Technology has become so embedded in the social, political and economic fabric of our world today. One of the ways we see this exemplified is through digital platforms – like Amazon, Google, Meta’s Facebook or Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo. These platforms, which essentially mediate products and services between different groups via the internet, appear to be all around us and at times almost inescapable.
Let’s take the case of Amazon, which is constantly making headlines: whether it is for its (annual) earnings crucial for the rise and fall of its shares, for its five-digit job cuts amid moments of crisis, or for the sometimes isolated, sometimes recurrent strikes. These rally around national and transnational campaigns against its working conditions. But Amazon is much bigger than its well-known e-commerce platform, and has come to operate a whole ecosystem, including its cloud service platform Amazon Web Services and its digital labour platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The latter can be thought of as a form of digital outsourcing of microtasks like answering surveys or data labelling to identify objects. Anyone across the globe can work on these gig tasks remotely and is then paid precariously outside traditional employment relations.
The labour undertaken by MTurk workers is one of many contemporary examples of ghost work. Just this January, Time published a piece on Kenyan ghost workers who had earned less than US$2 to ‘make ChatGPT less toxic’. Ghost work refers to less visible but essential labour behind technological advances, in the case of MTurk of data for machine-learning algorithms for the development of artificial intelligence. While these platforms generate a whole range of repercussions, the realities of these varying workforces are all around us and embedded in our daily lives. The internet and platforms rely on so many racialised and gendered divisions of labour to keep running. Platforms do not come into being or develop in a vacuum, but are grounded in political-economic, social and technological conditions.
We need to humanise the debate around those who power the platform economy: its workers. It is crucial to understand what happens behind our interfaces when we place an order on Amazon or engage with technology through algorithms that would not have been possible without ghost workers like those on MTurk. Diving into the various (digital) shopfloor levels and talking to those workers helps us understand their political-economic localities and realities. These realities can look very different depending on how the platform organises them. For one, platforms instrumentalise the technological conditions (like the dissemination of the internet, its infrastructure, network effects) to mediate work via varying natures of platform. This refers to whether work is location-based, like Amazon warehouses, or web-based and remotely, like on MTurk. Platforms do not only instrumentalise the technological conditions but also the political-economic ones that have facilitated their development – from the growth of finance, speculative bubbles and tax cuts under neoliberalism to the deregulation and flexibilisation of the labour market. We see this embodied in the nature of work – where some workers receive a traditional time wage like at Google and others are paid by gig as on Uber. This begs the question: how do these differences in platform organisation – here in the nature of the platform and the nature of the work – relate to the ways by which workers are alienated and how they express their agency?
These realities of those working on these different kinds of platforms essentially translate into various divisions of labour, forms of management to measure their performances (especially algorithmic management) and methods of surveillance. Thus, when we order something from Amazon on a day like Black Friday – it is bound to have an effect on their working day, the pressures they face, possible injuries and heightened surveillance. Shedding light on these working conditions is, however, only one part of how to humanise the debate around the workers, as it is also important to underline the ways in which these workers resist – by speaking out against their conditions, participating in interviews, forming collectives or mobilising. Amazon workers encounter one another in the warehouses and can more directly cultivate solidarity, organise themselves and strike through unions. This reality is fundamentally different to that of MTurk workers, who labour from their digital cubicles across the globe and are not considered employees to begin with. They collaborate alternatively through the infrastructure of the internet to give each other tips, for instance, on how best to navigate the platform.
By delving deeper into these platforms and then taking a step back to contrast and contextualise them in the larger platform economy, we can identify certain trends that they produce and reproduce. These include new ones like algorithmic management – which implies an algorithmic wage discrimination – for which platforms have become renowned, and trends they reproduce like normalising precarity on the labour market through the gig economy. Given how these different conditions intersect, the debate on platforms and technological developments cuts across disciplines and their boundaries. This provides us with multiple ways by which to address the growing implications of the platform economy for our world today and the world of work: How do we then regulate these platforms, which have in fact grown in the absence of regulation and dodged it when it has been present? And what does regulation look like for a platform like MTurk where workers are distributed across the globe in their own contexts?
In order to answer these questions, it is important to go back to the very workers at the heart of these platforms and centre the debate around their working realities – both the conditions that structure these and the ways in which workers organise and mobilise themselves. In doing so we can then find various ways by which to regulate platforms, support these labour struggles and create a more fair working world and socio- and political-economic system.
Sarrah Kassem is Lecturer and Research Associate in Political Economy at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen.
Watch Sarrah discuss ‘Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy’ here.
Learn more about ‘Labour realities at Amazon and COVID-19’ here.
Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy by Sarrah Kassem is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £85.00.
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