Announcing Our 2024 Award Winners!

Labor Tech Research Network (LaborTech) is excited to announce the winners of our 3rd annual Book, Graduate Student Paper, and Social Justice Awards!

LaborTech is a community of people dedicated to analyzing issues of labor and technology from an anti-racist, feminist, and transnational perspective. We have over 650 members, including researchers, tech workers, policymakers, activists, and union organizers affiliated with institutions in over 55 countries.

We will be celebrating our award winners during our end-of-year event on Dec 13 at 10am ET(US)/3pm UTC/8:30pm IST. For more information, click here.

Book Award

Winner: Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands by Héctor Beltrán (Princeton University Press)

Héctor Beltrán’s Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands is an unrivaled book in its approach to demonstrating computing culture and society in Mexico and the U.S. Through anthropological, ethnographic, and transnational qualitative methods, Beltrán prioritizes demonstrating how women, migrants, and othered programmers are engaged in hackathons and the larger socio-economic implications for Mexican and Latinx communities, across what he calls the techno-borderlands. As an author, Beltrán’s computer science and anthropology expertise is applied to construct an intricate account of the borderlands’ computational culture. Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands brings together multidisciplinary fields such as anthropology, Latinx studies, science and technology studies, and Mexican history and engages beautiful montage illustrations by Daniela Rivero to demonstrate the importance of “code work” in Mexico and across borderlands.

Honorable Mention: Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times by Erin McElroy (Duke University Press)

Silicon Valley Imperialisms by Erin McElroy is a groundbreaking work that explores the global reach of Silicon Valley through a sharp study of Romania. McElroy delves into crucial issues such as orientalism, housing justice, and the intersection of the arts with tech-driven imperialism. Silicon Valley Imperialisms brings an urgently needed, intersectional perspective to the tech industry’s impact on global cities. Through a wonderful blend of ethnography and collaborative mapping, McElroy invites the readers to confront difficult questions about the alignment of liberal and fascist ideologies in today’s anti-communist climate. Engaging with a wide range of theorists, McElroy’s work offers a provocative and original examination of how neoliberal expansion operates within the complex legacies of postsocialist societies. Silicon Valley Imperialism is a bold and essential contribution to contemporary scholarship on technology, power, and social justice.

Graduate Student Paper Award

Winner: “‘Animation in London/Matchmove in Bangalore:’ Territorial Profiles of ‘Creative’ and ‘Technical’ Workforces in the Visual Effects (VFX) Industry by Suryansu Guha (University of California Los Angeles Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media)

Suryansu Guha’s “Animation in London/Matchmove in Bangalore” is a rigorously researched and methodologically inventive paper. It investigates how visual effects (VFX) work is outsourced to India and how these workers help create effects-heavy, yet cost-effective, blockbuster films. Guha draws on oral histories, practitioner interviews, and a close textual analysis of media, trade papers, and other artifacts to demonstrate how these workers become profiled as doing non-creative, technical work. By exposing the geopolitical profiling of workers and the racialized distinction between ‘creative’ and ‘service/technical’ work, Guha shows how outsourced VFX labor helps Global North clients create a precarious standing reserve of competing labor forces. The paper makes a critical intervention into our understandings of the inequalities within global creative labor markets.

Honorable Mention: “Paradox of Marginality: The Formation of a Refugee Workforce and Labor Power in the Digital Labor Market” by Michelle Lee (Northwestern University Department of Sociology)

Michelle Lee’s paper is a nuanced, empirically-driven study of how labor market intermediaries create “markets” for refugee labor by constructing what Lee calls “refugee capital.” The paper draws on nine months of ethnography with a digital labor market intermediary in the U.K. and Ethiopia, as well as 51 interviews with experts and refugees in the digital labor market to demonstrate how organizations transform refugee status from a market liability to a market asset. The paper represents a vital and critical engagement with the support of refugees by labor market intermediaries and how such supports can be improved in our current political and environmental climate.

Social Justice Award

Winner: Homeless Workers Movement in Brazil (MTST)

The winner of the Labor Tech Research Network Social Justice Award 2024 is Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) in Brazil. It is a “popular, urban and left-wing movement” that started in 1997. It is one of the largest urban social movements in Latin America with 30,000 activists, and focuses on rights and struggles for housing. All members of the Social Justice Award working group found the grassroots activism by the organization impactful. MTST has already guaranteed housing for millions for homeless workers. In addition, MTST has also run education projects, based on the pedagogical directions of Paulo Freire. It has successfully run solidarity kitchens—offering food to homeless people and delivery workers. It has also created a Technology Division that looks closely into the intersection of labor and technology for homeless workers. We are also impressed with the clear future goals of the organization, in terms of expanding their work in Latin America.

We felt MTST is expanding the definitions of “tech labor” in ways that critically recognize the under-explored intersection of informal labor and technology for socially marginalized communities. The Technology Division of MTST also brings together software engineers, designers and system analysts who question the hegemony of Silicon Valley tech corporations. The Technology Division of MTST has developed a digital platform for delivery workers’ co-operative—representing women and trans persons—in Sao Paulo. In the “Hire Who Struggles” project, MTST has created a virtual assistant who connects homeless workers to potential employers. MTST also offers coding courses for homeless workers, and develops educative and informative games to strengthen homeless workers’ movement. We find that these instances exemplify an innovative integration of technology to support labor rights and social justice. These initiatives show that there are solid, productive connections between tech and labor justice.

Honorable Mention: Rajarshi Dawn/Awakening IT-FITE Kolkata

The honorable mention for the Social Justice Award this year is conferred on Rajarshi Dawn, the General Secretary of Awakening IT-FITE Kolkata, an organization representing IT workers and workers in the IT-enabled service industry in Kolkata, India. It is a local chapter of the Forum for IT&ITES Employees, that was founded in 2014. Awakening IT fights against layoffs and arbitrary terminations of workers in the tech industry, against gender discrimination, and discrimination against immigrant workers—showing its commitment to social justice.

The organization has been attempting to register as a labor union for the last five years, but faces various institutional barriers including resistance from the local government. Therefore, a large part of its activism involves negotiation with bureaucrats, particularly the Labor Minister and the Labor Secretary. Awakening IT also provides legal assistance to tech workers who experience unfair terminations and other forms of harassment in tech companies. Awakening-IT also organizes campaigns and workshops in the IT corridors or tech parks to raise awareness about the importance of collective bargaining. Rajarshi has also made multiple media appearances to raise awareness about tech workers’ rights.

We are impressed with Rajarshi’s work on the ground and attempts to organize different groups and classes of workers within the IT-ITES industry in India. We also recognize the social-justice relevance of some of the future projects that Awakening IT will undertake. It will pursue transnational collaboration with tech workers in other countries, addressing issues of exploitation in offshore locations. It will organize workshops to analyze and discuss the four new Labor Codes that are being introduced in India, and threatening to weaken existing labor protection. Awakening IT is also carefully considering the possible impacts of AI on workers, that may diminish labor demands and create a need for upskilling. We feel that Rajarshi’s work in Awakening IT deserves recognition for centering discussions on tech workers’ rights around social justice, and for creating public awareness about the hidden challenges of seemingly privileged tech jobs in India.

A huge thanks to our committee co-chairs and members!

LaborTech is an all-volunteer-run organization. We can only do what we do because of our members. This year, we’d like to honor the hard work (over many, many months!) of our award committee co-chairs:

• Book Award: Fatma Guneri and Fiza Brakel-Ahmed
• Grad Student Paper Award: Ritu Gosh and Brian Dolber
• Social Justice Award: Rianka Roy and Winnie Poster

Thank you so much for all the hard work you have dedicated towards making our award committees a success!