|
|
|
|
E X C E R P T THE MAKING OF A CYBERTARIATVirtual Work in a Real World by Ursula Huws All material copyright © 2003 by Monthly Review Press |
|
| « MRP Home
August 2003 |
Foreword by Colin Leys The moments when a fresh impulse is given to the social sciences by an original spirit deserve to be celebrated, and making the feminist political economy of Ursula Huws available to a wider public is such a moment. From the late 1970s to the present, while so much intellectual energy was diverted into “culturalism” and postmodernism, not to mention the arid wastes of “public choice,” Huws developed a distinctive analysis of commodification that combines cultural, economic, social, and political dimensions in an exceptionally innovative and creative way. Among policy makers and researchers concerned with work and technological change her reputation has long been established. But the potential of her work to revivify feminist political economy generally, and to stimulate new research on working conditions, markets, commodification, consumption, and technological change, has not yet been as widely appreciated as it should be. Why this should be so, especially when her writing is so clear, wide-ranging, and witty, might at first sight seem puzzling. The main reason is that very little of her work has been published in academic journals. Huws began writing as a trade union activist in the publishing industry. Her aim then was to reach her fellow workers, who were mainly women, writing in a way they could readily understand and identify with. But this formulation as a writer makes her later, more theoretical essays distinctively accessible and enjoyable. Here, for example, as an appetizer, is how Huws discusses the way in which, according to the apostles of the “weightless economy,” the value of a product is attributable to its sponsor rather than to the labor of the people who have made it: In 1993 . . . Michael Jordan alone received over $20 million from Nike for allowing his name and image . . . to be associated with their product—equivalent to more than the total labor cost alone for all the 19 million pairs of Nike shoes made in Indonesia. Traditional economics allows us to understand the very small portion of the final shoe attributable to the labor involved in its manufacture as the super-exploitation of a vulnerable group of workers; the “new economics” simply renders them invisible. Yet it is difficult to see the division of labor in the production process as anything intrinsically new; rather it can be seen as a continuation of a process that has been evolving for at least the past century and a half. Michael Jordan may be earning considerably more, but his contribution to the value of the final product is not different in kind from that of the little girls who posed for the Pears Soap advertisement at the turn of the century or the members of the royal family who gave their official blessing and the use of their coats of arms to pots of marmalade. (Chapter 9: “Material World,”) Huws shows how the root of the problems women confront lies in the way capitalism constantly commodifies traditional tasks, such as cooking, first making them into paid-for services and finally replacing paid-for services with the sale of manufactured objects capable of being mass-produced—while simultaneously transferring the remaining labor (self-service banking, shopping, etc.) to the consumer, with women bearing most of the costs at every step, both as workers and as “consumers.” As Huws herself notes, part of what she has done is to extend Harry Braverman’s famous analysis of factory work to the analysis of domestic labor: the “degradation of work” applies to housework, too. But she always sees these processes in a wider context. She links the situation of a mother in Milwaukee or Wolverhampton, with her computerized washing machine and microwave oven, who finds herself spending more hours doing housework than her grandmother did before these marvels were invented, to the situation of another woman in Malaysia who is being super-exploited to make the computer chips for that washing machine and microwave. In the same way Huws examines how—thanks to modern communications technology—an overworked and underpaid woman worker in a call center in Newcastle or New Brunswick can be threatened with the loss of her job to an even more underpaid woman in a call center in India. And these are never casually chosen examples. They are based on Ursula Huws’s experience as the director of some of the most extensive and sophisticated surveys of work that anyone has done (a full list may be consulted at www.analytica.org.uk.) It was this empirical familiarity with the actuality and interconnectedness of the fast-evolving new forms of human labor produced by worldwide commodification that also allowed her to puncture, so definitively and early, the myth of the “weightless economy” propagated by the evangelists of the 1990s stock market boom. Another central theme of Huws’s work, closely linked to that of commodification in general, is the application of information and communications technology to the labor processes involved in office work. Since the middle of the twentieth century most office work has been done by women. Consequently its transformation through the application of digitized information technology, and through the ability of new communications technology to permit any “digitizable” work to be outsourced to anywhere in the world, to be done increasingly by machines, has primarily (though by no means exclusively) affected women. They have been the labor force chiefly involved, both in pioneering the new technology and in paying the social costs, followed by a new cycle of the degradation of work, and finally job losses. These themes do not exhaust the analytic tools Huws deploys, but they provide a framework that allows her to illuminate an unusually wide range of contemporary issues: casualization, outsourcing, runaway corporations, the control of computer-based workers through surveillance software, the development of consumer profiles through the computerized tracking of our purchases, the transfer of “consumption work” to consumers, the ideology of “choice,” relationships between men and women, “homeworking,” loneliness and isolation, the erosion of public space, the dissolution and re-formation of the working class, the work-leisure boundary. Part of the impact of Huws’s work when you meet it for the first time is that it sheds a brilliant new light on so much of our contemporary experience. One more feature of Huws’s work should also be noted here: the prescient nature of her predictions. To give just a couple of examples, before the mid-1980s she correctly forecast, contrary to conventional wisdom, the relatively slow take-up of teleworking, broadband cable, and the transitional nature of the boom in data-entry employment. She also correctly foresaw that the dramatic jump in office work productivity predicted in the late 1970s would ensue only when the necessary interfaces between the different information technologies involved had been created, something that conventional wisdom in the mid-1980s was discounting. Huws gets things right because she understands not just the technology, but also the social forces that are driving technological change. Huws raises the analysis of capitalism’s unremitting drive toward commodification to a new level. Understanding this process, and its profound social consequences, has never been more important, and she is a wonderful guide to it. |
|
