2023 Winners
Social Justice Award Winner: Marta Rozmyslowicz
Marta Rozmyslowicz worked as a warehouse associate at the first Amazon Fulfillment Center in Poland, “POZ1.” Experiencing first-hand the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to push for higher productivity and speedup of work, her colleagues opted to unionize and started the Amazon section of their larger union, OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza (Workers’ Initiative). Marta was elected shop steward and a representative for the warehouse occupational health and safety commission. Her union’s actions prompted the Polish Labor Inspectorate to measure work intensity in terms of kilocalories burned on the job. The resulting study found that Amazon employees expend even twice the legal limit of energy, putting in tangible terms how the company is squeezing out the energy of more than one shift from workers.During the pandemic, Marta’s union joined with Amazon workers from around the world to make important gains through campaigns like Make Amazon Pay. Even though Amazon located this POZ1 warehouse near the German border—to take advantage of cheaper labor in Poland, and to segment the workforce by nationality and ethnicity—her union used this to their advantage. Polish workers sought out connections with Amazon workers in Germany and founded Amazon Workers International. Since leaving Amazon, Marta has continued as a union organizer and legal representative of employees in labor court. In addition, she is pursuing a Thesis in Labor Law at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and conducting action-oriented research in a project called “Workers Fight Back Algorithms”, for which she received the 2022 Landecker Democracy Fellowship.
Social Justice Award Honorable Mention: The Tech Workers Coalition Newsletter
The Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) is a collective of volunteer organizers promoting cross-collar solidarity in tech. TWC’s commitment to social justice is built around the ‘abolitionist mutual aid’ model of activism, emphasizing the leadership of women of color in labor organizing. TWC focuses on feminist, anti-racist, international and intergenerational solidarity, and amplifies tech and labor concerns in its newsletter, for which they collaborate with journalists.
TWC runs a semi-weekly newsletter featuring stories from workers’ perspectives. The organizers set up calls with workers who reach out to them and turn the transcripts into stories, which the workers are asked to review and edit collaboratively with the organizers. TWC also offers worker-contributors a US$150 honorarium from their mutual aid fund. This main project of TWC has engaged thousands of workers over the past three years in reading and sharing organizing stories from peers. Over one thousand workers have shared their stories in one-on-one and group interviews. This is a remarkable contribution toward labor organizing, as TWC acts as a unique bridge between workers and the media, by foregrounding workers’ voices.
The past and future projects of TWC highlight the detrimental effects of tech work on vast swathes of labor rights in diverse global contexts. Some of its projects also aim to build bridges between other organizations working on similar issues. TWC refers these workers to other legal and financial resources and shifts power to worker-led organizations. TWC also organizes teach-in sessions and learning clubs. In 2022, it held an intergenerational teach-in program for three days with 33 elder workers. In 2017, TWC hosted their first six-week Summer Learning Club. The event is now held online, with guests sharing their critical work, including book discussions. TWC is also advancing mutual aid organizing by focusing on mental health, in collaboration with social work and therapy allies, conducting trauma induced organizing interviews, and highlighting individual experiences in collective action.
Book Award Winner: Karen Levy, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance (Princeton University Press)
Dr. Levy’s book is an exemplary, deeply researched study of a particular kind of technology in a specific occupational context: the use of electronic logging devices (ELD) in trucking in the U.S. The book gives broad political, economic, and cultural context for the implementation and reception of ELD’s by the many different stakeholders involved, as well as deep ethnographic descriptions of the realities of this kind of workplace surveillance and workers’ resistance to it. Dr. Levy’s depth of expertise—not only in this specific context of work but in thinking about technologies of working surveillance more generally—is apparent throughout the text as she deftly weaves together the perspectives of policymakers, trucking firms, ELD companies, and truckers themselves. The book also shines a light on the role of white working-class masculinity in trucker culture.
Karen Levy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, associate member of the faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and Data Science.
Book Award Honorable Mention: Carolyn M. Cunningham and Heather M. Crandall, The Climate Girl Effect: Fridays, Flint, and Fire (Lexington Books)
Drs. Cunningham and Crandall have written an excellent book that explores a wide range of activism labor and technology use for climate activism amongst girl leaders across the world. Female, non-adults and young adults have seldom been the subject of scholarship on labor and technology (excluding studies on influencers). The authors skillfully address and critique the pitfalls of the mainstream media constructions of these girl leaders as “exceptional”—and the structural roots of such framing in Western individualism and patriarchy. Informed by both eco-feminist and techno-feminist traditions, the authors showcase the labor, praxis, discourse, and technologies mobilized by “the climate girls” and the intersectional and coalitional communities they rely on and contribute towards building. The book produces new knowledge about the potentials of labor and technology, new forms of collective activism and community, and the intersections of women’s movements, labor movements, and climate actions.
Carolyn M. Cunningham is Professor and Chair of Communication & Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University.
Heather M. Crandall is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University.
Graduate Student Paper Award Winner: Bhumika Chauhan, “Uneven Deskilling: Recasting the Smile Curve in a Transnational Software Firm.”
Rich in its theoretical framework and methodology, Chauhan’s paper presents a crucial case study of uneven deskilling in a global technology firm. Existing accounts of intrafirm offshoring optimistically conclude that when firms in the Global North offshore aspects of a particular labor process to the Global South, this offshoring might help Global South workers “move up the value chain,” or upgrade their skills to move into higher-paying roles. The software services sector, especially in India, has been considered an exemplar of this process, and many expected the differences between the Global North and South nodes of global production to disappear. However, drawing on 70 interviews with software engineers in the U.S. and India, Chauhan demonstrates that even when firms combine workers from the Global North and Global South into a single labor process, these workers remain segmented and workers in the Global South and up functioning deskilling. On the one hand, onshore workers tend to do conception tasks that involve design, branding, and distribution–all relatively high-value-added activities. On the other hand, offshore workers were delegated execution tasks, meaning they executed the onshore team’s designs, usually by coding and testing the product. This means that directive authority, without exception, always resided within onshore employees, even when offshore workers occupied higher positions the organizational chart than their onshore counterparts. Offshore engineers were effectively locked out of upper-level management and high-skill design and architecting, thus being deskilled on the basis of their offshore location alone. By challenging optimistic narratives of convergence and upgrading in the Global South, Chauhan’s paper raises important questions about the long-term potential of the software services sector for development.
Bhumika Chauhan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at New York University.
2022 Winners
*Book Award*
Winner: The Labor Tech Research Network is delighted to announce Ergin Bulut’s A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry as winner of the inaugural LTRN Book Award. The book, published by Cornell University Press analyzes labor in the video game industry from a political economy perspective. The author provides an ethnographic account of the politics of labor and play in a video game company, Desire, where work is racialized, gendered and stratified despite the prevailing imaginary of meritocracy. Bulut adroitly weaves feminist perspectives and critical race theory into study of an environment synonymous with technomasculinity. Through references to the broader economic climate during the research, the book further highlights a rather stark dependence of creative work on corporate financial structures that introduce another layer of precarity in an already complicated industry. Bulut’s work also combines perspectives in media studies, sociology and history of labor, and while it is situated in an American company, the book speaks to how the pleasure of a few privileged workers in companies like Desire is built around the exploitation of others located even as far as the global south.
Ergin Bulut is a professor in the Department of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University in Istanbul Turkey.
*Honorable Mention*: Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications by Melissa Villa-Nicholas (Rutgers University Press 2022)
Melissa Villa-Nicholas’ effortlessly shows the intersection of race and gender in a subaltern history of labour and technology. The author’s approach gives voice to workers whose experiences and contributions are easily ignored in mainstream narratives of information work that center white masculinity. She situates the stories of Latina information workers in efforts by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission to include people of color in telecommunications. The book connects research areas in History and Media Studies. It is written to preserve the voices of the various workers whose oral histories are combined to create this compelling story that challenges prevailing myths of neutrality in information technology work. The book ends with a fascinating personal account of one of the study’s participants who delineates between structural conditions and individual performance, a tension that continues to exist in neoliberal culture.
Dr. Villa-Nicholas is an assistant professor in the Harrington School of Media and Communication and the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
Graduate Student Paper Award
*Winner*: The Labor Tech Research Network is delighted to announce that Di Wu is the winner of our inaugural Graduate Student Paper Award for her forthcoming paper, “‘We Make AI Smarter, Not the Other Way Around’: Disability Expertise and Artificial Saviorism in AI Data Work in China.” The paper uses ethnographic methods to explore how workers with visual or physical impairments annotate training data for a commercial smart home system. Wu demonstrates how AI companies profit from the skilled labor and expertise of disabled workers, as well as the wider structural ableism in the labor market that excludes these workers from many jobs. In accounting for both structural discrimination and local meaning-making practices, Wu develops the concept of ‘artificial saviorism’ to capture how Chinese tech companies are able to position themselves as engaging in philanthropy when hiring disabled workers, thus obscuring the labor these workers put into making AI systems ‘smart.’ Detailing the disability-informed labor practices of these workers, Wu highlights the potential of disability expertise in creating more just labor conditions.
The paper strongly speaks to our mission at Labor Tech: not only does the paper draw attention to a context largely understudied by labor and technology scholars in the Global North, but it builds on existing studies of disabled tech workers from several countries, including India, Argentina, and Australia, as well as Indigenous communities in the U.S. Wu also brings in her experience working professionally in disability inclusion programs in China to inform her findings. We offer our sincere congratulations to Di and look forward to seeing what comes next in her promising career.
Di Wu is a PhD Candidate in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) Program at MIT.
*Honorable Mention*. The Labor Tech Research Network is also happy to announce that Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya and JS Tan are being awarded an Honorable Mention for their book chapter, “The Role of Workers in AI Ethics and Governance,” which was recently published in The Oxford Handbook of AI Governance. The chapter draws on a decade of AI-related worker activism to develop a typology of AI workers; the criticisms they make of the products they help create; and how they claim jurisdiction over AI governance. The authors also develop a model for explaining how workers report harms related to AI in their workplaces. We believe both the model and the typology will be generative for future research on labor activism in high-tech workplaces in many national and transnational contexts. Please join us in congratulating Nataliya and JS.
Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley and a member of Collective Action in Tech.
JS Tan is a former tech worker, member of Collective Action in Tech, labor organizer, and graduate student with MIT’s Media Lab.
We encourage you to watch this short video of award acceptances in which the authors share why they were inspired to do their research and how it reflects on labor and technology.