Here's a thought for a Monday morning, from
another list, shared with me and then to you.
This seems to reinforce that a computer and
cell phone are not status goods
but part of a master-slave
relationship.
We have the Consumption Economy, The New
Economy, The Restorative Economy, The Creative Economy, The Knowledge Economy.
What's
next?
The
Cyberserfs
Technological
innovation promised us more leisure time.
But, asks
Christine Evans-Pughe, are we now just in thrall to
machines?
19 November
2003
Around the
world, people are sitting with one hand poised over a keyboard and the other
going from keys to mouse. They're all staring at dull grey squares labelled
File, Edit, View, Tools, Format, Windows and Help - "the ghastly spoor of some
aesthetically-challenged Microsoft employee of the late 1980s," according to
the teleworking guru and labour historian Ursula Huws in her new book of
essays, The Making of a
Cybertariat.
"For the
first time in history," she says, "thanks to Bill Gates, we are all working
with a common language in the form of an identical labour process." This is
why, "having designed the creativity and skill out of their information
processing jobs, companies can partition what's left into piecework tasks and
shunt them around the globe".
Huws is
professor of international labour studies at London Metropolitan University
and an expert on the global division of labour in the information business. As
the director of the multigovernment-funded programme Emergence (Estimation and
Mapping of Employment Relocation in a Global Economy in the New Communications
Environment), she's also a leading commentator on the implications of the rush
to outsource every job under the sun.
Her essays
chart the transformation of technology and work since the late Seventies, with
the theme that
we're using technology to turn every part of our working and personal lives
into commodities. On the one
hand, she says, we're employing it to standardise paid work processes to
squeeze the maximum labour from each other at minimum cost. On the other,
we're plundering areas of life in which labour is carried out beyond the money
economy (for example, housework, entertainment, communication and sex) to come
up with more and more "labour-saving" products. The result is amazingly
complex global systems of machines and people that are slowly spiralling out
of our control.
"The first
shift is typically to a service industry," Huws says. "Then, as technology
develops, the service industry becomes automated and goods that are more
complex are produced, which spawn new services to deal with the complexity.
Then each of these services can be automated, allowing the creation of more
new products in a continual cycle of innovation.
"Communication
used to be people talking to each other," she says "Then it became writing,
and then various electrical and electronic ways of transmitting, like the
telegraph and telephone. Entertainment used to be somebody singing; the
service industry grew minstrels and then orchestras, then technologies for
recording music, which become the basis for mass commodities like the CD or
pop music videos."
Mobile
phones are a great example of the creeping "commoditisation" of our
personal lives, Huws says. "We now walk down the road with friends while
talking on our mobiles to other people. We're prioritising the distant person
over the near one, which is exactly what the phone companies want us to do
because it doesn't cost anything to talk to the person you're standing next
to."
Huws shows
me pictures taken as part of her Emergence research. One is of a home-based
outworker in Vietnam sitting in front of a gleaming computer in a dilapidated
shack. Others show Chinese women employed to enter data for credit-card
companies; they eat, sleep and work in the same building while being
continuously monitored by video from Australia. Huws explains how their work
is chopped up so that one set of women types postcodes, another surnames and
so on. In India computer operators - often postgraduates - now process medical
transcriptions for doctors in the United States for one-eighth of what US
computer operators would earn, but four times the salary of an Indian
schoolteacher. These Indian workers have their own servants and are part of
the élite. Supermarket security cameras in California are now monitored by
cheap labour sitting in Atlanta, Georgia.
Huws
mentions that someone from the World Bank recently suggested that employment
could be created in Africa by giving the Africans jobs remotely monitoring
supermarket cameras in the West. She feels the idea is brutally idiotic: "They
would have their noses constantly rubbed in the profusion of Western consumer
goods. And would they ask them to watch out for the dodgy-looking black
shoppers?"
Using
technology to standardise and strip creativity out of work
processes and to
monitor workers is certainly dehumanising. Taking
advantage of the poverty-stricken is exploitation. But Huws
also sees positive
democratic effects on the
usual master/ slave dynamics of the relationship between customer and service
provider.
She relates
with amusement how an Indian call-centre that provides help to computer users
deals with difficult callers. "If the customer makes a racist remark, they
say, 'Switch the machine off, put it in the sun for 24 hours so it reaches its
optimum temperature, and if it doesn't work, call us back.' This works on two
fronts because the workers lose bonuses if the call goes on for too long or if
the customer calls back within 24 hours. Their view is that the work is
beneath them: the customers are stupid, but they're doing it for
India."
The big
problem Huws sees is that, as producers
and consumers, we
all risk
losing the plot as we
become enmeshed in ever-growing chains of interconnected manufacturing and
service relationships filled with
people with incomplete knowledge of what
they're doing, and very different agendas as to why they're doing
it.
A mobile
phone, for instance, involves tens of thousands of people distributed around
the world in chip manufacture, design, assembly, marketing and sales. Then
there are those building the satellites and base stations, the credit-card
companies sorting out how you pay, and the people at call centres dealing with
complaints about why multimedia messaging doesn't work. "As each part of each
work process gets separated, it becomes harder to get a handle on the map of
the whole, and to see where the buck stops," Huws says. "Nobody can see who's
up at the top. There probably isn't anyone at the
top."
The irony is
that technology doesn't seem to be giving us more leisure because we spend
more time doing "consumption
work". We trail
around shops and websites deciding what phone or dishwasher we need. We wait
in real queues to buy it, then wait in virtual queues for advice from call
centres on how to use it. "The stuff we do for fun is things that our
grandparents did as chores or duties: gardening, making bread, singing in a
choir," Huws says.
But she
doesn't romanticise a golden past where most of us worked like slaves and a
small proportion of the population got waited on - she's a fan of technology.
"Technology holds out the promise of things being redistributed in some way,
but there are two edges to it," she says. Huws hopes her book will get people
thinking about how they can regain some control over their working and
consuming lives.
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