Digital Labor in Asia Helani Galpaya 1 BACKGROUND

Transcript:Digital Labor in Asia Helani Galpaya 1 BACKGROUND:
Digital Labor in Asia Helani Galpaya 1 BACKGROUND & CONTEXT 2 Labor involved in types of digital production (loosely modeled on Fuchs, 2013) 3 Example Type of work Services that are “impersonal” (Blinder, 2007) Falling under to mode 1 trade (pure remote transaction where buyer/seller don’t meet physically) Difficult to quantify labor that is extracting only for digital goods, but…signficant numbers employed Source: U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2017 % of world mine production, 2016, by volume # employees in leading rare earth element production in China Source: Estimated by author, based on various sources such as https://markets.ft.com/data/equities/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_Corporation_of_China_Limited; http://www.minmetals.com/english/about_666/AboutMinmetals/ Industrial labor employs even more: Contract manufacturing is dominated by China Employees at Fortune 500 manufacturers @top contractor manufacturers of digital goods (2013) Source: Fortune Global 500 (http://fortune.com/global500/2013/) and companies’ annual reports Employees in India, 2013 Employees in China, 2013 Information Labor : “traditional” IT sector employment Computer software and services employment as % of total employment % of total business sector workforce involved in the ICT sector Number of employees in Computer Software and Services Source: http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/ier2012_en.pdf India: leader in traditional IT jobs Domination through industry lobbying, government action (apart from labor arbitrage, educated workforce Emergence of strong lobbies: NASSCOM (India), SLASSCOM (Sri Lanka) Heavy lobbying E.g. Call by private sector for higher quality lower cost wholesale telecom connectivity in India, late 1990s and early 2000 Government convening stakeholders ID of core competency in accounting in Sri Lanka in early 2003-2004, investment in trade-shows to highlight outsourcing capabilities Incentives Tax breaks for foreign direct investment, full profit repatriation 9 World’s top Outsourcing Destinations for IT companies Information Labor – “non traditional” platform labor Micro workers in Sri Lanka 17,000 – 22,000 Source: https://www.elance.com/trends/talent-available/geo Source: Graham Source: LIRNEasia (2017) based on national survey representative of 16-45 yr olds and author estimates Information Labor – many “prosumers” in Asia, and growing Leading countries based on number of Facebook users (as at 04/2017) Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/ https://wearesocial.com/special-reports/digital-in-2017-global-overview Year-on-year growth of social media users (as at 01/2017) Mapping the literature on labor 12 Labor involved in types of digital production (loosely modeled on Fuchs, 2013) 13 Example Type of work Information Labor can be further broken down 14 Example Type of work Range of interconnected “themes” come up repeatedly Exploitation of labor (Lack of) collective power of digital labor Alienation Marginalization of specific groups 15 Exploitation – existence of this is well