Most people are aware of the call centres in India, but few know just how far-reaching some services they access everyday have become, as information whips across countries, continents and time zones.
Labour expert Ursula Huws has watched labour markets shift towards an increase in outsourcing in the last 25 years. She is offering a public lecture on Oct. 22 to discuss some of the trends and challenges of a digital global economy.
Women in Africa are monitoring security cameras stationed in California parking lots and U.S. doctors are sending MRI scans to India to be read by specialists. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the daily labour outsourcing of many companies.
Any job involving the processing of information that can be digitized can be carried out anyplace, says labour expert Ursula Huws. The ability to outsource work at a cheaper rate has changed the way companies do business and has led to new challenges in a globalized economy.
Ursula Huws is the director of Analytica Social and Economic Research Ltd. and honorary professor of International Labour Studies at London Metropolitan University in England. She was a keynote speaker at the conference on “Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens” Oct. 16-18.
The three-day conference hosted by the Faculty of Information and Media Studies invited panelists of 50 leading Canadian scholars and union activists, including representatives from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of Canada.
For 25 years Huws has conducted research on the economic and social impacts of technological change, the telemediated relocation of employment and the changing international division of labour in services.
With the digitization of labour, workers are becoming more interchangeable. Playing on Karl Marx’s term ‘proletariat,’ used to describe the working class, Huws has coined a term for the new kind of worker, a ‘cybertariat.’
“There is a seamless switching of work around the world,” she says. “We now have a situation where a very high proportion of jobs can, in principle, be done anywhere.
“This doesn’t mean necessarily that they will be done anywhere,” she notes, adding “It’s introduced a huge range of new choices in terms of who does what work, when, where and how.”
The threat of jobs being outsourced has changed the balance of power between workers and employers, she explains. Particularly during times of economic crisis, workers are forced to make concessions on hours and wages to keep their jobs local.
Outsourcing began before the internet boom, with one of the first cases being American Airlines shipping ticket stubs to Barbados in the 1970s for data processing, she says.
But it was expansion of the internet, a scare about the Millennial bug shutting down computers worldwide in 2000, and the switchover of European countries to the Euro currency that contributed to India’s position in the late 1990s as a mecca for data processing companies.
“That was a massive amount of quite routine programming work and so these Indian companies really did well out of that,” she says. Countries later began outsourcing more difficult work to India.
Now, India, China and Brazil are major world players. Those who once were recipients of outsourced work are now outsourcing to other countries.
“A lot of companies cannot afford not to outsource anymore because these global companies have such market power.”
Now that jobs can be broken up into parts like pieces of Lego, which Huws calls modularization, multiple people can perform the work required by a company from different locations.
Meanwhile, Huws believes creativity will eventually lead to a change in these labour models. Although companies try to “manage” employees, which in turn hinders creativity, Huws says creative workers are needed to generate new ideas and shape the future of labour markets.
With an increasingly digital world, few jobs escape the reality of these challenges, notes Jonathan Burston, associate professor and Rogers Chair in the Faculty of Media and Information Studies, and conference organizer.
“All of us are digital workers and some of us are at the front lines of the changes of work life,” he says. “We are studying ourselves and each other.”
The conference is the first stepping-stone towards the creation of a new research centre related to digital labour issues.
Lecture today
Topic: The Making of a Cybertariat: Labour Restructuring in a Digital Global Economy Presenter: Ursula Huws, honorary professor, International Labour Studies, London Metropolitan University, U.K.
Details: Oct. 22, 4:30 p.m., 3M Centre, Room 3250. Public reception follows in Michael’s Garden.
