The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World

The workplace has been changed in recent decades by the rise of digital technologies. Parts of a single labor process can be moved around the world, with implications not only for individual workplaces or firms, but for the working class as a whole. Computer operators in India process medical transcriptions for doctors in the United States at one-eighth of what U.S. computer operators would earn, and at four times the salary of an Indian schoolteacher.

Within advanced capitalist countries, the workplace has been made more “flexible” through cellphones, e-mail, freelancing, and outsourcing. The same process often makes the situation of the worker more precarious, as they are forced to pay for the tools of their trade, made constantly accessible to the demands of the workplace, and isolated from their fellow-workers.

Huws’ Making of a Cybertariat examines this process from a number of perspectives. It focuses especially on women in the workplace and at home. It examines changing categories of employment, and modes of organization. It shows how new divisions of race and gender are created in the process, and sets out an agenda for negotiating them. It explores the ways in which traditional forms of organization are being reshaped, and questions how the emerging cybertariat can become conscious of their common interests and stand together to struggle for them.

The Making of a Cybertariat is both a testament to the author’s remarkable record in the politics of technology over several decades, and a vital resource for grasping ongoing controversies in this field.

Contents

Foreword by Colin Leys

Introduction

1. New Technology and Domestic Labor
2. Domestic Technology: Liberation or Enslavement?
3. Terminal Isolation: The Atomization of Work and Leisure in the Wired Society
4. The Global Office: Information technology and the Relocation of White Collar Work
5. Challenging Commodification: Producing Usefulness Outside the Factory
6. Women’s Health at Work
7. Telework: Projections
8. The Fading of the Collective Dream: Reflections on Twenty Years of Research on Women and Technology
9. Material World: The Myth of the Weightless Economy
10. The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World
11. Who’s Waiting?: The Contestation of Time

Notes

Index

The essays in The Making of a Cybertariat previously appeared in the following publications:

“Domestic Technology: Liberation or Enslavement?” Scarlet Women, No. 14, January 1982.

“Terminal Isolation: The Atomization of Work and Leisure in the Wired Society,” Making Waves, Radical Science 16, Winter/Spring 1985.

“The Global Office: Information technology and the Relocation of White Collar Work,” Third World Trade and Technology Conference Papers, Third World Information Network, 1985.

“Challenging Commodification: Producing What’s Useful Outside the Factory,” Very Nice Work If You Can Get It, Spokesman, 1985.

“Women, Health, and Work,” Silent Health, Camerawork, 1990.

“Telework: Projections,” Futures, January 1991.

“Material World: The Myth of the Weightless Economy,” Socialist Register 1999, Merlin Press/Monthly Review Press.

“The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World,” Socialist Register 2001, Merlin Press/Monthly Review Press.

Ursula Huws is Professor of International Labor Studies at the Working Lives Research Institute at London Metropolitan University. She is also the director of research consultancy Analytica and has been an activist and commentator on labor and technology issues since the 1970s. Her writings have appeared in the Socialist Register, Z Magazine, and The New Statesman.