#undervalued labour

[aurorajay]

Okay so I just stumbled across this job posting for a one-off custom gown and I couldn't not scream into the void about how fucking BONKERS it is.

BEHOLD:

THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT MADE:

I am used to people dramatically underestimating how much time and money it takes to create clothes from scratch, but this is next fucking level.

Even if there was any single person in the world capable of creating this in a week, they most CERTAINLY would not be doing it for 200 measly bucks.

[worklabournewsresearch]

The Revenge of the Essential ‘Low-Skilled’ Worker

“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of low-skilled labour in the economy was assumed to be in decline. ...The pandemic has partly debunked this narrative, by revealing which workers truly are essential. It turns out that there are still no good technological substitutes for the street cleaners, shopkeepers, utility workers, food deliverers, truckers, or bus drivers who have kept the economy running through the darkest days of the crisis. In many cases, these workers perform tasks that require situational adaptability and physical abilities of a kind that cannot easily be coded into software and replicated by a robot. ...  The challenge has always been to close the gap between the social value these workers create and the wages they receive.”

“Behind their sleek digital facades, most of today’s Big Tech companies rely heavily on low-skilled workers. In 2018, the median salary of an Amazon employee was less than US$30,000, reflecting what most of its employees do: manage inventories and fulfill orders in warehouses. The same is true of the electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla, where the median salary was about US$56,000 in 2018: around one-third of its employees work in its assembly plants. And while Facebook’s median salary in 2018 was US$228,000, this figure does not account for the tens of thousands of low-wage contract workers that the company relies on for content moderation.”

“But all too often, the people working at the end of the platform-economy value chain are treated as second-class labour, not even rising to the level of staff. Unlike the engineers and the programmers designing and updating the apps, they are employed as contractors with scant workplace protection. Given the realities of the digital economy, there is no excuse for treating low-qualification jobs as synonymous with low-quality jobs. Today’s ‘low-skilled’ workers may not have advanced academic degrees, but many are in fact skilled technicians who have mastered certain knowledge domains and techniques. Acknowledging this will be crucial for re-establishing these workers’ negotiating power and forging a new social contract.”

The Globe and Mail, November 23, 2020: “The revenge of the essential ‘low-skilled’ worker,” by Edoardo Campanella

Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 2016:  Defining Skilled Technical Work by Jonathan Rothwell

[worklabournewsresearch]

What to Know When Comparing Data on Women and Men’s Work

"How many men and women were employed last week? How many hours did they work in their main jobs? And how many hours did they work in unpaid activities such as caring for children? These are seemingly straightforward questions but measuring paid and unpaid work through household surveys is anything but straightforward. This holds true especially for women in developing countries, who are more often engaged in informal activities such as microenterprises or small-scale farming — activities that can fall through the cracks of traditional surveys."

"To improve the measurement of women’s work and provide guidance on good measurement practices, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank collaborated with the Sri Lanka Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) between 2017 and 2019 on a multi-stage pilot study. The study compared the outcomes of two types of household surveys: the labor force survey (LFS) and a multi-topic living standards survey (MLSS). ... This difference in outcomes can be concerning for users who can often assume that an indicator carrying the same label – such as unemployment – should amount to approximately the same thing regardless of the source."

"[W]e highlight three findings:

Different types of surveys won’t always give the same results, but gaps between them can be reduced

Women’s work is at greater risk of mismeasurement

Good translation matters"

International Labour Organization, October 12, 2021: What to Know When Comparing Data on Women and Men’s Work by Kieran Walsh, Summary (12 pages, PDF), Full Report (68 pages, PDF)

World Bank Group, April 2020: 'She Helps Me All the Time': Underestimating Women’s Economic Engagement in Rural Honduras, by Miriam Muller and Liliana D. Sousa (32 pages, PDF)

Photo Source: Ackley, J. (2018). [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/1hxgFZ68xZ4