“The technology industry loves nothing better than to dress up something old in idealistic language and offer it up as a bright, new benefit. Flea markets existed long before eBay consolidated them into a website; clubs shared cars and friends surfed each other’s couches long before Uber and Airbnb ‘invented’ the ‘sharing economy’; and task-based employment existed for centuries before platforms like CrowdFlower, CloudFactory, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk began touting the flexibility of on-demand micro-employment. It was known as ‘piecework’, and it was associated with poverty and exploitation.
The platforms talk a good game. Workers, they argue, like the flexibility and control over their time and the convenience of working at home without the time sink of commuting and the constraints of traditional workplaces. In Ghost Work, the results of a five-year study of platform workers in the US and India, Mary L. Gray and Siddarth Suri find that all these things are true for many of the workers they interview — but they are only part of the picture.”
Read the full article at ZDNet
“Ghost Work and Behind the Screen, book reviews: Lifting the veil on the internet’s secret employment sector.” By Wendy M Grossman, ZDNet, November 22, 2019