Week 10 Digital Labour notes (Digital law blog)

What is digital labour? 

“The exchange of labour for money between individuals or companies via digital platforms that actively facilitate matching between providers and customers, on a short-term and payment by task basis.” 

(Trade Union Congress, 2021: 4) 

-Labour of sociality [Innate, uplifting element of human nature]

-Wage labour [unnatural. tedious, and agonising. It requires monetary compensation.]

-Free labour [UGC, users time, and attention, social networks , and meta data. Non consensual, stolen data.] 

-Labour of struggle [Worker generated content, WGC]

Is UGC and social media use, in general, free labour?

The dominant capital accumulation model of contemporary corporate Internet platforms is based on the exploitation of users’ unpaid labour, who engage in the creation of content and the use of blogs, social networking sites, wikis, microblogs, content sharing sites for fun and in these activities create value that is at the heart of profit generation (Fuchs and Sevignani, 2013: 237).

What is gift economy?

-An economic system based on gifting goods and services with no expectation of remuneration or reciprocity. Like vinted 

What is gig-economy?

-Workers are independent contractors, on call workers, or temp workers

-Advantages: Gig workers have high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety, and complexity. --

-Disadvantages: These mechanisms of control can result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, sleep deprivation and exhaustion.

Apps that allow you to outsource work such as fiver

Apps where you can find work like Indeed 

What is reputation economy?

-Credit score

-China social points 

It is measured through likes and impressions on social media platforms

The more followers you have, the bigger of a personality you are which means that you have a high reputation

General users and influencer fans 

They can take that reputation away in an instant if you are called out