In 2023, the worldwide share of employees who report being stressed at work reached a record high,
according to Gallup.
One contributing factor is the “fissured workplace,” in which corporate
managers carve up their traditional workforce and redistribute its
functions to subcontractors. Often marketed in futuristic terms as a
part of the tech economy, it is, in fact, a well-worn way of reducing
worker power.
In response to pressures from capital markets to
improve their financial performance in the 1980s and ’90s, large
corporations whittled down their directly employed staff to those
concentrating on “core competencies,” freeing them to fire
“non-essential” laborers, such as janitors, whom they subsequently
brought back as temps at significantly reduced pay—a domestic expression
of labor arbitrage. Neoliberals argue that this corporate strategy is a
win-win, liberating workers from being tied to one company, which now
must compete for their services. But in reality, they are thrust into
unregulated forms of employment with irregular hours, low earnings, no
route for advancement, muddied relationships with management, and no
business enterprise ultimately responsible for their welfare.
One of the primary characteristics of the fissured workplace is its obscured authority structure.
....
Application programming interfaces, or APIs, which hundreds of tech
companies use, bring this process to perfection. APIs are used to
crowdsource tasks to workers that a full-time engineering staff and its
AI algorithms can’t cover (or that firms won’t pay to have covered by a
stable of full-time employees)..... As the journalist David
Zweig reports, when Twitter ratcheted up its content moderation to
full-blown censorship during the coronavirus debacle, it tasked,
“contractors, in places like the Philippines … to adjudicate tweets on
complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data.” Americans were
rigidly censored by on-demand workers around the world toiling for
poverty wages.....
As machines are deployed by corporations to monopolize greater shares
of the labor process, new forms of work are generated that require
human services at the edges of AI’s reach. “Thus,” they write, “there is
an ever-moving frontier between what machines can and can’t solve…. As
machines solve more and more problems, we continue to identify needs for
augmenting rather than replacing human effort.”
Automation, then,
will create new jobs, not mass unemployment. But it doesn’t necessarily
follow that we will want the jobs it creates.