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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
What is work? Who is considered a worker? What are its limits, be they conceptual, legal or political? And what does contesting the limits of work allow theorists and workers to do?
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
The question of who is considered a worker, what is considered work, when a person is considered to be working, and where a workplace is are categories that have been very much taken for granted by establishment union organising and academics. Different theorists have intervened in that to say these boundaries are in fact contested; that there are, for various reasons, different forms of labour and people that are not included in these categories, not legible within them, and that therefore do not have access to the fruits of labour victories or the labour rights that are considered regular norms.
What we see is a carving out of populations from these categories, as a way of dispossessing them and the generalisation of this process across the workforce has happened more quickly than previously thought. This goes against what was previously imagined — that economic growth, linear capitalist development would integrate everyone into an industrial working class. In fact, what happened is the opposite: those conditions of exclusion and expulsion have become generalised across the workforce, even among those previously considered “regular”.
In the field of study I’m in — platform labour studies — there is this story that platformisation is tied to the rise of a precariat, that we have these social and labour norms from the postwar era, and that they have been degraded by neoliberalism, of which one feature is platformisation. It’s one part of a broader narrative of the decline of the postwar social contract. For me, what’s missing from this story is that the postwar social contract was only ever a reality for a very small group of workers at a very historically specific moment.
Actually, that postwar social contract had very much been based on exclusions, exploitation and extraction from the majority of the world’s workforce. What we’re seeing now is simply the category of people that have access to that social contract is rapidly shrinking. That’s being read as a new kind of phenomenon when actually, it’s the generalisation of a phenomenon that has existed for a huge number of people.
When we look at the organising consequences of that, that’s where it’s really important to rely heavily on the conceptual and organisational forms that have emerged from movements that we don’t typically think of, as traditional labour organising. I'm talking about feminist and Marxist feminist contributions to theorising categories like worker and work, but also, I think disability studies is incredibly instructive here, especially on the consequences and political subjectivities that emerge from being deemed “unproductive”. That’s what I’m interested in: what are the processes of exclusion and carving out from rights-conferring categories, whether it’s worker, citizen, or human, and what are the consequences of that?
What are the processes of exclusion and carving out from rights-conferring categories, whether it’s worker, citizen, or human, and what are the consequences of that?
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
I like how you put that — the focus on the processes that lead to these expulsions and exclusions because sometimes the way exclusion is discussed is as a form of conceptual harm rather than a material process through or by which people are excluded and expelled from various things.
Your research looks at racial platform capitalism, what is that? How would you describe it?
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
At its core, my work is about processes of social differentiation, whether that’s racialisation, gendering, or (dis)ability, and how all of these shape and are shaped by the organisation of labour and capital. I’m interested in that historically: i.e. how capitalism has come to exist through these processes; and in the present: i.e. how it is continuing to exist through making use of these processes, and how these processes are themselves being changed. It’s historical, contemporary and more speculative too.
Racial platform capitalism is a way of me trying to situate platform capitalism as not just an innovation of labour reorganisation, or technological innovation, or all of the things that we’re told are the precursors of platform capitalism — the financialisaton of the economy, the building of telecommunications infrastructure, regulatory weakening, austerity and so on. My intervention is to identify processes of racialisation and bordering as being preconditions to the platform economy, and as phenomena that are being re-shaped by the emergence of platform capitalism(s) and to situate platform capitalism almost as an innovation of racial capitalism, by which I mean, a capitalism whose ability to reproduce itself is dependent upon the social differentiation of its workforce into workers and non-workers. It’s a deceptively simple concept.
I’m interested also in the varying ways in which racialisation helps us to understand how platforms are developing. For example, in the case of Uber, you have the development of these incredibly punitive algorithmic management systems in the name of passenger safety, which is reliant on racialised ideas about who the worker is, who the “threat” is, and the management of low-wage racialised populations. In these cases, this is really in the DNA of algorithmic management systems.
My work looks at how racialisation informs the development and emergence of platform capitalism and aims to reanimate the question of what racialisation looks like in platform labour. I’m becoming increasingly interested in how processes of racialisation that historically have been very tied to visual markers of race and “risk”. How does this work in data-driven systems, where it happens through inference, it happens through proxy, and it happens through the kind of structures that are emerging from racialised contexts, but which are able to divorce themselves from those processes? How is the platformisation of labour reshaping the mechanisms through which racialisation operates?
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
In light of the process first account you have outlined, how should we — the left — understand race and gender? Do we need to revise our concepts?
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
The number one thing that we need to break out of, theoretically and organisationally, is this notion that groups of people are affected by different issues, and sometimes those issues overlap — or the way that people experience those issues, is shaped by how they experience other issues. We need to move from this idea — in which issues of racism, issues of gendering, and issues of disability are specialist concerns for particular groups, and rather understand these as processes that are heavily embedded in the construction of systems that exploit us all.
There’s a difference, I think, between seeing particular struggles as the exclusive remit of people who are understood to be part of that group, versus understanding racialisation or gendering or disability [as processes], and the ways in which they allow capitalism to reproduce itself, therefore meaning that it is something we are all implicated in.
The process first, rather than the identity first approach helps us to understand how we are all staked in systems that rely on differentiation between us.
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
You can see the difference between that model and the model of “who is affected by XYZ thing”, because the latter is pretty static, whereas the former can account for how things change.
There’s a difference between seeing particular struggles as the exclusive remit of people who are understood to be part of that group, versus understanding racialisation or gendering or disability as processes, and the ways in which they allow capitalism to reproduce itself, as something we are all implicated in.
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
How do sectors become gendered or raced? One thing that might be relevant here is the work you’ve done on the importance of cheapness and surplus populations.
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
The question of cheap labour ties in really neatly with the idea of a process first analysis of racialisation.
Oftentimes, you’ll hear from lefties or union organisers that don’t have a literacy in racial capitalism the idea that we need to have stronger borders because British workers are going to be undercut by cheap foreign labour. This develops into this analysis that goes something like this: neoliberals love open borders or open borders are capitalist because of the idea that you can bring in “cheap” labour.
This misses the question of what makes someone cheap; people aren’t born with price tags on their heads that say how much they’re worth per hour. People are made cheap, and they’re made cheap through racism, they’re made cheap through a global political order that inherits the blueprint established by colonialism, that allows for one country with the most military might to maintain economic power and control. It’s not about the labourer or the labour itself being inherently cheap or expensive; it’s processes that make some labourers and some forms of labour cheap, and others not.
And so really, if what you want to get rid of is the problem of bosses and employers and capital pitting workers against one another to get the cheapest price, what you’re really trying to dismantle, or what you should be trying to dismantle, is the system of racism and imperialism that produces some people as “cheaper” than others.
This is a great way of understanding why the problem of racial capitalism is not just a problem for the worker who is produced as cheaper (although it obviously is clearly a problem for them), but it’s also a problem for the worker for whom the cheapness of that other worker is used to beat them with and is used to discipline them with. You can’t fix that with hard borders.
Now, how does labour become racialised or gendered? That’s a really big question. I think that there are material processes, that is to say, forms and ways in which, for example, in the platform economy, you’ll have workers who have been excluded from other forms of work. Either they’ll be excluded through racism or they’ll be excluded through racialised processes like bordering. You’ll have either undocumented workers in the case of some platforms or workers who are documented, who are citizens, but for various reasons are not able to access regular standard employment.
You have this material sorting of differentially racialised workers into different forms of work, whereby downwardly racialised workers get put into the most dangerous forms of work or the most poorly paid forms of work or the forms of work that have unsocial working hours that prevent them from being able to have a life outside of work.
And then, you have the more sociocultural processes that dovetail very neatly with those material ones whereby, because of the ways in which particular forms of workers are tracked into particular forms of labour, a sociocultural narrative then develops that justifies it by saying that there’s some kind of cultural and biological suitability of that person to that work.
In my research on childcare platforms, the vast majority of the women on these platforms are Latin American. A lot of them are Brazilian and undocumented, therefore can’t access any forms of regular employment, because the “hostile environment” makes migrating from non-European countries very hard unless you are incredibly well-off and highly-educated in particular sectors. The hostile environment also makes it impossible to rent officially, so they’re moving about a lot, meaning they need work that can follow them, which platform work can. There is this strange recursivity because people think that Brazilian women are natural caregivers, that they’re family-friendly and good at childcare. It ends up being portrayed as a natural trait, and therefore not a skill. It can’t use skill because it’s a “natural biological instinct”. In this way, labour is racialised and also racialising.
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
What do you take democracy at work to mean (and you can take both of those terms as narrowly or as broadly as you would like) in the context of platform work?
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
That’s a really difficult question in many ways. The thing that people often will come up with is: “oh, well, you can have platform cooperatives”. And that’s definitely interesting, but the emergence of platforms is so deeply tied to the broader context of dispossession — you can’t rewire or redesign the internal model without changing that broader context. The platform economy would not have emerged in the way that it did if we did not have a financial crisis that dispossessed vast numbers of people from the standard employment relation, it wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have the hostile environment, carving out so many different workers from the ability to work regularly. It wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have austerity, that meant that care systems are failing and people are having to turn to apps to find people to look after their children. All of these contexts are why this phenomenon has emerged. It becomes really difficult to imagine an alternative.
I was talking to people who founded this cooperative food delivery platform called Wings. It was really interesting. There was a local element to it that was really important.
I go back and forth on this idea of localism and how localising is important for democratising, but increasingly, I feel that one of the things that the platform economy does, that is so brutal to workers is it promises scale in a way that just is impossible for workers to keep up with. Particularly when it comes to service work and forms of labour that require intimacy — care work, someone coming into your taxi, beauty work — whatever it is, massively expanding the scale and geographic territory where that’s happening, it becomes really difficult to manage those relationships in ways that are conducive to good working environments.
Wings [a food delivery co-op] is doing great things, but it hits the barrier of the hostile environment, because unless you’re willing to break the law, it is really difficult to meaningfully democratise that work because you’re talking about people who are carved out of every single mechanism of accountability that could be available to them in terms of work rights violations. It’s really difficult to talk about this without looking at those broader contexts. It’s not a computational design problem, it’s not an optimisation problem. A lot of AI ethics people treat workers' rights and the problem of exploitation and migration as things that can be solved by optimisation. But they can’t because the raison d’être of platforms is to capture and monetise and exploit informal flows of labour, of people who are carved out of protective regimes.
I don’t see how you can democratise that without tackling those broader systems. In a society in which people aren’t systematically carved out of rights in that way, could you algorithmically manage a workforce in a way that is not dehumanising or prone to punishment? Very possibly. But that question is so far down the line that it becomes difficult to answer.
It’s not a computational design problem, it’s not an optimisation problem. A lot of AI ethics people treat workers' rights and the problem of exploitation and migration as things that can be solved by optimisation. But they can’t because the raison d’être of platforms is to capture and monetise and exploit informal flows of labour, of people who are carved out of protective regimes.
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
Maybe it’s one way in which this aspect of the economy maybe differs from the standard story of, there’s a factory, it’s a revolutionary moment, you expropriate the factory, you have all of this fixed capital on the ground, and you say: “now we can make the stuff we were already making, now perhaps we can make different stuff, though we will need to change some things in the factory. But it’s in some ways the same, except this time, we’re in charge”. But if you have something like the platform economy, which is so entangled with these mechanisms designed to isolate and atomise workers, and also create new “needs” within social reproduction, say to have something delivered very quickly to you. Maybe it’s not just enough to say we should capture that apparatus and leave it largely unchanged. We can’t just carry on the same but with slightly modified algorithms.
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
Ultimately, I think you shouldn’t need to hire someone to walk thirteen minutes to get you your food unless you have a specific, say disability-related need. The “problems” that the platform economy are trying to fix are problems that we could do away with.
The question of atomisation is really important. While you don’t have a minicab office anymore, in the case of Uber, you might have a place at which workers would congregate. But when it comes to childcare workers, the spatial dynamic of that work has shifted such that workers are not working locally as much anymore.
When I have spoken to nannies, who don’t work on platforms, who tend to be British citizens, they will have an area that they work in, say, Brockley or Norwood, or Islington. They’ll know the schools really well and they will be recommended through word of mouth in a confined area. There will be spaces for them to meet each other outside of homes, and that gives them a rootedness. They will be locally embedded, they’ll know the teachers, which means they’re harder to replace. But on a platform, suddenly you’ll have workers travelled across London to do one-off sits. It’s further atomising work that was already really atomised.
But this is also what Wages for Housework and the Women’s Strike have theorised: how do we engage people who do not necessarily think of themselves as workers or who feel uncomfortable with the idea that what they’re doing is work? How do we engage and organise people who don’t meet with one another in workplaces regularly, a dynamic that union organising relies on? They’ve been grappling with that for a really long time. It’s looking at that, and how they push through those contradictions, that is useful for organising in the platform economy.
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
There’s a tradition to draw on and learn from. I completely agree about needing someone to complete a thirteen-minute walk for you. This is historically so new — to me, it seems symptomatic of a low wage and unequal economy where you can have people — often who are pretty low-paid themselves — who can afford to pay someone else to save them a twenty-minute task.
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
There’s a downward pressure, in platform childcare it’s really easy to pit these women against one another and say that it’s just all these rich, upper-middle-class professional women hiring working-class undocumented women — and to some extent that’s true, but for women hiring nannies, it’s often because there is a pressure to be available all the time for their employers. I speak to nannies who tell me they’re called into work because the mum needed to attend a last-minute meeting from home, so they call someone to be with the kids for two hours. This creates pressure all the way down.
So the shift in working conditions in these upper echelons then intensifies reliance on this awful, exploitative network, which is not conducive to good childcare or good working rights — the scale demands of the platform mean they’re not building that relationship or understanding and trust that makes a childcare relationship easier. Ultimately, the platform infrastructures being produced to meet our various essential needs are shaky, unstable and ineffective.
[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]
Yes, if we tried to design from scratch — from the perspective of workers and community — this infrastructure, there’s no way it would look like this. You wouldn’t get shopping to people this way, or childcare provision.
Finally is there a book or text on workers in the platform economy that you would recommend to readers?
[.cdw-name]Dalia Gebrial[.cdw-name]
I’m going to go with two: one of them is nonfiction, and one of them is fiction. The nonfiction is Rethinking Racial Capitalism by Gargi Bhattacharyya. I think that book just so brilliantly approaches the question of work and workers’ rights and exploitation from this holistic perspective that does not just locate labour struggles in the workplace but is able to conceptually reckon with the splintered and often contradictory politics in which this is all mired. It’s the book with the conceptual chops to deal with the messy web that we’re in right now.
The fiction book is Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. That book brilliantly approaches the question of work and of what is considered work. And who is considered a worker? What are the consequences of being considered a worker and of not being considered a worker? And the relationship between non-work and work, especially in relation to marriage and love. It’s able to hold that question of what is considered work.
Both of those books do a really good job of grappling with issues of work, autonomy, exploitation and empowerment in ways that can give space to contradiction and nuance, rather than black-and-white boundaries or fixed identities.
