The stark reality is, in the past two weeks, I’ve earned approximately \$0.75 an hour (yes, that’s 75 cents/hr), however, that will be reduced by 15.3% when I file my Federal taxes next year (Self Employment Tax), as for my state, I haven’t confronted that aspect as of yet. […] I know my family is fortunate to have health insurance, a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and the choice to live where we want but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t also be upset over poor wages, after all, this isn’t the 19th century with sweatshops, robber barons, and no unions, although, it seems like it more and more with the richest 1% of the world soon to own 50% of the world’s wealth. One of my greatest fears is not being able to help my children go to college, especially for my oldest child who falls into the Gifted range. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, don’t you agree?2
How does a dialectical critical theory of communication help us to understand such phenomena? Such a theory sees the economy and culture as inherently connected and does not separate physical and mental labour. The workers in Chinese factories such as Foxconn, Pegatron or Quantat that assemble digital technologies are manufacturing workers. They conduct physical labour. Freelance workers on platforms such as Mechanical Turk, Upwork, TaskRabbit, Freelancer, PeoplePerHour, etc. tend primarily to be information workers who produce some form of information and make use of online freelance platforms (created by software engineers). Both type of labour have in common that they take place in the digital industry that is dominated by large transnational corporations. Corporations such as Amazon.com and Apple do not just exploit one type of digital labour, but diferent ones: Amazon.com doesn’t just put a rent on freelance services via Mechanical Turk, it also sells physical goods such as the Kindle and paperbacks and intangible goods such as e-books. Apple’s primary income source is the sale of digital technologies such as Apple computers and the iPhone. But Apple also sells content via its iTunes store. Given the global and convergent character of transnational information corporations, it is not feasible to separate the physical and the mental labour conducting for these companies. Digital workers form a collective workforce. The phenomenon of cultural and digital labour shows that culture and the economy are not separate.
The working conditions are as poor as described in the two examples because global information corporations are profitable businesses: Apple’s profits amounted in 2015 to US\$53.4 billion3. Amazon’s profits were in the same year US\$596 million.4 There is a class antagonism between information labour and information capital. These conditions can only be changed if the information workers of the world unite at the transnational level in order to challenge the power of information capital. Apple was in 2015 the world’s twelfth largest company, Amazon the 458th largest.5 The dialectic takes on a very political form in information capitalism so that class relations bring about highly exploited forms of labour. At the same time, many digital media companies have come under criticism for avoiding paying taxes, which not just increases their profits, but also deprives states of tax income and supports austerity measures that destroy the welfare state and threaten social security.
Conclusion
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