Technological transformations Flashcards
On the nature of globalisation of call centres.
Nasscom-McKinsey (2005): 4% GDP growth from IT industry, 1998-2007
* Fears for future of employment
* Offshoring believed to devastate service sector
* Standardised, simple, scripted, short work
* Transferral is not a direct transposition since the neo-colonial context modifies the content of familiar technological architectures e.g. ‘colonisation with time’
Taylor & Bain (2005)
New rich middle class in Chennai
* Absence of gender bias in IT centres?
* Or difficult to juggle career ambition with family responsibilities?
Fuller & Narasimhan (2007)
Degrees without freedom, in rural North India.
Education widely believed to transform career prospects but ended up drawing men into systems of inequality
Jeffrey et al (2008)
The cultural transformation of identities. Argues strongly in favour of colonial argument, language imperialism, fictional personal profiles.
Indian urban labour transformed into a global proletariat
McMillin (2006)
Organisational control in Indian call centres going to the heart of identity through the promotion of ‘professionalism’ in the entirety of the employment process which becomes internalised.
d’Cruz & Noronha (2006)
Labour geographies of India’s new service economy.
Theorising back on mainstream theories of ‘dead-end’ call centre work.
* Indian context must be recognised - jobless growth
* Agents strategically improve their working conditions by moving call centres
* Complex rationalities: women may actually prefer night shifts
* An over-focus on attrition (the turnover rate is high) has contributed to an overly negative perception of the call centre industry without looking at why people leave
Work is always socially embedded and understood differently according to place-specific particularities. This is why ‘offshoring’ is not just as simple as the movement of one job to another place - work is **reconstructed*
James & Vira (2012)
Alternative labour organising in India’s new service economy.
* How is unionisation reconstructed in the Indian context?
* Finds significant differences between UK call centre industry and Indian equivalent due to the different cultural experience and perception of work and employment in India
* This poses an alternative set of challenges for unionising
* Unions are affiliated with main political parties, leading to general mistrust
* Also, call centre workers are given amenities and workplace benefits - it isn’t seen as a dead end job
* They also feel they learn transferable skills that enable them to increase earning prospects
Again, we need to engage directly with geographical specificities of place. This determines the desires for, and meanings of, representation and work more generally amongst Indian call centre workers.
James & Vira (2010)
Hybrid development/economic geographies.
Vira & James (2011)
Five pillars of Fairwork, a global initiative trying to develop better working conditions for gig economy workers. Pay, conditions, contracts, management, representation
Fairwork (2019)
Fairwork India Report, the 5th annual study of working conditions on 12 Indian platforms.
Landmark Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers Act in July 2023 - this promised to introduce a degree of security for workers in Rajasthan such as a welfare fund for gig workers financed by platforms.
However, most platforms achieved worse scores than in 2022 - not a single platform awarded a point for ‘fair representation’
Fairwork (2023)
2023 report on the global state of the platform economy
* 270 platforms rated with an average of 1.2/10
* First report published on AI using case study of Sama
* Launched new project looking at 4 major sex work platforms, an industry which boomed during the pandemic and which consists disproportionately of female and LGBTQ+ workers
Fairwork (2023)
Gender and platform work, Fairwork report.
* Demands differ because of gender e.g. preventing discrimination, fast response times during emergenceis
* The platform economy’s common practices risk cementing pre-existing gender inequalities
* Women’s participation in the platform economy is located disproportionately in beauty, care and domestic work, activities which, due to their location in the home, are often not successfully accounted for
* Many platforms respond with technological solutions e.g. banning female workers from working at night, which ends up increasing platform control, not solving the root issue, and reducing worker control
Left unchecked, the platform economy perpetuates and amplifies gender visions.
Fairwork (2022)
Case study
Uber and Ola, India. Has created viable employment opportunities for drivers (especially young men) and benefits for urban middle class users who can find taxis at cheaper rates.
* Example of how platform economy is reconstructed in Indian context
* Taxidars: taxi-owners, usually middle-class individuals, who rent out cars to drivers and pay them a fixed salary
* The context of the driving industry in India, which was already highly informalised
* So the new platform economy maps onto pre-existing and place-specific social hierarchies
* This has implications for policy and theorising from the South
Kashyap & Bhatia (2018)
Case study
Labour agency and resistance in African gig workers.
* Gig workers are commonly understood to have fewer opportunities to exert agency
* Katz (2004): resilience, reworking and resistance - theorising everyday forms of resistance which do not necessarily involve structural change
* ‘Hidden transcripts’ of African gig workers reveal the limits to resistance and how labour agency is mediated through the socio-technical structures of platforms
* Two key constraints: (1) socioeconomic/cultural contexts, (2) capital’s own agency that encroaches on class power
* Resilience: sharing computers, buying reviews
* Reworking: negotiating working hours, using two monitors
* Resistance: warning fellow workers, leaving negative client feedback
* The positionality of workers influences the actions they can take
* Remote work and geographical dispersal makes collective action nearly impossible - but informal organising can be done
Anwar & Graham (2019)
Case study
Elance-oDesk, a micro-task crowdwork paltform in India.
* Crowdwork: defined by Internet-enabled connections between strangers worldwide, mediated by the netural platform (protected from commitments to clients or wokrers)
* Eliminates costs of subcontracting, maximising profit
* Provides a route to employment for many
* Hidden from view, operating outside of a clear legal jurisdiction
* Paper finds that ‘positives outweigh the negatives’ for many workers on the platform
* Yes, there were challenges, but these were eclipsed by the gains such as income, skill enhancement, career progression and flexibility
* This can be explained by the nature of the Indian labour market where employment conditions remain poor and society is feudalistic, hierarchical and nepotistic, making crowdsourcing an attractive alternative
In Western scholarship, freelancers are simply precarious workers providing immaterial labour - this is an overly simplistic perspective. However, negative experiences cannot be glossed over, since in buying into cloudwork, workers are perpetuating a fundamentally exploitative model.
d’Cruz (2016)
