Kate Lappin (KL): Across the world, digital transnational corporations (TNCs), collectively known as Big Tech, are fundamentally shifting the political, economic, and social landscapes of workers’ lives. There hasn’t been a change this big since the industrial revolution. And, like the industrial revolution, this revolution too is fundamentally shifting our ability to organise and exercise power – as workers, as rights holders, and as users of public services. In keeping with the overarching theme of this series, our conversation will assess the ways in which the dominance of digital behemoths is upending workers’ lives through constant surveillance and monitoring, incessant data capture, and algorithm-fueled inequalities. We will reflect on the need for a new social contract that centers workers’ data rights, and the role of labor unions and social movements in this regard. Finally, we will mull over new strategies and alliances that can propel us towards a better future of work. Our focus will be on the Latin American and Asia Pacific contexts since this is where much of Sofía’s and my work is based.

Let us start Sofía, with how you think the digital revolution and the growth of Big Tech corporate power has impacted workers. 

Sofía Scasserra (SS): In recent years, the growth of digital TNCs has affected how we communicate, what we buy, and how we work. The introduction of technology into the workplace has begun to subject workers, as you mentioned, to constant surveillance, absorbing data from them and ushering in a new phase of cyber capitalism. And as we know, the data thus accumulated is reconfigured into raw material for developing more technologies that will then replace or discipline the same workers. These technologies are produced largely in the Global North and imported to developing countries in the South. This is what we call digital colonialism, and it forecloses any effective digital industrialization in the Global South. Of course, this is highly dangerous, especially for public services, since the technologies that are being imported are concerned not with social benefit but corporate profit. 

The world of work in Latin America is diverse and complex. Informality is rampant and the digital divide has intensified existing inequalities. Some sectors have hyper-technological unicorns such as Argentina’s Mercado Libre, even as entire regions are stranded without internet access and knowledge of technology management. This gap affects the arena of work, since it is not easy to train workers when a new technological tool enters the workplace, often leading to job losses. That said, the state of work in the region is not rendered ‘sick’ by technology and robotics, but by labor fraud. The use of technologies to precaritize, outsource, and overload workers is common across countries in Latin America. This situation is not the fault of technology per se, but its poor implementation and the lack of regulation. And finally, the issue of ‘data as the new raw material’ is starting to ring alarm bells. UNI Global Union and Public Services International (PSI) have both done extensive work on this really important issue. In your work at PSI, Kate, how do you see the lack of regulatory oversight on data rights affecting workers?

KL: You’re right. World over, governments have largely failed to tackle fundamental questions about the value and power of our metadata, what it means for this level of intelligence and control to be in the hands of Big Tech monopolies, and what the role of democratic governments, entrusted with upholding human rights, should be in data governance. Over the past decade, discussions inspired by colleagues at IT for Change have made me consider and compare the changes that workers and communities currently face with those of communities confronted by the enclosure of lands and the introduction of industrial manufacturing in the past. 

Both the industrial and the data revolutions involve powerful private interests capturing or enclosing a resource that was previously not a financialized commodity, and consequently amassing even greater wealth and power. It is useful to think about these histories because trade unionism was born out of workers’ struggles in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It led to better wages for some organized workers and spurred further demands for public services and a more representative democracy. These past gains are quickly being dismantled, often under the guise of technological restructuring. 

Many private companies have now acquired a monopolistic hold over the metadata governments need to operate critical public services. Many governments are handing over rights to such data to companies without understanding their value or implications for effective public service delivery. Giving away rights over data to the private sector not only strips the government of potential revenue, but also undermines the capacity to govern, provide public services, and ensure decent work. 

Google Maps and Uber hold essential data on city traffic flows, genome mapping companies are collecting massive databases on DNA sequencing required to develop future medicines, and Facebook can influence election results with essentially no regulatory oversight. Global data companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alibaba and their host governments are pushing for new e-commerce rules to be adopted at the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are backing trade agreements that will constrain the capacity of governments to develop new ways to treat data as a collective social good. Already, rules that civil society has termed ‘digital colonization’ prohibit national regulations for data localization and requirements for digital companies to have a local presence, restrict access to source code, and limit the liability of Internet Service Providers.

The business model of Big Tech companies is based on their ability to effectively rewrite economic rules – they can avoid taxes by directing most of their economic activity through tax havens, they have largely avoided antitrust laws that were designed to stop monopoly power, and they have created fictions like the ‘self-employed worker’ and ‘flexible work’ to get around labor laws. 

SS: Also, these rules will weaken the terms of trade, pushing poorer countries to be only the consumers of technology, stripped of any access to data that could help develop and improve their own ecosystems and public policies. At various multistakeholder forums, we are being forced to approve rules that will determine an economy we are only just starting to understand. It is hard to imagine that poorer countries really understand what they are giving away if they sign these rules. 

These rules and the new models that are being designed come under the umbrella of platformization of work and are already affecting all employment. When we talk about platformization of work, we refer to a world of work that is mediated by digital TNCs which have legal addresses in tax havens, and act as ‘mere intermediaries’ in the data economy through web platforms. This closely aligns with the WTO’s idea of ‘servicification’ of manufacture, which classifies everything, except the final product, as services. One rather extreme version of this idea will see every worker is a micro-enterprise that provides a service to a company through the intermediation of a platform. 

This stance is being resisted in various parts of the world. Even workers who are employed by platforms are finding ways to resist the precarity to which they are subjected. Their victories have taken the form of labor laws that recognize the platform as a company and its workers as dependents, or cooperatives that organize workers in ways that give them more power to decide how to offer their work. Labor unions are also organizing and mobilizing platform workers around the world. In Latin America, platform workers are engaging in different forms of digital activism. They log into work accounts but don’t actually take on work, thus disrupting services provided through platforms. These acts of resistance offer a ray of hope in the defense of decent work. It is only a matter of time before, at least in Latin America, workers have more expansive rights and the power of these companies stands curtailed. But till that happens, Kate, do you see platformization inevitably engulfing other areas of work? 

KL: As you mentioned, Sofía, there’s nothing inevitable about the future of work. The World Bank and Big Tech might like to think that precarious, platform-based work is a natural consequence of technologies, but the future of work will be determined in the same way that it always has – through the exercise of power. 

Precarious platform work hasn’t come about because of technology – it has come about because tech companies have aggressively undermined labor laws and based their business models on the avoidance of employment obligations. And when workers build collective power, they can challenge the fictions created by Big Tech capital. Tech companies in the US are complaining that their businesses may not be viable if laws introduced in several states to recognize workers as workers, are successful. They are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying against this. 

The World Bank’s 2019 report, The Changing Nature of Work, made the case for a form of social protection that would enable platform workers and other precarious and displaced workers to continue receiving meagre, insecure income. They argued that a safety net would allow labor laws to be further deregulated. The Bank used technological determinism to emphasize what it has always advocated for – deregulation of labor and capital. These technological fictions enable the sustained attacks on wages, work conditions, and trade union rights. This will impact (and are already impacting) all workers. When the minimum wage floor is effectively meaningless, pressure mounts for all wages to go down, including public sector wages. 

So clearly, workers delivering public services are not exempt from these pressures. Governments are increasingly outsourcing public services to Big Tech. More than half of Amazon’s operating income comes from Amazon Web Services and a growing portion of AWS is hosting government data. Public postal services are being squeezed by Amazon and others who use low wages or the fiction of platform work as a competitive advantage. 

During the pandemic, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) advised governments to cut public sector wages suggesting that wages for some private sector workers are lower. As we have always said in the union movement – “touch one, touch all” – when some suffer, all eventually suffer. We know that, by driving down wages and monopolising wealth, Big Tech has played a major role in the exacerbation of various forms of inequalities. How is this playing out in the Latin American context, Sofía?

SS: I totally agree with your assessment that the techno-deterministic view of the IMF and World Bank makes us think there is no alternative than to accept precariousness, because that is the only way the model can sustain. But the truth is that if your business model is sustained by labor precariousness while you get richer and richer, that is not a business model, that is essentially fraud. 

Thinking about alternatives is hard in Latin America because governments right now don’t have the capacity to come up with new frameworks on a regional scale, and people don’t have enough digital education.

I think the biggest inequality between workers today is the digital divide. This gap operates between generations, excluding those who cannot adapt to new technologies. Many workers lose their jobs as a result. In some cases training works, but in others, the accelerated rate of change of technology means that many workers cannot keep up.

The second gap is that of access to technology. In Latin America, access is very unequal, not only with respect to the level of income and the quality of the technology that a worker can afford, but also with regard to the infrastructure of public services available in their city. Some have to work for months to be able to buy a telephone or a computer that they can use for work, or they are stuck with old devices without enough RAM memory, unable to run the applications they need to work. 

The gap in access to public services is even worse. The population distribution and demographic characteristics of the region mean that huge parts of Latin America are very thinly populated. This has repercussions on the incentives for companies to invest in better internet connections. Fiber optic technology is an essential public service that does not reach most cities and towns. What do we do with the rest, who are not in the big urban cities? The lack of quality public investment in the less populated regions means that only some workers can access better jobs through platforms and teleworking. Workers in regions that remain disconnected are stranded in the periphery of the labor market. What other inequalities do you see in your region, Kate?

KL: I think that’s very well put. To add a couple of points, data monopolies are a key driver in exacerbating existing inequalities. Data companies increase wealth inequalities by extracting and monopolizing much of the world’s wealth, aggressively avoiding taxes which diminishes public services that can actually reduce inequalities, driving down wages, and worsening work conditions. Inequalities between countries is magnified not just by the wealth accruing to billionaires in the US, China, and to some extent Europe, but also by data monopolization that centralizes much of the world’s information (or intelligence) in the US, China, and other data havens. 

Then there are inequalities fueled by algorithms. Algorithmic management sounds neutral but often draws on metadata that reflects existing inequalities and replicates it. Secretive algorithms can deepen the power imbalance between workers who don’t have access to the data, and the management which is protected by ‘commercial-in-confidence’ and trade rules that hide the source code. In the case of platform workers, for instance, small changes in algorithms can drastically reduce their incomes for reasons that may remain completely unknown to them.

Workers’ productivity trackers may appear neutral but are generally modelled on the output of a healthy, experienced worker of a particular sex, age, and stature, on an ideal day. Workplace health trackers can identify women who might be trying to get pregnant, help employers filter out workers with chronic diseases or those at higher risk of developing certain illnesses. 

Algorithms can also reinscribe discriminatory practices in the delivery of public services. An algorithm in the US, for example, allocated health funding for Covid-19 based on previous health expenditure, meaning black patients typically received less funding despite being at higher risk. Algorithms that profile suspects of crime, and those that process credit or job applications, have been revealed to be similarly discriminatory.