Calling them “emotional labor,” as Julie Beck points out, has the curiously sexist implication that all work performed by women is somehow about feelings.

The original meaning was the labor involved in regulating, evoking and suppressing certain feelings while you’re at work — as Hochschild puts it, it’s “trying to feel the right feeling for the job.” It described work for which you are paid (although not always adequately compensated) and didn’t only apply to labor performed by women.

We often think about AI “replacing us” with a vision of robots literally doing our jobs, but it’s not going to shake out in quite that way. Look at radiology, for example: with the advances in computer vision, people sometimes talk about AI replacing radiologists. We probably won’t ever get to the point where there’s zero human radiologists. But a very possible future is one where, out of 100 radiologists now, AI lets the top 5 or 10 of them do the job of all the rest. If such a scenario plays out, where does that leave the other 90 or so doctors?

protect the chi!-· dren

For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it – not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these operations.

In this way they have come to dominate what I call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the industrial age.

esearchershave discovered that it takes about 45 minutes to craft a single bead; to make 10,000 suchbeads totals 7,500 hours of work, or three years of labor by skilled craftspeople

fifteen-hour work week

Kojève thought that the other way was through labor. The slave achieves his sense of self by work that transforms the natural world into a human world. But the slave is driven to labor in the first place because of the master’s refusal to recognize him. This “master-slave dialectic” is the motor of human history, and human history comes to an end when there are no more masters or slaves, and all are recognized equally.

The task for social theory, therefore, is to render the invisible visible, show relations and intercon­nections, begin tbe process of questioning the unquestioned. Before we can identify some of these economic relations of temporal inequity, however, we first need to understand in what way the sin of usury was a barrier to the develop­ment of economic life as we know it today in industrial societies.

Marx's princi­pal point regarding the commodification of time was that an empty, abstract, quantifiable time that was applicable any­where, any time was a precondition for its use as an abstract exchange value on the one hand and for the commodification of labour and nature on the other. Only on the basis of this neutral measure could time take such a pivotal position in all economic exchange.

Unschooled reductions in government and reflexive conservatism create more problems and inefficiencies than they purport to resolve.

Recent research on the actual work involved in putting technologies into usehighlights the mundane forms of inventive yet taken for granted labor, hidden in thebackground, that are necessary to the success of complex sociotechnical arrangements.

People have come to believe that they, their jobs, their communities, and the social contract that binds them to work and place and each other are under threat. And they’re not wrong.

the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems

Today’s American youth are entering a labor market strikingly different from earlier generations. Over the last decade, global economic integration and the collapse of the Soviet Union have led to what economist Richard Freeman (2008) has called a “dou-bling” of the global labor market, from a pool of 1.46 to 2.93 billion. This has created a chronic shortage of jobs relative to those who seek them. The economic downturn that resulted from the 2007 financial panic has worsened this shortfall (see Figures 1 and 2).2

he labour power of a class of landless labourers -the proletariat

All non-communist modes have in common the production of goods by means of the domination and exploitation of one class by anot

divisionoflabour

Division of Labor

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons

geographical mobility in America has been on the decline for three decades

For a boss to fire a worker is at most a minor inconvenience; for a worker to lose a job is a disaster. The Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, a measure of the comparative stress level of different life events, puts being fired at 47 units, worse than the death of a close friend and nearly as bad as a jail term. Tellingly, “firing one of your employees” failed to make the scale.

Once the employee is hired, the boss may ask on a moment’s notice that she work a half hour longer or else she’s fired, and she may not dare to even complain. On the other hand, if she were to so much as ask to be allowed to start work thirty minutes later to get more sleep or else she’ll quit, she might well be laughed out of the company. A boss may, and very often does, yell at an employee who has made a minor mistake, telling her how stupid and worthless she is, but rarely could an employee get away with even politely mentioning the mistake of a boss, even if it is many times as unforgivable.

a number of studies have found that people on welfare, black Americans included, feel that people take advantage of the system and receive benefits when they should not

Inmates were required to work for their wages in food;

Oklahoma Correctional Industries; workers scan the original photos and prepare metadata

Within the workings of the informal economy bullying and violence is rife. The harshness of these conditions, and the sword of damocles of deportation, is precisely why this labour is so cheap, and so many businesses opt for it. Bullying makes workers subservient, and scares them away from industrial organising (although there are now amazing unions now fighting for workers in these sectors - the IWGB, IWW, and UVW.) It is not just those businesses that do well out of this exploitation. It makes things cheaper for everyone, and oils the cogs of the whole economy. Many people are happy to reap this work’s benefits without ever taking responsibility for the suffering it causes. 

Simply saying competition is divisive won’t raise standards for collaboration, and won’t create the grounds for hope. To do this, we urgently need to start collecting new stories and evidence of a different culture forged in kindness, that we know we can build together. Then maybe we need to start making our own videos.

If Barack Obama was capable of muscling through the sort of laws that the labor movement—and Barack Obama—would like to see enacted, he would not have to give labor leaders a summit. He could give them political victories. But that does not seem to be the reality of the moment. So we all got invited to the White House instead, to talk about “outreach strategies” and to “#StartTheConvo” on labor issues. I did not get the impression that the conversation needed more starting. We all seemed pretty well decided on what we wanted. Left unspoken was the fact that the working class will not be getting what it wants, any time soon.

what labor, whose labor is saved, is replaced in this, an age of economic precarity, adjunct-ification, anti-unionism, automation?

The naive economist who truly believes in the equal bargaining position of labor and capital would find all of these things very puzzling.

One of the things that stuck with me the most in this video is the guy mentions something he heard from an Amish farmer (at 6:35), that labor was part of his profit — that he was able to provide labor for other people was part of his profit.Which is soooooo counter to basically every farm I’ve worked at, where I’ve often felt like I was doing my employers some kind of “disservice” by working for them, because they thought I was “costing them too much” or somehow cutting into their already low profits.

But these features also make it ripe for conflict between sex worker activists and anti-trafficking activists who oppose sex work. One of the most frequent attacks on Twitter is that these activists are pimps pretending to be sex workers. This argument defeminizes sex workers into the masculine identity of a pimp and paints them as co-conspirators in trafficking. It’s a form of gendered shaming against female-identified sex workers that pits them over and against victimized women and girls