From the outset, however, let us bear in mind that new media are not determining agents. Like any other technology, they are facilitators, not causes, of changing social forces. So, too, as Marx and many others have noted, technologies are not simply weapons of class war, designed to control and deskill workers, they also harbor the potential to eliminate wage labor, socíalize production, and free up our time. Whether they are deployed for the latter purpose depends not so much on their technical development as on what Marx called the “relations of production"—that is, the state of our socioeconomic relationship to capital, property, andgovernance. Reverse engineering beginswith technology,but unless it is also taken up as a social challenge, the chances are that the outcome will only benefit tech-savvy elites.
Formerly Known as Employment
In the heyday of the labor movement, it was commonly observed that the bosses needed workers but that workers didn't need bosses. Yet in the third and fourth quarters of 2010, corporate America posted record profits at a time when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the real unemployment rate at 17%. Does this yawning disjunct between profits and joblessness meanthat the bosses have learned how to get by without workers?Not exactly, no, but the statistics, which can be dissected a hundred ways, might suggest that a sea change is occurring in the world ofwork.
Two of the reasons for the high earnings seem to be beyond dispute. Corporations are moving more and more of their operations offshore, especially jobs in high-skilled sectors, where the largest savings in labor costs can be gotten. So they still need workers, but not expensive ones in the North. A secondexplanation rests on what business economists call increased productivity. Roughly translated, this means that employees have been pressed, by the stiff threat of redundancies either to work harder and longer for the same paycheck or to take a cut. In any downturn, employers will push their advantage in this way, but in a soul-sucking recession like this one, there is no quarter; the assault comes from all sides, whether in the form of pay freezes, concessions, furloughs, layoffs, or further casualization. A third reason—and this is the unfamiliar quantum—is the growing reliance on new kinds of free labor to boost the balance sheet of companies that are canny enough to harvest it. Hard evidence for this footprint is notso easy to muster, but the strong anecdotal record suggests it is large enough to be statistically significant.
Free, or token-wage, labor is increasingly available though a variety of channels: crowdsourcing; data mining or other sophisticated digital techniques for extracting rents from users/participants; expanded prison labor programs; the explosion of unpaid, near-obligatory internships in every white-collar sector; and the whole gamut of contestant volunteering that has transformed so much of our commerce in culture into an amateur talent show, with jackpot stakes for a few winners and hard-luck swag for everyone else. The web-enabled developments have attracted the most media attention, not least because the tidalsurge of free online content directly threatens the livelihoods of professional writers and artists. After all, the widespread shuttering of newspapers, magazines, and overseas news bureaus has seen a generation of union jobs scattered to the winds. Professional pay scales are reduced to dust as the online content aggregators sweep all before them, and resistance was few and far between until the Huffington affair came along. In most corners of the information landscape, working for nothing has become normative, and largely because it is not experienced as exploitation.
16
The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets