Interview: Sarrah Kassem

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What is the platform economy?

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

The platform economy is a useful way for us to make sense of ongoing changing dynamics in the economy. It’s a way to categorise companies together on the basis of their function. And in this case, it mediates products or services via the infrastructure of the internet. It’s changed over time too — there was a time where the terms “shared economy” or “on-demand” economy were used instead. Importantly, “platform economy” can describe this without attaching a positive meaning. While it’s useful, it is a wide term, so it’s helpful to make differentiations within the platform economy.

Platforms have developed in different moments in time and space, and in relation to different political conditions, different economic, technological, and societal conditions. It’s not a coincidence that Amazon grew out of the 1990s, whereas Uber boomed after the last financial crisis. We can look at it historically, and then within that, we can consider how capital organises labour and labour organises itself. We can look at it from the perspective of labour and from the perspective of capital and at how the development of one relates back to the development of the other: capital will organise workers in a certain way, but workers respond and organise, which forces further reorganisation.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Why is it a useful framework and how have you used it in your research on resistance within the contemporary workplace?

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

I find it especially useful when trying to think about what these companies have in common and the ways by which they organise their workers. This does not necessarily mean that every aspect of how they organise workers is new, but I think it helps us think through these dimensions and the perspective of capital, to think of these particularities as well, not just the similarities.

There are so many different platforms that organise workers in different ways — the platform economy, to me, is an example of how we see different forms of labour organising happening — you have everything from what we understand as its more traditional forms (strikes, top-down unions) but also bottom-up and grassroots initiatives and unions, like the Amazon Labor Union. It also forces us to think of news ways of how workers claim agency when they’re no longer organised in traditional ways, which we see with something like Amazon Mechanical Turk, or with food delivery workers.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How do platforms affect class consciousness? Or situations of the dispersal of workers rather than the concentration of them that might be said to affect industrial production?

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

The concept of class consciousness is so important when we think about agency. Yet at the same time, I find it incredibly difficult to analytically approach as a concept. In a similar way to a concept like alienation or exploitation, how do you talk about class consciousness as a researcher without making a judgement about how much class consciousness these workers have, as if it’s a scale. I really would not want to do that, because I feel that as a researcher it’s not my place. But it’s a great bridge as concept to explain how workers — despite their exploited working conditions, and despite their alienation, they will organise.

When we approach class consciousness for the platform economy, but even outside of it, we always have to contextualise the workers. So, on the one hand, what are their material conditions, what kind of laws do they have, what kind of visas are they on? And that can affect it, because you can have the class consciousness, and you might want to walk out, but you end up not walking out because it means you lose your employment, or you have to leave the country.

And that brings us to the question of what happens when workers are not brought together under one roof. Amazon, the e-commerce platform, is a platform, for the purpose of my analysis, so there is always a more traditional example, where we would see exactly this — how workers understand their labour as collective labour, where they all have one part to play within the circulation of commodities in a warehouse to send out the product. Where, if they all stopped performing that labour, through a strike for instance, could really disrupt Amazon. Within the platform economy, the Amazon warehouse is probably one of the most traditional forms of organising workers. It’s almost like a traditional labour organisation — from the perspective of capital and labour — but brought to the 21^st century because of the additional role that technology plays.

Things look a bit different once you take into account places where workers are not all being paid a traditional time wage as they would have been in a warehouse, and where they’re location-based and not all under a single roof. Take the case of food delivery workers who are maybe working in different parts of the city, and who don’t go into the workplace and see the people they’re working with. But, there is research that shows that while delivery workers are waiting at restaurants, they talk to each other and have organised in different places on different occasions. So, there is a location element in this case.

This takes on an additional dimension when we think of web-based platform workers like Amazon Mechanical Turk, where workers who are located anywhere across the world. On Amazon Mechanical Turk, you’re working behind your own interface. On this interface, you have no way of interacting with any other worker, you’re not even aware of who is online working at the same time. The request for the task can be anonymised so you might not even know who you are working for.

The development of class consciousness is shaped by these different contexts and expressed in different ways: whether it is an Amazon warehouse worker who is walking out because in the Amazon warehouses, you see that class consciousness is very much coupled with something like subjectivity on the basis of race or on the basis of sex or on the basis of gender. We know that the platform economy predominantly tailors its work to low-wage work or what is considered on the market to be “low-skilled”, which we know with the development of capitalism has meant that you will have migrant workers or refugees doing this kind of work. So, race is absolutely crucial here in the development [of consciousness] and in identifying with one another.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How are current technological developments reorganising work within and beyond the platform economy?

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

There are a lot of trends that the platform economy is reproducing. I think the platform economy has benefited from the ongoing deregulation of labour and the labour market that we’ve seen over the last decades. One could ask oneself, if there’s a reregulation happening now with a possible directive on platform work that is yet to be seen. Also, even with the reregulation of platform work when workers are reclassified, historically capital finds ways to produce and reproduce a race to the bottom. So, if you’re going to regulate web-based platform work somewhere and reclassify workers — what will happen to workers in the Global South, who are receiving a lower wage anyway? This is something to think about when it comes to the deregulation of labour markets.

The other thing is the nature of the work, of the gig economy as piecework. Piecework has been instrumental historically to capital. It has been around in different parts of the economy, whether the formal or the informal, and platforms are contributing to that particular form of precarity on the labour market, especially through low-wage piecework. The majority of platforms that are out there — Amazon’s warehouses (though paid an hourly wage), Amazon Mechanical Turk, the food delivery platforms — are based on piecework.

When it comes to the reorganisation, and this is very important to emphasise, is that platforms have been trendsetters when it comes to algorithmic management. What’s very scary about this is that other companies outside of the platform economy can look to the platform economy to produce this and see this as an efficient way of organising workers.

Algorithmic management combines with the trends the platform economies already produce, surveillance, for example. In the Amazon warehouses there is social surveillance, so your manager is watching you, which has also historically been the case. But additionally, you have surveillance through technology. This is why a lot of scholars have been talking about the digital panopticon. Because many platforms are tech companies, they’re at the forefront of developing technology that can then be implemented precisely to monitor and manage and surveil the labour process. This contributes to the further quantification of labour, and this, in turn, has fundamental consequences when it comes to class consciousness, or alienation, or workers’ organisation: how do you resist when technology is always watching you, is always counting the seconds, is always reading you?

If the whole labour process is managed through algorithms and by algorithms, then when something goes wrong in the algorithm, who do you reach out to? This has been a massive problem for platform workers.

In the case of Amazon warehouses, you have this technological and social aspect to it. On Amazon Mechanical Turk, the whole labour process is then mediated through this infrastructure where you are given an approval rating. And then based on the approval rating, you have access to certain jobs — micro-tasks. The algorithm is really managing you and the requester of the task does not have to actually reply to you.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How have workers responded to these changes or this reorganisation of work?

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

Here I start with some questions: where is the worker located? What does their labour market look like? What are their material conditions? When workers resist, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Some platforms work to undermine labour organisation and in some countries, there are more obstacles to unionising. That’s one dimension. Another is that platforms, depending on the country, will employ different tactics to undermine and fragment workers.

This is related to how the workers are organised [by the platform work], but it also depends on how workers respond. The first dimension I would want to emphasise is, because of the way that the platforms deny workers individual acts of resistance — things like slowing down at work; how can you slow down, when you have those algorithms, timing you constantly, when they can calculate the time you are on task and time you are off task, when they're telling you this is your units per hour rate, as we see in Amazon warehouses, and this is what you have to fulfil every hour in order to be not an underperformer — I think that these individual acts of resistance become incredibly difficult, and almost impossible, depending on which platform we're speaking about.

The question then arises, how do workers organise? This brings me back to the very first question where I think that the platform economy really demonstrates the wide spectrum of organising and prompts us to think about how we should think of organising. On the one hand, we think of traditional forms of organising, something like a strike. Now, we’ve seen strikes happen in location-based traditional wage platforms like Amazon warehouses, even in countries where a few years ago, it was thought that it’s very difficult to organise a warehouse. We’ve seen this type of organising happen not only in the Global North but also in the Global South, such as India. This can take place through a more traditional union that has existed for some time, or through a grassroots union, like the Amazon Labor Union in the US. In both cases, what we can see, and including in the case of Germany, we can see that there the labour movement has a changing face. This is not the white, male labour movement — we see that the people on the front line are people of colour. In this more traditional form of organising, workers are striking, unionising, and trying to push for collective bargaining agreements where this is possible within their specific national contexts.

Now, if we shift over to gig-based location workers, such as delivery workers, here we see also, grassroots bottom-up labour organising happening, coupled together with striking in specific contexts. These strikes can be legal in other contexts, and we have seen this in Germany, when food delivery workers of Gorillas had gone on strike, it was a wildcat strike. Now the courts have said that this was not legal at the end of the day, because strikes have to go through a union. In this specific instance, workers went on strike within that moment, because it was related to the weather conditions; it was snowing, and it was incredibly dangerous to get on the bike to deliver food. The legal context can create obstacles, and here the company ended up taking those workers to court.

Now, if we shift over to the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, I think this really pushes our way of thinking beyond the traditional sense of striking. Of course, striking and industrial action are instrumental to workers advancing their class interests, but how do you organise a strike when you are labouring online and your fellow workers are somewhere across the world, in a different timezone, and you have no idea who they are? What we’ve seen there that workers are organised by the infrastructure in such a way that alienates them from their own interests. There are things like online communities, such as Reddit threads where Amazon Mechanical Turk workers give each other advice, especially on finding higher paid tasks (some tasks can pay as low as one cent per task). Of course, workers don’t have to do that. They could perceive each other as competition and say, “why should I give someone across the world who I don’t even know, tips and advice as to how to best navigate the platform when I could just snatch up those tasks myself?”.  There are also digital interfaces like Turkopticon, which was created by researchers — you can see here how the academic community can bridge and help or create supporting structures for labour organisation. Here, researchers turned the panopticon on its head, and workers got to rate task requesters, telling each other who to avoid because they might not pay you. This is another instance where we see labour organising happening in a different way.

Workers have different power resources that they can mobilise — such as the structural (striking), the associational (by organising as a collective), the societal (expanding their cause to a larger public discussion) — all of these power resources express themselves differently depending on the platform that the workers are on. Central to this are the spatial dimensions: if you’re working in an Amazon warehouse, it’s not just the local dimension that’s crucial, but also the national and the transnational, because Amazon has a decentralised network of warehouses, so if workers go on strike in one warehouse, its orders can be shifted across borders, say from Germany to Poland. Amazon is able to use workers in Poland as strikebreakers when workers go on strike in Germany. This transnational dimension, or global dimension is also part and parcel of the Mechanical Turk labour force because anyone across the globe can do that kind of labour.  

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

The next question is a methodological one. Why study the platform economy, or any feature of work, from below?

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

I would argue that it is absolutely important to study from below, because at the end of the day, platforms and the economy, are only running because there are workers who are running it. If we leave out the below, it’s a very deterministic perspective, it would imply that change is only possible from above, meaning the conditions would have to change, or the platforms would have to decide as capital sort of how, what do we do differently, or regulation would have to come from above.

Now, also, historically, we know that changes also come about from below; it is no coincidence that the working day has been substantially shortened now compared to a few centuries ago, or even a few decades ago, or a few years ago, depending on where you are in the world. It is also no coincidence that we now have something like a weekend. This is very much tied to the agency of workers and the different ways through which workers have resisted time and time again, and have walked out of the job or expressed their opinions and organised.

Changes in the platform economy can happen through political-economic conditions — changes in venture capital can affect platforms. But at the same time, changes can come from below, and we need to account for that.

By studying from below, we’re humanising the debate. We need to centre workers within the debate. So I think when we're doing labour research, the question is always how do you centre workers without speaking for workers? That’s a dilemma — as a researcher, you might be supporting the labour struggle, but you still need to avoid speaking for workers. A starting point is shedding light on the acts that are happening and speaking to workers doing them. At the end of the day, we only know much about labour struggles because workers are brave enough to speak to us, whether that’s the media or researchers. We can link this back to their societal power — it strengthens the labour struggle on multiple fronts.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

In the book, you turn to a kind of whole host of Marxist concepts to explain contemporary work. I think this is really useful. And I think it's makes the book, really useful for people that are also trying to understand these concepts. I was interested in why you wanted to use them and what you think is kind of gained from using them?

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

We’re seeing sort of a revival of Marxist concepts and analytical tools. I think that we need to talk about them and we need to break them down to make sure they are actually helpful and how to possibly expand these to understand our world today. Through Marxist concepts or critical engagement with capitalism, we can understand better the inequalities that exist in today’s world, and understand how they tie to one another. By going back to Marx, we find a theoretical foundation on which to build other concepts that have developed since. Marx’s work is a systematic way to analyse capitalism, politically, economically and socially. I think also, it helps us to understand capitalism is a holistic sort of system, to think of how a change in certain conditions brings about changes in other conditions. We can think more dialectically in terms of relations, but not deterministically. If we think of technological conditions, for example, the technological conditions within the 1990s, it was through the dissemination of the internet that we saw platforms erupting and growing. But platforms would have never come about and grown the way that they did with this growth before profit model, if it wasn't for financial capital, feeding into and pumping sort of these platforms with money. That is what we saw in the 1990s, right, with the venture capital and with initial public offerings going on the stock market, but then the dot-.com bubble burst. So all of a sudden, you had these economic conditions, having a snowball effect, also on the political conditions and on the societal conditions and on the tech conditions.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I wanted to ask about alienation in particular, because lots of people see it as tainted with a kind of humanist, or essential, or otherwise troubling baggage. But you seem to be saying that we needn’t worry about that. I find that quite sympathetic — it’s something I’ve found in teaching, for example: alienation resonates with lots of people.

[.cdw-name]Sarrah Kassem[.cdw-name]

I agree with that. I think, in fact, when you speak to workers themselves, sometimes even they might use this term or use a term that kind of describes a sense of disconnection. I think in our current moment in capitalism, it’s almost an opportunity. You know, if you bring it to the table, we can talk about it, and then we can change that. And I think one thing I would want to add to alienation is — and this is how it connects to the rest of the analysis — alienation opens up ways to make sense of working conditions and to say “what can we do about these working conditions?”. That’s why I think I’m committed to analysing alienation, but if we stop the analysis there we would be stripping workers and labour of their agency, because we're saying, you know, what, under capitalism, it's just the way it is — as long as capitalism exists, you are exploited, and you are alienated. And if we, if we stop there, then it would mean that change is not possible and change from below is not possible. And essentially, this is how it ties back to class consciousness. It is because we, as humans, have a consciousness and this consciousness under capitalism ties back to the interests we have in improving our realities, our material realities, because this is what structures society. It’s tied to capitalism but also patriarchy, sex, colonialism, race, and how these all come together when workers say “yes, I am alienated, and yes, the material conditions are not in my favour, neither are the laws, but I will organise, and I will resist”, and this is what we see across history.

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You can purchase Sarrah's book, "Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization" here: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/work-and-alienation-in-the-platform-economy