopt their business model, as profit possibilities and margins as well as the efficiency of other systems are called into question or had collapsed.
Fourth, technologies-wise, infrastructure platforms come with their own hinterlands and their extensive backwaters, carrying the biases, fallacies and stereotypes of those who designed them. They are also situated in, and reflect the logics of, the organisations’ and institutions’ visions and mission objectives – the political and socio-economic structures – in which they are entrusted with and embedded within.
While the role of digital platforms’ algorithms in shaping and obscuring metrics and processes such as price-setting, remuneration and commission rates is widely acknowledged, the global flow of financialization capitalism, including venture capital, ‘angel’ investments – national pension funds, hedge funds and so on – supporting these platforms to develop these technologies is less so. In short, the infrastructural platform is a profit-taking demon siphoning surplus value from labour participation.
Lastly, this new business model restricts critical reflection and social action on the raising consciousness and concern of digital labour awareness. By refocusing instead on the circuitry of capital flows, we are witnessing the power imbalance between those who establish, finance and operate these infrastructursl powerhouse platforms and those who work for them or consume their services.
This increasingly financial dominance of digital platforms in shaping public opinion and their subsequent influence on regulation is quite acute and troubling, as exemplified by the California Prop 22 case in APPENDIX: A.
Now, with the insurgency of a Covid19 pandemic, capital is experiencing increasingly uncertain and volatile business environment, and companies have evolved so that they can purposefully develope capabilities to tackle ambiguity and unpredictability with capacility resilience to thrive first, prioritising labour secondary. Since the future of work and life will be more digital than previously imagined, the operations and processes depend more and more on data, analytics, digital tools, and automation so that digital technologies – and the supporting infrastructural power of respective digital platforms – will constitute an increasingly critical element of business survival and sustainability.
3. THE LABOUR LEVERAGE
Labour has a role in defining the architecture of technologies and refining the infrastructure design and deployment so that digital workers can attune, and be in alignment, to the new workspace environment by adopting and adaptating positive features, facilities and functionalies to their wholesome benefits, see Ursula Huw, Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age.
A) That asymmetries between labour and capital do not always coincide nor pair favourably in the same way. Infrastuctural platforms tend to adopt strategies with blatant misclassification of workers as ‘independent contractors” as they did in California.
In Germany, for example, Uber had to adapt its strategy and instead subcontracted with private transport intermediaries, which in turn employed drivers.
These subcontracted employment arrangements can be extremely precarious for workers, with several drivers earning below the minimum wage, and others expressing uncertainty about whether they would be insured by the platform if they got into an accident; see car-hailing experience in France, court room in London, Gojek in Indonesia, Grab in Malaysia, Singapore Ryde.
B) That there are various, and a variety of viewpoints, regarding social, political and regulatory leverage to pivot towards a fairer platform work in the future.
For instance, the platform co-operative movement shows promise, though worker-owned platforms are unlikely to outcompete transnationals, in terms of marketspace share and financial resource, given how current funding structures supporting digital platforms tend to favour market disruption, unfettered expansion, coopetitative advantage (cooperating and competitive at the same time as demonstrated by the Uber-Grab scenario in Malaysia at one time) rather than fending labour rights.
Sanjukta Paul, professor of Law at Wayne State University, argues that there is an antitrust case to be made for platform-worker rights. The aim would be to reallocate co-ordination rights ‘toward the smaller players and away from the dominant ones’, so that ‘a municipality could run the app and publicly coordinate the market, taking into account public interest’.
C) That there is an urgent need in redirecting economic processes to fundamentally rethink and recreate digital infrastructure as a public good, as stated previously.
Without significant state investment and engagement on national and regional levels, however, such ideas remain well-meaning abstractions and fruitless endeavours. As digital platforms become more firmly infrastructural, the inherent contradictions surface where they can be seen to serve as a public function but somehow and somewhat the public accountability challenge to their prime business model which is still engaged in undemocratic governance with capital ownership structures is glaringly amissed.
4. INFRASTRUCTURAL POWER AND LABOUR EMPOWERED
There is no such thing as “taxpayer money,” but only public money. Modern money – not Petronas oil and gas gushing out in the South China Sea – is the creative value of the people, and we should use it for public goodness: to own it and control it.
The recent success of digital platforms advocacy with Proposition 22 in California is indicative of their pivotal role in lobbying and campaigning to exert influence and make space for themselves in regulation, while establishing themselves in the eyes of funders and customers.
Underemployed labour is disadvantaged.
We are the rakyat2 and we as citizens, each deserve a clear and equal say in how our economy and society work.
It’s time to claim our democratic rights.
It’s now to redefine our work, our workplace and our workspace within a digital economy.
EPILOGUE
The immense speed of computer processing power and the wide deployment of technologies and associated software supporting that infrastructural power have consequential ramifications in countries of the Global South because as part of monopoly-capital dominant, these new enterprise models are extremely detrimental to precarious digital labour.
It’s timely and appropriately now to redefine our work, our workplace and our workspace within a digital economy towards a better post-2020 political economy.
APPENDIX: A
Exempting platform companies from AB5, a labour law passed by the state assembly last year which would have extended labour protections to platform workers. What distinguished this proposition from others was just how much platforms spent to make their case and the pervasive marketing tactics they used to ensure a favourable outcome.
A coalition of gig-economy platforms, including Uber and Lyft, spent more than $200 million promoting their campaign – the largest sum spent on a ballot in United States history – while labour advocates raised barely a tenth (although $20 million was in itself not an insubstantial amount). The day Prop. 22 passed, Uber and Lyft shares rose by 18 and 22 per cent respectively, adding $13 billion to their combined market value.
Prop. 22 represents the future of work in an technologically-driven economy.
[Needless to say, executives at Lyft and DoorDash praised the outcome as in the victory of Proposition 22, and it helps to consolidate gig-capital companies to remake labour laws thoroughly in other developed countries. The consequential ramifications in countries of the Global South as part of monopoly-capital domination are even sicker ].
seeUber and Lyft Drivers in California Will Remain Contractors @ https://nyti.ms/3mPDwAz
APPENDIX: B
In his 1985 address as president of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), Melvin Kranzberg outlined “Kranzberg’s Laws,” a series of six truisms about the role of technology in society. Kranzberg’s First Law states: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: Kranzberg’s Laws,” Technology and Culture 27.3 (1986): 547.
The first clause of this proclamation challenges the tendency towards technological determinism, and Kranzberg rejected his colleagues’ reductionist assumption that technology determines cultural values and societal outcomes.
The second clause acknowledges that technology can propagate disparate outcomes. When combined, the two clauses suggest that machines and programs are simply as impartial as the humans who create them.
Now, 30 years after Kranzberg’s address, technology commentators and social theorists are rediscovering Kranzberg’s First Law, particularly as it relates to the problem of algorithmic bias (a phenomenon that occurs when an algorithm reflects the biases of its creator
For example, criminal justice scholars have begun to evaluate risk assessment scores, which algorithmically forecast defendants’ probability of repeat offense with increasing scrutiny. While states now allow judges to factor risk assessment scores into their sentencing decisions, there is a debate about whether or not the algorithms that generate these scores decrease or increase racial disparities in sentencing, compared to judges’ subjective decision-making. Arecent ProPublica report suggested that black defendants were 77 percent more likely to be assigned higher risk scores than white defendants by the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) algorithm, one of the most widely used risk assessment algorithms on the market, even after controlling for prior crimes, future recidivism, age, and gender.
Jeff Larson et al., “How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm,” ProPublica.org, May 23, 2006, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm.
A follow-up Brookings commentary, however, rejects ProPublica’s conclusions on methodological grounds, indicating the necessity for further discussion, see Jennifer L. Doleac and Megan Stevenson, “Are Criminal Risk Assessment Scores Racist?,” Brookings.edu, August 22, 2016, @ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/08/22/are-criminal-risk-assessment-scores-racist/.
Firestorms 