Mago's case highlights the unregulated nature of the emerging global cognitive labor market and evokes the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program of the economic wonder years of postwar Germany in terms ofthe long-term historical interest of Western industries in labor arbitrage. The German Gastarbeiter program has been a prominent model for establishingan immigration without rights legislative system and it has recently inspired U.S. lawmakers during the fiery political debate on the immigrant worker program (H-1B visa) for the U.S. information technology industry (Jacoby 2009). The German Gastarbeiter program initially allowed only male workers fromYugoslavia, Greece, Spain, and Turkey ona temporary immigration status. These men were required to work up to 80 hours a week, supplying the labor needs of the booming postwar German industry at a much lower minimum wage than domestic workers and were exploited in a state of exception outside of the normal legislations, rights, and union protections.
The current neoliberal system of exception advances this early form of labor arbitrage by the help of digitalnetworks. In addition, the peculiar temporality of the digital network with its “timeless time"creates another effect—the time arbitrage—which furtheraccentuates the consequences of labor arbitrage. According toShehzad Nadeem:
Time arbitrage can be defined as the exploitation oftimediscrepancies between geographical labor markets to make a profit. This operates on two scales. At the geographical scale, many companies exploit time zone differences to achieve a 24-hour business cycle. At the labor process scale, time arbitrage can mean the extension of work hours or the acceleration of the labor process. (Nadeem 2009: 21)
One may consider the acceleration of digital labor processes as an extension of the general acceleration of the pace of life on digital networks. According to Manuel Castells, digital networks replace the clock time of the industrial age with what he calls“timeless time," which is
defined by the use of newinformation/communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time, to compress years in seconds, seconds in split seconds. Furthermore, the most fundamental aim is to eliminate sequencing of time, including past, present and future in the same hypertext. (Castells 2004: 12)
In addition, Castells characterizes network time as “the time of the dominant functions and powerful social actors in the network society" (Castells 2009: xli).
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Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor