Cloud Labour is open to Exploitation
Reading New Scientist this morning – like a good geek does before that first coffee – Justin Mullin’s article titled The Relentless Rise of the Digital Worker made me sit up. Exactly when is it alright and not alright to get into the Cloud Labour game? I guess the answer is when nobody is being exploited.
Nothing pisses me off more about the world at the moment than our incessent greedy pursuit of cheaper products and services. We need the cheapest pair of glasses, the cheapest coffee and the cheapest quote to fill a contract. Its actually got a name – the race to the bottom. OK so what happens if everything always gets cheaper? Labour, for example… if your coffee gets cheaper and cheaper to produce, where do you think those rationalisations are coming from? Most likely its from ripping off that coffee farmer for a few cents more every time with the employer / wholesaler / importer / exporter pocketing a larger profit. Workers get exploited… middlemen get fatter… we get cheaper products on our supermarket shelves.
So who and what is Cloud Labour? Basically its anybody with online access that can do a job. Hey that sounds great, until organisations start to pay a pittance to some third world worker with online access because that’s the cheapest option. Are these workers receiving a fair living wage from their work? Do you even know? Or is Cloud Labour a way around having to even care how you treat your workforce in pursuit of profits?
The high end example in the Mullins article is a company called Innocentive. The premise is that businesses can save their large marketing and ideation costs by posting a challenge to the Cloud Labour force vying to win a fraction of the worth of the work. I judge the worth to be the amount they would have paid non-Cloud Labour and the amount they stand to make from the successful output of the challenge. Innocentive is just a Spec Cloud Labour Force – one person gets a fraction of the value of the work and the others get squat… zip… zero. If you don’t see anything wrong with that paradigm go read about the No Spec Campaign.
We need to promote Cloud Labour with the same professional and ethical constraints that we approach any labour strategy. If its just about exploitation of overseas workers in cheaper economies who can live on a dollar a day then don’t think you’re any different than someone who has tshirts or belt buckles made by 10 year olds in east asia. Because the argument is about profits… not improving their lives.
I’d just like you to think about that for a minute. Does Cloud Labour have the potential to become the new non-unionised totally exploitable owe-them-nothing workforce? Yes sure it does. But it takes you and me and everybody else to permit that exploitation.
