[music playing]
Hi everybody. Welcome to Data and Society.
My name is Sareeta Amrute
I'm the director of research here.
It's my sincere pleasure and honor
to welcome you to Data and Society for this discussion
inspired by Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri's recently released book
Ghost Work: How To Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass.
Mary Gray is senior researcher at Microsoft Research
and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society
Mary also maintains a faculty position in
the School of Informatics Computing and Engineering
with affiliations in anthropology, gender studies and the media
school at Indiana University.
Her research looks at how technology access material conditions
and everyday uses of media transform people's lives
and today she'll be talking to us about her latest book
written with Siddharth Suri who is based in Seattle.
Take it away Mary.
[applause]
Thank you.
Thank you everyone for coming out
and I see some familiar faces and I just really want
to voice my appreciation for all the support I've had
over the years doing this work
first and foremost to my co-author Sid Suri
but to all the workers who have given their time
and let us into their lives to learn about their experiences.
This work wouldn't be possible without the time that they've given to us.
So with that
I wanted to start by giving you a sense of where this work came from
and for me, I was thinking about my own research questions
before coming to Microsoft Research.
Most of them circled around the question of
how do we become more or less seen?
How are we known and valued as people and what role do technologies play in that and
much of the heralding of the internet was that we're going to become more visible.
We're going to be able to speak our truth, hear all voices
and much of my grounding in anthropology and critical media studies
brings me to the question of how so?
When is that not true?
and what are the conditions under which people make that more or less true?
So I come to this project with that background.
And in many ways
what I'm hoping to do is incite you to care about this world of work
that is more or less seen, known and valued
depending on where you are in this universe.
It really started with coming to Microsoft Research
and asking a basic question about how artificial intelligence is made.
I had no idea
and so when I started asking computer scientists and engineers in my lab
what goes into developing algorithms and the models that are built
to be able to advance artificial intelligence.
It turns out that there are a lot of people involved in that work
outside of the coders and the engineers and computer scientists that are
theorizing these, these technological innovations.
It's a lot of people who are effectively cleaning and managing data
the training data that become the models for building algorithms out
and there isn't a case of any artificial intelligence that exists
that doesn't depend at some point in someone touching that data
curating that data and taking something that's otherwise kind of
structuralist nonsense and putting it into some structured sense
that a computational process could then model and learn from.
So at the goal of this book, if there's nothing else you take from this book,
it's to understand that artificial intelligence always has human hands in it
that we are benefiting from a lot of people contributing to advancing these
technologies, even in cases where we might fully automate one process along the way
particularly as its impact
or its application to a domain it wasn't expected to enter
say language, like text translation that's done in real time.
If you're a speaker of multiple languages and you're code switching
odds are pretty good that the AI isn't going to be able to keep up with you.
So look at those cases where you then have to bring people back into the mix
to be able to develop a model that would be able to capture
what kind of exchange is happening.
That's really the beginning of this book is to understand who are the people
who are doing all of this work and it turns out that when you ask
computer scientists and engineers often their responses are I don't really know.
I've never really met these people. The beauty of this technology is that
I don't have to meet them and I say that now with all seriousness
the sense is that this is a technological innovation often called human computation
or crowdsourcing the technique of being able to thread a person into a moment
of judgment where you need a person to be able to evaluate or decide something
that a computational process can't quite figure out.
Bring that person into that moment, that judgment and then threading them into
a computational process, an automated process so that you can carry on
with an output.
So we're somewhat familiar with some of the applications they're little bit
visible to you today.
This is an iceberg.
Most of you are familiar perhaps with your Uber driver.
You've met them maybe you've chatted with them.
You might be familiar with other platform services
on demand services that effectively
are using the same technology of human computation
to match a person who's able to deliver a service
through a mix of application programming interfaces
that calls that person to the job
whatever it might be
whether it's to pick you up at the airport
or to pick up some food and bring it to your door
or if it's a content moderator
And I think what's fascinating is two years ago
If I'd said the phrase content moderator or content moderation
I would have just gotten blank looks
How many of you know what content moderation is today?
It turns out they're doing an incredibly important job.
They are people who effectively curate
look at pieces of text and images
that are beyond the capacity of any computational process
to analyze and evaluate and say: ah, that's pornography or that spam
versus someone sharing information.
So it turns out that we're not that far along
in being able to evaluate text and images to figure out
is that content that should or should not be there.
You could say anything that's hard for a human to evaluate and decide
is that misinformation? Or just a fact that I'm not familiar with yet?
The odds are very good, a computational process isn't even close
to being able to figure that out.
If it's hard for a person to figure out it's going to be intractably
a technically hard process for computation to model.
You have to have really certain this or that
yes or no to build code with accuracy to be able to automate something.
So again take away how much this world
that's completely dependent on having people at a moment of judgment
enter the scene like content moderation and then look below that surface
and that surface below that iceberg
that is this spiraling growing expansive world of services that effectively
are building to keep a person in a computational loop
because it turns out it's much more efficient and effective
to be able to match a person to a task like captioning and translation
or a task that might be image tagging for a new set of images
that you're trying to evaluate, whether it's for training AI
or that you want to do a marketing project
in all of those cases all of these businesses
that are probably unfamiliar to you that are on this on this slide
are quickly making the best of a business model
That brings contract driven task-oriented work to people mostly doing work in their homes, or if they're in a setting they're covered by what are called vendor Management systems.
And again, they're people that you will never meet as an end consumer but that you benefit from every day.
So when I'm asking engineers and computer scientists about this work of human computation and the role of people in the loop, it turns out that most of these businesses are effectively doing what these Engineers are doing, which is bringing people in as quickly as they can and then moving on to the next project.
They're not asking who are these people under what conditions might be be working in most cases?
They're working on contract for that specific task itself.
So the moment of Engagement might not last more than a few minutes at best.
So it's a pretty kaleidoscopic world.
So
At Microsoft research.
I feel incredibly lucky to be around people who do reflect on this question of what are they building for the rest of the world and in many cases when I meet a group of people who are saying I don't really know who are the workers who are here.
There's at least a subset of those folks who will say, I don't exactly know but you know, the technology really keeps me at a distance and then there was a third set that would answer fairly regularly.
I don't know and I don't know if I want to know and as you can imagine for any anthropologists in the room, that's just that's you really want to pursue that question.
What makes somebody uncomfortable about knowing who is on the other side of a screen what makes it seem an attractively socially uncomfortable question to find out about their work conditions.
So when I met said SRI, he was really one of the first people who genuinely coming out of computer science wanted to not only know what we really
Work conditions people might be engaging but what their lives were like and so we started on this this journey and I don't use that word lightly.
It took us five years to develop a methodology for being able to bring the value of qualitative critical work that engages people in their everyday lives and figure out where you could integrate measurement and computational analyses to build out a picture of this world of work.
So often will get this question of well, how big is this Market underneath that question is often people who feel like why should we bother carrying this is worth is going to be automated any day if you buy the beginning premise of this book and I hope you do this work isn't going away.
The tasks will change but in fact we're building towards a world of a service industry Information Services knowledge work.
That isn't a niche job.
This is the dismantlement of full-time employment.
The dismantlement of full-time employment for anyone who does creative work so we might not be able to see how large that market is arguably.
We've never done a head count.
There is no effective way to do a worker census of an environment that is by Design distributed Global and often doesn't have a category of work that people would recognize and resonate with where they could say.
Yeah, that's me. I do that work.
So this is both a world in which our old categories of what job do you do is being blown apart and it's a world in which we don't have any mechanisms for tracking and holding accountable the supply chain that's going into this world of work, but let's take some guesses here and some of this is drawing on on economics and the secondary literature about the possible size of this market right now.
We know that there's about an estimate of
About five percent of the u.s.
Population alone. According to Pew that's doing some form of online work so that there are at least in part.
The work is sourced scheduled managed shipped and build through an application programming interface an API and the internet five percent that doesn't necessarily mean they're doing and their entire job online.
It means that a form of income that's important to them is coming from one of these jobs.
Now, this is really striking if you can take into consideration, we've only had the possibility of making an income from this form of work for about a decade.
So to have five percent of the u.s.
Population already doing this work start thinking through the size of this Market the growth of this market and if that's not quite enough think about how large the global market for the businesses generating value will be by next year.
It's a twenty five billion dollars.
The street already and that's not a small number if you think about how it compares to other industries that are fairly mundane.
So that iceberg that I showed you all of those businesses that are spinning up on below the surface of our visibility as consumers is building an incredible amount of economic value that up to this point doesn't seem to be moving to the other side of the screen to the workers themselves who are doing the work another projection here of thinking about the implications of dismantling employment is to imagine this is not the displacement or the full automation of occupations and work.
It's the semi automation of work and being able to task a fi it that is the target of most of these industries and the technologies that companies are building.
Everybody would like to figure out how to break down things like scheduling managing any sorts of appointments any of your work.
Low figure out how to break that down and turn it into a task that you can hand off to someone else so that you can up whatever it is that is your main point of view or value right that this is again the object of most of the industry on building out the Technologies at the rate.
We're going we're looking at 38% of jobs within the u.s.
Moving to being semi-automated by the 2030s.
Now that might sound like a shocking number but let's just make it mundane that means taking most of office work knowledge work Information Services and turning it into contract work that's already happened in a lot of places.
So it's not as though this is so futuristic.
And in many ways this the goal of this book is to say it is not too late to
Mine what this world looks like we're really just at the beginning but know that it's moving quickly.
So the kinds of work that this entails again because it's because you can't see it.
It's often really hard to describe.
It's everything from editing copy editing content curation.
The should be if anybody participates in these kinds of jobs, you might see yourselves in these these tasks taking surveys marketing design any sort of graphic design any sort of data entry and labeling which is a pretty labor-intensive cognitively hard job.
If you're constantly looking at again data that's coming in that scraped from somewhere with not a lot of context and you're trying to figure out what would you call this material?
Is this analyzing somebody's attitude about a product.
How would you how would you assess that attitude?
It's actually pretty challenging work and it goes very quickly kind of task by task.
We were studying very specific.
He's I'm going to just go through a bit of the methodology that we used but we were looking at companies that generate sales leads so you can scrape the web and get an idea of who your contact person might be if you sell air conditioners, but you're going to do much better doing your sales of you know, who you should call in that office turns out generating sales lead.
That's a particular kind of on-demand ghost work being able to take what is otherwise just a web scrape of people's contact information and curating that list and figuring out who should I contact and then handing it over to a business that wants the best contacts that's a very specific vertical within this industry.
And then translation Ted has one of the largest projects open translation projects.
That was the beginning of a volunteer community invested in making videos available for hard of hearing communities and for linguistic diversity, and it was the the heart and soul.
Amara.org which is one of the companies that we one of the organizations that we studied and then the other kinds of tasks that again are becoming more familiar to some of you content moderate moderation classification tasks that are meant to optimize your search query experience.
So if you're typing in something and this will happen happen every election year.
If you have a new candidate up for election odds are pretty good.
If you've never seen that candidate before they had to do some work to make sure that when people were searching that term searching that name that it matched to the proper biography or persons official presence online.
So it's it's kind of this renewal of a need for making sure the information is relevant.
I love the example of how many of you remember a moment during the past elections when Romney made a reference to binders full of women right to be able to figure out should that be a trending topic because if you just think about that phrase that's a nonsensical phrase.
Aside from who said it and so realize that took a lot of content moderators working very quickly to be able to identify.
Oh the context for that.
Oh, it's an election cycle a candidate debate.
Yes, trending makes sense that's happening below the surface.
You'll never see it happen and it's not something that can be automated anytime soon as would be my argument and then lastly thinking about these mundane uses of location verification.
How many of you had a favorite restaurant that went out of business.
Last month odds are If It Moves somewhere the location needed be re verified and updated within search queries that's still very much the handwork of people below the API.
So there's a lineage here.
This is not so new and and we take great pains to point out that the tendency to treat contingent work.
That seems like it's going to go away anytime.
Therefore not that valuable and something we don't need to care about in terms of our employment relationships.
That's old news. So if you think about the experience of the Industrial Age and peace work and the work that was literally something that couldn't be accomplished by the newly quickly moving Loom, but that could be taken to mostly Family Farms and in the United States context and be able to share that material that raw material and the material that's been created say a shirt and to have the button or the flourish of bows that could then be attached by a person.
That's the kind of work that the entire time the Hope was eventually that will be automated away.
And yes, eventually the machines were able to attach the flourish the button the bows that didn't mean that the work entirely displaced other kinds of work that needed to be put on the table.
This could go on for generations and did in manufacturing arguably.
The only reason automation can knock it out of the park is precisely because you can build the factory around the automated mechanical processes and get people entirely out of the building.
But in any case where you're working with people and effectively when you're trying to serve their interests and anticipate their needs you're in an entirely different world of required tasks on a person's time and cognitive ability.
So if you think about the next generation of lineage here and the computers behind being able to put people in space or to be able to do some amazing technical achievements, we've always had these moments where the Assumption was.
There's something wrote and on Creative about this work.
It can be done by an often is done by the same suspects generation.
Generation, but their work is not seen as integral to what is really valued and worth retaining or underwriting through full-time employment.
So for much of the women who are involved in the Cold War projects through NASA and through other Aeronautics institutions, they were on contract.
They didn't have full-time jobs.
They could be they could be released at any point and particularly before it was illegal to fire women because they were pregnant women could be dismissed as soon as they married because odds were good.
They would get pregnant.
So thinking about this lineage is important to imagine who is often invited to take on these contract positions precisely because into the 60s there imagine to be the perfect temporary Workforce both able to do the work as in Kelly girls and selling Kelly girls as the
Opportunity for business professionals to have someone take care of their needs and then quickly exit to bring in fresh Minds fresh bodies for the work that needs to be done around the office.
So you might see a pattern developing here in this lineage of who is seen as replaceable or less valuable and therefore ripe for contract work as we move into the 90s late 90s to early 80s to late 90s and the internet and connected communication devices allow the workflow of office work that otherwise seemed the domain of professionals from accounting to human resources to any sort of financial services.
It becomes quite easy to take that work and move it to other continents where you have enough linguistic capacity to be able to
Take advantage of Labor Arbitrage a cheaper Workforce and still be able to get the work done.
So what I'm hoping you see in this lineage is precisely the set of assumptions that say who's not so valuable here, who is the person that should hold this temporary job?
Because we don't necessarily need to care about them too much and what are all of the ways in which contingent work particularly the United States sets in motion a framing of contract work as disposable less important contingency becomes a value proposition to the business not to the worker so
The way in which we went about studying this and I can go into this in the the QA.
It's really hard to figure out how to find people behind a distributed system who are working globally in their homes.
I'll be the first to confess that I'm someone who really likes to find the people that people assume or otherwise really hard to find because it turns out if you just ask people hey, where are those people they'll prickly quickly identify themselves and say, oh I do this work.
This was a whole other level of Challenge.
And so the way we went about it was to find four institutions organizations that were producing this kind of Labor and then to figure out ways in which we could meet the workers who were participating in these labor markets.
We work agnostically with the assumption that this is contract work unless it's otherwise called something else and we worked with the terms of the of the people who are engaging in these projects.
So we studied
So Mechanical Turk, which set the Baseline for how most of task-based work is framed and treated and the sidestepping of any legal Frameworks or classification that go with it.
And then we also looked at the universal human relevant system, which is the internal platform that Microsoft has please note every large tech company has an internal platform that you can't see that's larger than Amazon Mechanical Turk that has far more work than you could ever tracked because when it comes to the accounting of this Workforce, it's effectively the equivalent of paper.
It's it's not considered labor Capital.
It's just an asset being bought and sold through a procurement Farm or through a procurement office.
So I say that coldly because importantly that's part of the legal framework in Arrangements that exist between businesses hiring outside of
Their companies to be able to have full time labor on tap through other firms that are the employer of record.
So it's a really important lineage to understand how it pipes into the back of several of these companies the other two companies.
We looked at organizations that we looked at lead genius is a social entrepreneurship.
It was a startup founded in Silicon Valley that generate sales leads and they have a global Workforce with a lot of recognition that trying to do the work that they want to have done in the United States is not something they could legally do without being classified as formal employers.
So they've moved a lot almost all of their Workforce outside of the United States and then a fourth organization that we studied Amara Amara on demand.
I'm fascinated by a more on demand and the one of the co-founders and organizers of it.
Dean Johnson is going to join us for a conversation later.
But what fascinates me
Now tomorrow is that it started out as a volunteer community again doing captioning and translation of video, which is technically a very hard problem to solve to be able to look at video in any robust way and interpret what are the actions that are happening in that video.
That's Way Beyond computation right now and this community of volunteers effectively became a magnet for companies that in organizations that wanted to be able to translate and caption their videos in other languages.
So company started approaching them saying can we just pay you to do this fast?
So we created a labor market that from it's very beginning was organized by the volunteer energy and the attention to the workers doing the work for this community.
And I think it's a wonderful example of what we could be doing differently in terms of organizing these worlds of work around workers themselves.
In looking at these four companies it became an opportunity to start from there and to put out surveys on each of those platforms to be able to reach workers themselves and ask them about themselves and at the end of those surveys to be able to ask them.
Would you be willing to meet in person for an interview and the map that you're looking at for work that is in theory work that can go anywhere that's available to anyone.
You should see some patterns.
There's something that maps onto the infrastructure of Outsourcing of places where there are not many job opportunities that are comparable to service work at retail stores or in other settings where the Pape the payment is about the same as what you might be able to get in these online markets so note the pattern because that should tell us there's something structuring again.
Who does this work where they do this work?
What are the other opportunities that it?
Forecloses or suggest or not available?
On top of those once we had enough people interested to do the interviews.
It just turned into old-fashioned anthropology in a lot of ways of go to where the people are meet.
People see who would be willing to allow us into their lives for a long enough period of time to be able to understand the ebb and flow of their engagement with this work.
So it becomes really important for example to be able to be in India and see what happens when the monsoon season hits and how people then whether no pun intended the work that they have to do which is effectively being online and having to be hyper-vigilant to pick up tasks that are then delayed by whatever might be getting in the way of their internet access, for example
The the layer and I you know hats off to Sid for figuring out the ways that he would be able to measure this world because I have to confess I wasn't I didn't really care that much about measuring I cared about if there's anybody experiencing this world that's enough for me.
And thankfully he helped me see there's a lot of value in being able to understand the distribution of this work the the
Patterns and so what I want to share with you is really the outcome of merging these two approaches.
What we found was in this is to me that one of the most striking findings in the book is that there's a real Pareto distribution of participation and when I say that like so many other power laws that are out there it turns out there's a concentrated few that are picking up and doing most of the work in these markets.
So a good depending on the platform a good ten to Fifteen twenty percent at most are picking up most of the tasks to be had.
And then there's this Core group of people that we call regulars that first group.
We call them always on and they literally are they've turned this into an income stream that maintains their livelihoods and they might have other income streams and often they were working on multiple platforms.
They've turned it into full-time work for themselves the second group.
There's about 30, you know, 30 percent at most but closer to 20 are what we call regulars.
They're stepping into this.
They've sunk the costs of figuring out how to make these platforms payoff.
They've learned what they need to learn and importantly they've connected with peers much like the always-on have they've connected with discussion forums other people who help them manage and figure out how to reduce their costs getting this work done.
They are the bench the Deep bench that is always able to step up into this labor market and pick up a task and do it and it is what allows anybody who's always on to step away and
Not have the entire Market just fall apart.
There's no way the argument we have here is there's no way to turn this into fully on time always on work to turn it into full-time work precisely works against what it is that people who have entered this world have said is important to them about entering this labor market.
I'm going to come to this in a moment, but lastly and most importantly there's a good 70% of people who walk into this we call them experimentalists.
Try it and they're like peace out don't want to do this.
They have a read of a range of reasons.
They decide they don't want to do it.
All of them are still providing value both for the companies that are able to claim that they have 500,000 workers on On Demand.
So think about any time you've used Lyft or Uber being able to see enough of those little cars that tells you okay, I'll bother that's the value all the experimentalists are bringing to this market and picking up one task or two tasks at is precisely being available that they are offering being willing and available.
That's the most valuable thing that they're doing and I think it raises this question of and yes, isn't that valuable?
Why isn't that considered valuable?
They're bringing an incredible amount of value certainly to the businesses.
They whether all of the costs.
These are most cases the people who could not figure out how to tap into a communication Network to make this manageable often felt isolated and alienated.
So collaboration is key in this environment the thing that allowed people to find their footing to be able to make enough money to make this worthwhile.
And again, the trade-off being being able to do it on particular terms was tapping into a network.
This is from an experiment that Sid Surrey and whenever co-authors manian developed to be able to identify.
What were the communities that people were engaged in discussion forums.
The different colors are the different discussion forums for this is just for Amazon Mechanical Turk.
So an incredibly robust Rich nuanced complicated environment of interaction and all of the small dots are this the solitary workers.
So the vast majority of people who haven't connected with somebody are there still providing value, but you've got this tight cluster and groups who are organizing around specific communities who again really scaffold with each other and make this manageable work.
I wanted to share this quote from one of the workers talking about how important it becomes to be able to connect with other people doing this work.
I think the Deep irony here is that the platform Builders assumed this is great work because you can do it alone and you don't have to interact with anybody.
You don't need any help what they hadn't anticipated perhaps because they didn't have enough anthropologists and sociologists in the room was that people might still be invested and having social connections.
The social connections are actually incredibly valuable to getting work done.
It's just immeasurably valuable and that's that's that's part of this environment is figuring out how to recognize the value of that connection the motivators that came up most often in this might sound trite.
It actually maps on entirely to the literature we have already about how people talk about their work what they value from work particularly when they decide to be self-employed or to try and freelance.
It's about
Trolling your time and I'd like everybody to stop using the word flexibility if you please because this isn't about flexibility.
It's about having other constraints on your time and needing to control your schedule often having to do with Family Care Elder Care Child Care other work responsibilities and other interests having interest in other education other other Hobbies other Joys and in most cases people making doing that calculus of how can I make this kind of work sustained me so that I can make my life run the way I want it to run that's aspirational to be sure but it's certainly part of what motivates people to keep at this
The second thing they're after is to be able to control what they work on and I'd imagine many people in this room share that they do just about anything to be able to Define what their project is rather than have somebody else tell them what to do and the third is controlling your work environment.
And if you're pushed to the margins controlling your work environment is not a nice to have so people with disabilities queer identifying people women who felt marginalized by the formal employment opportunities in their area all talked about this work being away of relief from those other constraints.
So when Carmela is talking about effectively being able to turn the this work because she can then pick up her computer and do it from anywhere.
I want to take very seriously and not dismiss her claiming that this is the kind of work that lets her live her ideal life.
It's how do we recognize take that at face value and still remained critical of a system that might still take advantage of her desire to do this work without somehow thinking that Camilla is the problem here.
So I want to move into thinking about where do we go from here?
What have we learned from the way these workers not only survive this work, but make it meaningful that we could then use to redefine this world of work because I'll continue to say this is early days.
We have an opportunity to really Design This purposefully with people at the center of our equation.
So I want to focus on two things if you
The book there's a the entire conclusion is just here's what we could do.
It's my bucket list that comes from the bucket list of the workers we engaged but the one I want to focus on for this conversation is to think about what it means to redefine the social safety net and job classification.
I'm just going to say it I would like to completely blow up employment classification as we know it.
I do not think the defining full-time work as a place where you get benefits and part-time work as a place where you have to fight to get a full-time job as an appropriate way of addressing this labor market and particularly if we consider that globally there are so few people in the world who have ever had access to full-time employment that provided any benefits.
So let's start organizing our classification and treatment of employment with all of the contingent work we've seen in this lineage and imagining that we will be those workers in the future and if that is the case
The best thing we could do is say there are some Basics here that we're building a Commons.
We have a labor Commons that every Company benefits from being able to draw from they can dip in and out of this pool.
So, how are we going to support that pool?
How are we going to make it sustainable?
So that the value proposition isn't here.
Let's just exhaust this pool and drain it because that's a tragedy we know of the tragedy of the commons apply the same logic imagine if health care for all isn't just a nice thing to do because a charitable it's like that makes business sense.
You need a healthy Workforce.
You need people to be able to step in and out of it to be able to make it sustainable continuing ed.
There wasn't a person that we interviewed who didn't talk about how often they were going to online resources to be able to continue exploring.
What were the kinds of materials they needed to follow up on and choose to read be able to do their neck next project.
We all benefit from being able to do that.
Everybody had a
Baseline of a liberal arts education the should be the big news is a liberal arts education and learning how to learn is the bass bass line for every worker in this market because it's creative work all of us had to learn how to learn as that Baseline and then build from there.
This is not specialized work.
This is using your brain all the time.
So the basic education that comes with critical thinking is key and then being able to make everything else available available becomes critical and then thinking about co-working spaces.
I just want to leave you with this Vision when I saw all of the home office setups of everybody we interviewed and at the end of the day thought of the health and safety administration and what our workplace around health and safety was set up to do it was to prevent Public Health crises.
We have a Public Health crisis and people setting up their home offices and not having resources to do it.
A way that's healthy.
So I know that sounds small, but every municipality could have co-working space that is thinking public health.
That's an intervention at the public health level.
Everybody should be able to get to a space where they can get relief for their back for their neck again sounds trite.
But if you're doing office knowledge work, it's critical.
And then lastly I want to dwell on this notion of a retainer.
So there's a lot of conversation about Universal basic income as a solution here.
What frustrates me most is the framing of that of that suggestion is that these are the poor souls who can't outrun the robots that doesn't really account for how much what we really need is to retain the cognitive and creative capacity of people to be available to businesses to each other for service work.
So people should be on a retainer for sure give everybody who's a working-age adults a retainer that says here's your base.
Line so that you don't have to think about paid leave or unemployment.
But that literally you have what sustains you to be able to step away when you need to step away have children take care of someone and at the same time know that you are going to have the financial means to get back into that comments right very different attitude than Universal basic income the idea that somehow the poor are going to rise against us.
And therefore we need to give them some some small amount of money completely misses.
Where is this economy headed?
It's a service economy.
It's an information service and Care economy where we're caring for each other and so to be able to do that.
We really have to imagine.
How would we give everybody the basic support financially to do that to be able to come and go in that work?
So the last thing we have to do is on us if you use any of these Services now is the time and today is a great day to do it.
There's a strike by Lyft and Uber drivers.
If you're a consumer of any ride hailing app be thinking about critically if you're somebody who consumes with care if you think about where you buy your clothes or buy your food, there's nothing small about that movement consumer advocacy and boycotting have been incredibly powerful.
They led to the Bangladesh Accord which was the beginning of holding companies accountable for the long supply chain involved in getting the shirts on our backs and in thinking about agriculture and places where knowing the supply chain became critical to making sure the quality of food, but the quality of people's work conditions growing that food was something everybody could know and then make your choices and that will never be enough.
This is not a land of
Businesses be kind to workers or let consumers be self-interested consumers.
It's about setting up the possibility for the right regulation and classification for employment of the future.
So the key takeaway other than a I always requires people.
So we're not getting rid of them.
Anytime soon is that this is a Commons.
This is a labor Commons that relies on people coming in and out and what will it take for us to be able to support and value labor?
No matter where it happens.
No matter how many hours somebody puts in because in fact the value of these markets it's aggregating up what we do.
It is literally the aggregation of everybody's input and from there what it's providing.
So think Uber--it's all of those drivers being available to you.
It's not just the one driver who took you to the airport.
So to be able to value all of the aggregation of that labor.
And say what will it take to say each of the people participating in that are equally important to our livelihoods to our lives.
And with that I want to thank my collaborators because there's nothing like a book about this kind of work
to make you hopefully always aware of how much-- everything that went into.
This book came from an incredibly rich team of people
bringing a range of expertise
from Greg Minton, who made the beautiful maps
to all the research assistants who were involved in doing the fact checking
to the key research assistants that we had in India to be able to maintain
the contacts with the people we had met through fieldwork
so there wasn't a person on this team who didn't do something integral that
if they weren't here I don't know that this book would be here either, so with that,
thank you
[Applause]
Thank you Mary that was amazing
I'd like to invite Dean Jansen to join us at the front of the room
Dean is the executive director
and chief executive officer of the Participatory Culture Foundation
The parent organization of Amara On Demand
co-leading PCF with Aleli Alcala
Amara is featured in Ghost Work
and we're thrilled to welcome him into the conversation.
so as moderator I'm
gonna take the host privileges of asking
a few questions of Dean and then Mary
and then I'll open it up to the floor for a discussion
Dean maybe I'll start with you if you don't mind OK?
If you could tell us a little bit about what's
changed for Amara since the book was
sure yeah this was a great question
and one that you know
thinking about what has changed
as an organization we've gotten bigger
When we started and when kind of AOD was first
starting I think we were a staff of about 9 to 12 people
the initial group of folks that were doing the translation
around 200 and today, the staff is closer to 30
there are thousands of different folks who have signed on
and her are working with with AOD at this point
and then as far as just them the marketplace
that's something that you know it
when we began there was obviously a robust translation marketplace
but the audiovisual subtitling and dubbing side of things
was still pretty nascent and
that's really starting to pick up more and more today
so those are two areas that have changed significantly.
Mm-hmm.
one thing that Mary talks about in the book
is this idea of the double bottom line
and she talks about that specifically when it comes to Amara
which tries to create fair and collaborative labor practices for people
who are doing translation and subtitle work
and so what I wanted to ask you Dean is
how do you respond to people who say that the double bottom line is a nice idea
but it's really not practical...
that in fact a business like yours can't sustain itself with that model in place
yeah that's that's a great question and one that I think
might be answered well with another question, which is,
what does it mean to be sustainable
from organization to organization ?
Again, in the in the space that we're in,
in translation, we saw early on
these kind of more established players that had very high margins.
And so again just a question of how do you define sustainability–
sustainability for whom and for what?
I think if you're asking more maybe about kind of the lower margin end of things
we're talking about some companies that are the biggest and most powerful and profitable in the history of the planet.
And so I think it's a question less – in our eyes at least –
of "is it sustainable?" and more a question of "how can we make it sustainable?"
I'll just name mturk as one of those companies since since Dean was too polite to say it.
Another question.
I wanted to ask about is really playing off of what Mary was talking about the end at the end of her talk.
We can think about consumer.
Advocacy we can think also about regulation in your mind from where you sit what are the possibilities and limits on what a business Enterprise can do to value and protect micro labor.
hmm another great question
I think well, let's see.
So as far as the limitations go, I think there are a lot of things that organizations can and should be doing and and and we were kind of joking about the not joking but a couple of weeks ago talking about how low the bar is when the bar is recognize that these are human beings that are doing this work early early on when speaking with Mary one of the things that really struck me was her describing conversation.
She would have as she mentioned with Engineers who really didn't see where all these layers existed with human labor in them.
So to me and many ways the work that Mary and Sid and all the people that have made this this book possible all the people that Mary spoke with shining a light on it and making it visible as like the first step in figuring out.
I think I've just
Skipped your question, but in terms of like zooming out and looking at societally what can we do and how can we accomplish some of these things?
Just that first step of having some recognition of who and where people are is really important but obviously on an individual organizational level there is a ton that can be be done and you give us a few just a few examples from
you're sure yeah, so let's see in terms of
I mean again providing people space to communicate and work with one another one of the things that we we found in Translation was there's this kind of stereotype of the Lonely translator someone who is working in an isolated sort of and in many ways.
That's again.
I don't I'm not a translator.
So this is just my learning and understanding of it but but historically people do it has been a more isolated kind of work.
So for us bringing the collaborative the collaborative side of the tools and platform that we're providing and building to continue listening to what sorts of things people need to do their work better and to collaborate more effectively.
That's been something that's been that's kind of the bread and butter of some of what we've been doing.
Thank you being cognizant of time.
I will just ask Mary a few short questions and then open it up to the floor.
So marry one of the key Concepts in your book.
Is this Paradox of automations Last Mile?
Could you pull that out for us a little bit and maybe relate it to the lineage of contract contingent labor that you put up for us which in your book actually very interestingly slut starts with the experience of slavery in the United States.
Yeah, I mean to think about this Paradox in many ways is to Grapple with what has been the use of the Lion's Share of manual labor for example, and an early days with you know, if we think about what defines modernity what defines our modern era.
It's imagining we're going to get our hands out of the soil and be able to put our minds to work.
It's an erudite notion of what does advancement look like what is progress and progress driven by technology?
And so the Paradox is that as we strive to pull ourselves out of manual labor.
I believe we start recognizing that it actually takes quite a bit of creativity and complexity to be able to do any Enterprise to be able to boot to do anything productive.
So starting starting the lineage with slavery in the book is to say that was really our first labor law in the United States it
Find who could be owned who could be used in a way that only treated their bodies as valuable and didn't imagine that any kind of work that we do involves a human capacity not to be too humanist here but a human capacity to be able to bring creativity to be able to bring responding to spontaneity to whatever we're doing so that moment of delaying recognizing the value of the real deep integration and of creativity with everything that we do I believe that is this moment.
It's this Reckoning with a paradox.
We keep introducing of thinking we're just going to we're going to get the thinking and the talking out of it.
It's just going to be something we can automate and then we're just left with things that are really hard, you know, the professional class will be able to do the really hard work it throws to the wind the
Dear that taking care of if you've ever taken care of an elderly parent that takes a lot of thinking a lot of creativity.
There's a beautiful book that really for me sets up the discussion of the Paradox and it's some by levying murnane their computer scientists and economists who talked about the new division of labor and they were trying to analyze what is it that a computational process can do that a human and what is it that a human can do that a really distinct?
What is that Division?
And so we're trying to to theorize why it is as we strive to automate things.
We keep discovering a new that the capacity to think creativity creatively is in the thick of it and that as we keep pushing to automate and reaching for having something else do things for us.
We'll keep discovering those bits that are really the heart and soul of what what humans do which is
Since each other's needs anticipate and I joke often be able to apologize when we get it wrong like computation can't do that.
I'm going to just as well. The one last question.
I know there's a lot of people waiting one thing.
I wanted to underline which I loved in your presentation.
And in the book is the way that you use the task of Mechanical Turk itself to set tasks to gain to get research for the book.
I think this is a brilliant methodology.
So I just want to put a big fat line under that and then and then based on that I wanted to ask you if you could pull out for us the significance for you in doing transnational comparative work, especially as it relates to identifying the challenges and opportunities in labor organizing.
Yeah. No, I mean I think from the to be clear starting with India and the United States in some ways was following the labor markets that Amazon Mechanical Turk had created by paying in both cash and rupees they had built this labor market by Design without probably much thought certainly about the kinds of work forces.
It would create and I in drawing that comparison it meant we were constantly able to pull out the places where connection broke down the kinds of nationalisms that would spark around different work groups, for example, so the transnational comparison gives us a chance to see where two people throw boundaries back up and I thought was most striking in India how quickly a kind of panned in the end way of orienting to work across all the platforms also came to the Forefront.
So the number of women and men who would start referring to each other as sister and brother to navigate the gender politics of
King and settings with somebody of a different gender the the amazing use of English as a way of navigating linguistic boundaries and what that can mean the meshing and sidestepping of religious and cast differences those complexities could come out and in some ways being able to see the complexities around class and race that played out in the United States in different ways really came to the fore with that comparison the technique of putting the surveys online.
I think in many ways. I'm really dedicated to us always imagining that anthropology sociology of engaging people's lives means getting in their lives.
I have a I have a difficult time feeling like stopping at a discussion forum and letting that stand in for people's experiences can answer the questions.
I'm interested in I think it has everything to do with the question you're asking
For the most part the question we were asking was what does the rest of your life look like?
And so there was really no way to ask that without moving from those platforms into the their living rooms into the cafes they circulated in and that that became the the methodology.
Thank you who would like to ask a question Dana?
This is Mary's fault. She set me up.
She was like you have to ask a question was like I was all right ready so much of what you're grappling with is a dynamic that we've seen iterate over and over again throughout history and you've pointed to them by talking about the enslaved people and as a form of contract with in labor markets where different versions of capitalism have evolved in response to these different governing structures, and we keep seeing a regulatory move and capitalism evolved.
We are now at a late stage capitalism structure where we're not only seeing the efficiencies that are produced by capitalism as as an operating system, but reinforced as you point out by Technical Systems, but we're doing it in a environment to sort of Riff Off of Cerritos point where we're not actually dealing with bounded nation state structures, and I've noticed you're not screaming to tear down late-stage capitalism and maybe a
I know you but part of it is how do we actually think about the boundary work of nation state structures and the evolutions of late-stage capitalism.
Something that can actually grapple with this so that it doesn't just keep slipping in evolving.
Two things popped in my head the last week or so one is thinking multinationals have figured this out in some ways.
They know how to cash flow and so to take at face value that multinationals generating quite a bit of wealth internationally and circulating it internationally can't figure out how to circulate and distribute the value seems hell.
No. No, they should not govern know it is the say there's clearly a way to exchange money.
Globally. I'll just I'll say it flatly like that and that means in terms of governing the revenue generated the redistribution of it.
That is a global conversation.
We know that multinationals are regulated in a specific company or in specific countries start there.
So make the United States make the EU the Battleground for saying new classification.
Everybody gets Basics go from there.
I think it's for me very frustrating and realize how many large companies and we're pretty much in a monopolistic, you know World here how many of the large companies that have merged and acquired each other have been able to stay on the sidelines of a conversation around Universal Health Care in the United States that makes no sense.
And it should be on everybody's mind to be advocating to these companies and it can't be about just advocacy but certainly making the case why are you on the sidelines you benefit from being able to see this healthy Workforce?
And in fact one way to think about this as Supply chains and good work codes for Enterprises to say there should be a call for regulation that if you are hiring a vendor you should make sure that vendor provides.
Of care just as you are required or at least benefiting from providing Health Care.
There's a business case there can it happen without regulation know we all need to say this is ridiculous that we don't provide basic Healthcare and I would I would just keep making that case but the second thing that came to mind is that it really is on all of us to stop letting liberal and neoliberal economics to find the value of Labor to call Labor and Marketplace and not see the moralism within that like, I I'm just going to spell this out just plainly we have allowed people in Elite positions both government and private Enterprise to say that our labor is the same kind of capital as a set of Records or a car.
We're not durable goods labor means something else.
So let's stop assuming that the marketplace sets the value of our labor.
My salary is not coming from some magically.
Earned value of me on a Marketplace.
It's coming from Power.
I have a particular kind of power and privilege to command a price and that is that as a set of irrational power moves.
It's not the logic of the market playing out.
So I just I really want us all to start questioning.
There should be no turn to the market.
What is the market paying for this task?
It should be Baseline labor divert deserves support because we need healthy workers to move the world forward.
I'm a pragmatist. That's why I'm not that interested in blowing up capitalism writ large.
I don't know you could probably get me there Dana but there are alternative versions of marketplaces like Cooperative marketplaces marketplaces.
We haven't even imagined yet because we haven't let ourselves think that the market can't set the value of us nor should it and that's why that lineage
It was slavery. Why would we have ever imagined that the market or a market should Define the value of humans?
Let's stop that and and and set a Baseline and then go from there perks sure you get perks if you're an extra good worker.
Yeah.
Last question one more of those.
I think I might have a simple question.
But I'm I'm sort of thinking as you've been talking about people's power and how we might choose a baseline that might be a retainer or some sort of work for all do you think that that might be really difficult as more and more people are doing labor unwittingly.
Like for example people like Google uses verification to make sure you're not a robot and we're like great.
That's great. I want to improve on human but you're actually doing work for for that you're doing that task and you don't know that you're doing it.
So do you think that like Hulu or subscription services are going to start making people do work in order to watch a video and because they want to watch it.
They're going to do work like in these microtransactions.
Do you see that maybe killing the labor force to because all the works going to be spread out to everyone that are very willing to like
Watch their content to do it.
Really optimistic reasons that I think that won't happen one is that when because when people become more aware that when you check that, I'm not a robot that you're actually doing work for a company that makes a lot of money and doesn't actually make your service better.
We should all be saying he'll know and and it's not that we're going to walk away from it because we're all enjoying those Services is that we're all going to become publicly aware that that you are having your time taken you are having your time taken without your permission.
That should never be. Okay, right.
So one one answer to your question is we absolutely have to have more public awareness of the sheer robbery of our time.
That's that's happening.
We make pains the second response to your question.
We make pains in the book to distinguish between paid labor and unpaid labor.
And the reason to focus on paid labor is precisely say that is a different relationship.
It is a social or it's not a charity when you get a job from somebody.
You are providing value.
It's a business transaction be cold about it so that we can start living our lives and stop having work Define who we are right?
Like this is Kathy weeks is one of my favorites on this like, why are we not fighting for the end of work rather than for a 40-hour workweek?
Hell no, right.
So let's go there and I think the beginning of it is with an awareness of when we are giving away our and actually I think that's the wrong framing when our time is being taken from us.
Let's stop saying we're giving it away because our time is being taken from us without her permission and we have to we have to say that's not okay.
That's the first part.
Okay last question.
Thank you guys. This is just great.
So I wanted to ask about I'm looking at the cover of the book and intensely wondering who is this person and and it but it brings back the question the topic of the visibility of people doing this work and their their relative invisibility and I wondered if you could talk about that and talk about why or how that visibility might be important to the bigger equation of change that you imagine.
There's not a day that goes by that somebody doesn't tell me about their lift or their Uber driver when I talk about this book and so there's clearly something poignant and and pressing for people when the person that they're worried about.
Is it right in front of them?
I mean and that's a good thing and I think in some ways let's tactically deploy that if you're an organizer, I do think we care.
I mean, I know I'm a roll.
Was Optimist I think when we see someone in pain we want to relieve it.
Usually we save that for people.
We love the most but bar impulses there.
And so I want to believe that by raising visibility by seeing the people who do this work, but it changes what we want for them the you could just be crass and cynical and say this could be you so don't you want to change your circumstances will absolutely be someone in your life.
Do you want to see their life better?
So I think it is for me.
It's funny you raised that that the cover was actually really I was uncomfortable with that cover.
I found it sensationalistic.
I'll just say this. I love my process.
I don't know if they're here right now. Clearly what they wanted was to get this book and people's hands and they wanted something that people might reach for
And it might have that effect.
I hope it does that was their reason for me.
I'm now on this mission to find out who is he, you know, and I'll get back to you.
I'll post something I'll find out who he is.
Yeah, and that is actually a really complicated question because of the end of the day for the people.
I interviewed there folks doing their jobs living their lives and they're not particularly interested in actually for the folks.
I've asked you want to be on any of the TV shows.
I might be on and the first thing they say is no and the second thing they'll say is I don't have time and the third thing they'll say is I don't want to be seen as one of those people who's a victim.
So what I don't really appreciate as most of the coverage out there frames the people who do this work as victims or dupes or unaware of their circumstances the people doing this work are painfully aware of their circumstances.
And we would do Best by listening to them.
I think we could just listen rather than need to see them.
This isn't really about making you see everybody who's had a hand in making your social media palatable.
It's about knowing there are people who are helping you and they are working.
So how do we support them?
Thank you very much by the book so over here.
Thank you Dean.