[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Digital-media workers of the world, unite!

Mon Jun 15 14:35:31 CEST 2015

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steve Zeltzer <lvpsf at igc.org>
Date: Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 7:27 PM
Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Digital-media workers of the world, unite!
To: "<networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>" <
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>

The organization of workers globally through the internet has greater
potential obviously than at any time in history. Workers are linked up
through multi-nationals and face global struggles for their lives that can
only be resolved throughout organizing as a class internationally. The idea
by the the tech billionaires that they could disrupt the economic structure
including social conditions of the working class to multiply their profits
and exploitation obviously has a backlash and that is the organization of
these workers internationally. We will be discussing these issues at the
upcoming LaborTech conference in Stanford on the 26th of July and we will
also be streaming it.

In Solidarity,
Steve Zeltzer
LaborTech
KPFA WorkWeek Radio
Labor Video Project
www.laborvideo.org

Digital-media workers of the world, unite!
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/6/digital-media-workers-of-the-world-unite.html
OPINIONJOHN VASKO / FLICKR
Digital-media workers of the world, unite!
E-lancing your way through micro-careers is no way to live
June 14, 2015 2:00AM ET
by Chris Lehmann   @lehmannchris
The sanctums of online journalism, which have disrupted everything from the
business models of the publishing world to the basic definition of original
editorial content, are now facing an unwelcome new disruption of their own.
Earlier this month, the employees of Gawker Media, one of the earliest and
most successful Web-publishing networks, voted to unionize, and create one
of the first digital locals for the Writers Guild of America. Seeking to
capitalize on this high-profile victory, a group of union activists and
labor reporters announced a national organizing push for digital media
workers, to be launched at a conference in Louisville, Kentucky, in October.

Longtime observers of yon digital-media revolution know that things weren’t
supposed to play out this way. The online media gold rush, like every other
form of digital commerce, was supposed to gleefully overturn the old
workplace hierarchies of the fast-expiring industrial age. Where fusty,
backward notions like group healthcare benefits, retirement plans, and
workplace solidarity once reigned, flattened hierarchies, IPO stock
options, and casualized free-agent work regimes were now going to take
irresistible, spontaneous hold. Let a thousand entrepreneurs — and millions
upon millions of sassy listicles and uproarious cat videos — bloom!

So what exactly went wrong? Like most collateral victims of misdirected
ambition dating back to ancient Greece, the barons of are falling to their
own staggering hubris.

Consider the curious, amply instructive case of Medium.com. The online
blogging platform began its publishing life at the behest of Twitter
co-founder Evan Williams, who was determined to preserve the perennially
beleaguered “long form” model of Web-based journalism. Medium would not
pander to the listicle-addled business models of BuzzFeed or mimic the
voyeuristic piffle slapped on the front page of the Huffington Post.

In short order, though, Medium’s investors found that journalistic ambition
produced disappointing market returns. So the cherished longform ideal was
quietly mothballed, and the site began in short order pandering to each and
every played-out market-libertarian cliché in the well-worn Silicon Valley
playbook. The site has become shorter, snappier—and robustly sycophantic in
its portrayals of the prerogatives, whims and general largesse of corporate
America.

A near-perfect specimen of the genre appeared this month on Backchannel,
the Medium subsite founded by former Wired writer Steven Levy — a practiced
courtier of Silicon Valley’s callow-yet-swaggering info elite, and author
of the ain’t-Google-grand corporate hagiography “In the Plex.” In his
liberationist manifesto, “The Full-Time Job Is Dead,” Kevin Maney, a Levy
epigone and budding Web prophet, is here to tell you just how very
excellent your future as a free-agent impresario of serial — or better yet,
simultaneous! — “micro-careers” is going to be. “Technology is now changing
the nature of work,” Maney enthuses — and then we’re docented through a
Tomorrowland-style survey of the relevant trends. A new era is upon us, he
writes,

in which most of us will work in multiple ‘micro-careers’ at the same time,
leaving the traditional full-time job behind. ‘Work’ is likely to turn into
a marketplace in the cloud rather than a desk and a chair at a traditional
corporation. A free agent workforce will be able to make a good living
layering a number of professional relationships, entrepreneurial passions
and other money-making pursuits on top of each other.

The great disruption is already under way in the American labor market,
Maney contends, in sectors “mostly focused on simple, hands-on work.”
Ride-sharing apps Lyft and Sidecar have transformed mere car owners into
enviably layered proprietors of their own cabs. AirBnB allows you to turn
your domestic domicile into a robust revenue stream. The cloying
hipster-crafts portal Etsy “is a market for the handmade skirts you sew
while watching ‘Game of Thrones,’” Maney writes in a revealing aside that
displays zero knowledge of actual textile work or cable binge-viewing.

No one said disruption would be painless now, did they?
This same willful obtuseness colors Maney’s account of how this spontaneous
self-reinvention of our work routines has crept up the socioeconomic
ladder, so that our credentialed professional class will undergo its own
free-agent makeover. Health benefits? Retirement plans? Job security and
seniority? Those are all the drab, uncreative emollients reserved for the
square. Be daring and layered, Daddy-O! Instead of having a boring regular
job with a boring regular pay check, you can continually apply for gig
after gig, as the managers setting your wage rates all compete with each
other to see how little they can get away with paying you! Hey, no one said
disruption would be painless now, did they?

And you don’t want to be one of those time-serving sheeple whose dreary way
is already earmarked for the dustbin of history, now, do you? After all,
Maney writes with ill-concealed self-congratulatory glee, the upcoming
generation of workers have already briskly adapted to the terminal
precarity of the working life as just the natural (read: “pure market”)
order of things:

While this kind of dynamic, entrepreneurial life may horrify an older
generation, we already know that younger workers tend to prefer their work
to be more ephemeral. … A recent Future Workplace survey found that 91
percent of millennials expect to stay in a job for less than three years,
and that flexible hours and location-independent policies are more
desirable than salary.

In other words, HR directors the world over have a brave new axiom to bring
to the challenges of post-industrial labor relations: Pay your workers
less, and fire them more often! Of course, it’s not exactly true that
workers who expect to have a job for less than three years, and privilege
more footloose outlets for their labor, are professing an active and freely
chosen preference for such things. And it’s even less manifestly the case
that they’re carrying out an entirely healthy and overdue generational
smashing of the outworn labor idols of an “older generation.”

It’s far more likely, in fact, that millennials are adopting such postures
out of weary fatalism than “dynamic” and “entrepreneurial” elan. Federal
Reserve estimates in 2012 found that 44 percent of recent American college
graduates were working fewer hours than they wanted — or needed, in order
to make ends meet. Another high-profile study of recent college grads
reported that, two years after matriculating, fully 74 percent required
ongoing financial assistance from their parents, while just 47 percent of
those who were working full-time had landed positions paying $30,000 or
more annually. (This, mind you, at time when the average student loan
burden for successful college graduates stands at $29,400.)

In other words, what strikes breathless New Economy sloganeers like Maney
as a tidal upsurge in militant entrepreneurial self-reinvention actually
resembles, on closer inspection, something much more like the bleak
conditions of tenant farming — right down to the ominous state of debt
peonage engineered by the student-loan-provider/company store.

It’s no surprise, then, to learn that Maney’s assault on full-time work is
yet more whorish sponsored content — a disclaimer at the end of his
outburst announces that it was “launched in partnership with Upwork, the
world’s largest freelance talent marketplace.” But lest that tagline prove
too subtle, Maney also thoughtfully supplied this, um, authentic
testimonial to his microcareer employer of the moment in his own sponsored
copy: “Upwork … is a pure market for free agent work, letting any entity
find and hire professionals for almost any type of knowledge-based work.”

Thus is the great liberated circle closed: From betokening a welcome and
unprecedented revolution in the powers of the self-propelled worker, Kevin
Maney and Medium are only plying a sad new-media variation on the world’s
oldest profession.

So, all together now, digital journalists: Which side are you on?

Chris Lehmann is an editor for BookForum and The Baffler and a columnist
for In These Times. He was the deputy editor of The Washington Post Book
World from 2000 to 2004.
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