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- Convenors:
-
Manuela Bojadzijev
(Humboldt University Berlin)
Tsvetelina Hristova (Southampton University)
Moritz Altenried (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)
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- Discussant:
-
Brett Neilson
(Western Sydney University)
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Digital labour platforms function as a central infrastructure that mediates, organises and controls flexible work. The panel aims to discuss anthropological perspectives on global platform labour, its genealogies as well as its embeddedness into diverse histories, local contexts and power relations.
Long Abstract:
Digital platforms are not only transactional spaces which create different modes of connection, but also central infrastructures for the global circulation of goods, data and the reconfiguration of labour. Labour platforms of the so-called gig economy such as Deliveroo or Upwork function not only as mediators between capital and labour, they also reorganize, redistribute and regulate flexible labour - and thereby remind us of older but still existing infrastructures for the mediation of labour such as the putting out system for home-based work or the traditional street corner for day labourers.
Thinking through the platform as an infrastructure that mediates, organises and controls labour therefore allows to move beyond the notion of platforms as completely new and disruptive actors. Anthropological perspectives on platforms could illuminate the complex genealogy of flexible and contingent labour and stress the embeddedness of platform labour into diverse histories, local contexts and power relations.
The panel aims at analysing how platforms (re-)organise flexible labour relations in different socio-economic, political and cultures contexts. While many studies focus on platform labour in the Global North, a recent study indicates that around 30 million platform workers are located in the Global South (Fair Work 2019). We therefore especially invite papers focusing on platform labour in diverse geographical locations, going beyond frequently studied gig economy platforms and reflecting on topics such as:
• Platforms as infrastructures
• Platform labour and social reproduction
• Digital labour and mobility/migration
• Platform labour in relation to other forms of contingent work
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Colonial enterprises, oil industries and digital platforms are key moment of logistic developments. They share structural characteristics. Through different examples we trace a genealogy of logistics from the colonial past to the present days.
Paper long abstract:
Logistics is no longer just a system of connection between people, practices, places, and objects, but these may be said to be ontologically constituted by the system of logistics itself. Thus, logistic is a veritable paradigm of the global circulation and due to its paradigmatic form, it can be understood as a power. This accounts to consider logistic as historical process whose development has enlightened some capitalist rationalities which in the past were less clear. The aim is to decenter the traditional historical account on capitalism and root it within logistic itself. Logistic as a power also aims to consider its impacts upon sovereignty and governance regimes.
Through concrete examples grounded within colonial enterprises, energy industry and digital platforms - which in our opinion represent the three highest moment that define the concretization process of logistic as a power - we cast a skeptical glance on the suppose geographical and chronological distinction of capitalism. In fact, tracing the genealogies of these three logistical concretizations shows an historical continuity of capitalist rationality. Explores these genealogies aims also to rethinks the bases of those institutionalist claim of a dualism between the territorial political authority (national-state) and economical actor. Extractivism, plantation economy, trade network, enclave economy, shipment, and data collection - just to quote few rationalities that characterize logistical development - are comprise by a repertoire of rival and overlapping political and constitutional forms in both alliance and tension with the national-state and its pretense of centralized and coherent power.
Paper short abstract:
This paper builds on the ethnographic cases of petty textile producers and their remaking of subcontracting chains to explore the promises and pitfalls of digitalization. I detail the inherent ambiguity of digitalization by showing how it leads to new forms of discipline and dispossession.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the promises, perils and pitfalls of digitalization in fast fashion industry subcontracting chains, building on the ethnographic cases of petty entrepreneurs in Southern Europe. The Vale do Ave in Northern Portugal, formerly among Europe's top textile outputting regions, has been shaped by persistent crisis and deindustrialization since the 1990s, a trend that recent austerity interventions compound. What textile industry remains in the region today takes the form of micro workshops located in the homes of subcontracted, allegedly "entrepreneurial" workers, who are controlled by a single monopoly producer. In this contribution, I explore the ascend of digital work platforms and their remaking the landscape of subcontracting in the region. I investigate how petty entrepreneurs' access to out-working orders alters from often decade-old networks of patronage, kin and affiliation towards digital competition. While this shift seems to offer opportunities for growth to some, it also radically precarizes many others. This is the case not least because digital competition and work monitoring on platforms involves surveillance of output demands and thus places novel disciplinary measures on producers. In detailing the (often adverse) effects of this process in an already low-wage, highly flexible production regime, this contribution highlights the ambiguity inherent in the emancipation that digitalization appears to offer. I thereby aim to critically intervene in emergent scholarly debates about digitalization by showcasing how it, too, undermines the possibilities for collective social bargaining and thus leads, in the long run, to dispossession.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how migrants/minorities navigate urban gig economies, focusing on cleaning platforms in NYC and Berlin. It stresses the value of cross-national comparative ethnography as a methodological approach able to grasp the local iterations of a global phenomenon like "platform labor".
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how, under nationally and locally distinct conditions of neoliberal urbanism, people navigate platform-mediated gig economies. It focuses specifically on the experiences of migrants and minorities working for/on domestic cleaning platforms in New York City and Berlin. In NYC, we meet Tish and Kenny: two African American cleaners who were driven to the Handy platform - and to cleaning work more specifically - through their encounters with labor activation schemes. Each has an ambivalent relationship to the platform, which provided them with a somewhat steady income stream when they sorely needed one, while also making it difficult to transition out of gig work and into a more secure and sustainable occupation. In Berlin, we hear from Kostas and Alexis, two Greek young men who left their austerity-ravaged country to look for better opportunities in the nation widely held responsible for enforcing the measures that bled Greece dry. Yet when such opportunities proved harder to come by than they had initially imagined, they turned to Helpling as an easily accessible "employer of last resort" (sans employment). Like Tish and Kenny, Kostas and Alex have a deeply ambivalent relationship to their platform, which is nevertheless articulated in distinctive ways. The paper concludes by stressing the importance of cross-national comparative ethnography as a methodological approach able to grasp the local iterations of a global phenomenon like "platform labor" - highlighting also the need to investigate this phenomenon through the conceptual lenses of social reproduction and migration studies.
Paper short abstract:
Rideshare driving is a common form of employment in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. This paper explores the attitudes and beliefs of the drivers and users of a ride sharing app in Dar es Salaam drawing on history and political economy.
Paper long abstract:
Driving for a rideshare app is now a common form of employment (or underemployment) in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. Clients include Tanzanians, tourists and expatriate workers. For those who use the service, it has generated a range of opinions including happiness with cheaper prices to frustration of non-Swahili speaking clients with non-English speaking drivers for not arriving on time. For the drivers themselves, the consistent complaint is that they do not earn enough as drivers. Ride share apps in Tanzania, then, generates a range of beliefs and attitudes by its users and drivers. Using an anthropological political economy approach, this paper will examine these beliefs and attitudes. The paper has three parts. Part one will give an overview of the employment situation for ride share drivers in Dar es Salaam which is characterised by a chronic lack of employment, underemployment and a massive informal economy. The second part explores the beliefs and attitudes of customers who celebrate and/or complain about the ride share service in Dar es Salaam. The third part examines the frustrations of rideshare drivers in the context of attempts at collective action by some drivers.