iSchool Crosstalks: Labour and Information: The Tyranny of the Wage Relationship and Possible Alternatives

Session Description

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The Faculty of Information has launched the ‘Crosstalk’ series, a collection of conversations on topics spanning multiple research areas and that may have been approached from different theoretical, conceptual, and methodological lenses. The goal is to tune our senses to seeing possible and ‘hidden’ connections between works and to engender disciplinary, multi/interdisciplinary, and/or cross-sectoral collaboration. Contact research.ischool@utoronto.ca to learn more.

Session Description:
Understanding the now & new: The conversation will focus on intersections between labor and information, considering new and ongoing forms of exploitation and precariousness of labour, as well as alternative possibilities considering the workers’ point of view. This involves platformization of labour across sectors and the role of information. Around the world, platform labour has intensified historical inequalities in the world of work, including issues of gender, race and migration. In fact, platform labor takes advantage of structural inequalities, such as informality itself, especially in the majority world, to intensify local and global dependencies. But this context is not definitive. On the contrary, in recent years, workers and policy makers have been fighting for alternatives to platform labour, whether in terms of regulation, workers organizing or building worker-owned platforms. Thus, the talk will focus on alternatives for workers towards a fairer platform economy, which considers issues such as tech sovereignty, intersectionality, and fair work principles. The talk will present concrete cases from Latin America, both in relation to workers and policy.

The historic context as a measure of the transformation of work: As a point of historic comparison, it will also reflect on working conditions in a traditional information labour environment: the public library. Ubiquitous institutions, their seeming banality belies a kind of “canary in the mine” reality with respect to historic and contemporary labour conditions. Both as early adopters of information technologies but also publicly funded institutions, the long slow retrenchment of the past 40+ years, and the unraveling of the social safety net can be seen in contemporary conditions (the weakening of collective bargaining power, incremental deskilling, and an exchange of living labour for dead). From a researcher perspective, insights into challenges around access to workers, and pushback from managerial elites combine to make telling a story other than “motherhood and apple pie” difficult.

Speakers: Prof. Rafael Grohmann and Prof. Siobhan Stevenson[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]