Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age

Following on her brilliant The Making of a Cybertariat, a modern classic in the analysis of class and gender, work and consumption, Huws turns her sharp eye to the present crisis into which the cybertariat ‘has come of age.’ Rich in theoretical and methodological insights, Labor in the Global Digital Economy carefully guides us through the world of transnational business, value chains, creative, precarious and knowledge labor, self-service consumers, and consumption workers. Challenging accepted thinking and providing enough wisdom to fill several volumes, Huws has once again demonstrated her preeminence among analysts of work and inequality in digital capitalism.

—Vincent Mosco, author, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World

Ursula Huws is a global treasure: her essays collected here continue her several decades of scholarship analyzing the impact of technological change on women and workers. This book brings her prescient Marxist feminist theorizing to a wider audience. It is a must read for anyone who cares about what the future holds for workers in the digital era.

—Gina Neff, author, Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries

As always, Huws has a treasury of insights to offer. Use this book as a manual for understanding how the alliance of capital and digitization is reshaping the landscape of labor.

—Andrew Ross, author, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal

Ursula Huws is without peer as an analyst of life in contemporary capitalism.

—Leo Panitch, York University; editor, Socialist Register

Huws (Univ. of Hertfordshire, UK) has written a book that deserves a place of honor among the many recent books on globalization—some praise globalization’s benefits and others criticize the impositions it forces on people and communities. Huws’s thesis is that the global digital economy is changing the nature of work itself, and she explores the contradictory pressures of these changes: much work is reduced to standardized, quantifiable tasks at the same time workers are encouraged to “think outside the box” and simultaneously expected to work as part of the “team” (an expectation that typically means staying within the confines of the box). This reshaping of the labor process often leads to the kind of organization that prevents learning on the job or opportunities to take advantage of those skills workers might contribute in the absence of rigid standardization of tasks. These changes also prepare the way for outsourcing work. Huws does an excellent job of showing how this reshaping increases costs and decreases the quality of public sector work. All the while, she manages to inform readers about how these new trends work to diminish the overall quality of life.

—M. Perelman, California State University, Chico