February 1, 2019
Workplace surveillance and the invasion of employee privacy have always been present under capitalism. Historically, this has mostly involved the combination of visual observation and abstract time, focusing on employee performance. However, the development of new information and communication technologies has brought important changes to the manner in which employers control employee productivity. Such digitalization or datafication of employees constitutes a qualitative change in the history of workplace surveillance—a change that reduces workers, their performance and bodies, to lines of code and flows of data to be scrutinized and manipulated.
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February 1, 2019
While the explosion of studies on the rise of the right has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of these powerful forces and individuals, we are due for critical assessments of these studies from the left. Over the past few decades, dismissals of class-based interpretations of history have plagued this type of scholarship. Expressed by some of the profession's most institutionally privileged members, such dismissals have led to a narrowing of discussions and debates by limiting studies to the tensions between liberals and conservatives and by downplaying or ignoring leftist critiques of liberalism.
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February 1, 2019
The precarious state of migrant workers has become a major area of concern for the contemporary global economy. In Southeast Asian regions in particular, the number of migrant workers has spiked since the 1990s. In the city of Hong Kong, domestic migrant workers, predominantly Filipino and Indonesian women, now make up around a tenth of the total working population. Since the beginning of Southeast Asia's labor diaspora, activists have been fiercely organizing against the rampant exploitation and abuse of migrant workers.
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