On-demand labor looks great on paper. It provides workers with flexibility in their scheduling, allows companies to outsource tasks for a low cost, and provides a supplementary income stream to workers. But the reality is not so kind as the exploitation of laborers runs rampant in the on-demand sphere. When considering the underpayment and mistreatment of on-demand laborers it is apparent that Marxism works well as a social theory in explaining how fetishism of the commodity and estranged labor lead to and reinforce class structure- often to the detriment of the working class.
On-demand labor is the term used to describe labor that is exchanged on online platforms. These tasks often do not constitute a full-time position, and these employees are exempt from the benefits and wages that salaried employees enjoy. The types of tasks available range from simple sorting tasks that are too complex for AIs to complete, to more complex tasks like editing and design work. In the video Minds for Sale, Prof. Jonathan Zittrain explores multiple piecework platforms and how their seemingly innocuous tasks could be manipulated for nefarious means (Zittrain 2009). He outlines an example where Amazon’s Mechanical Turks, their human-powered non-artificial-intelligence, could be manipulated to enforce a police state through face recognition tasked out at pennies per match. In this example, the workers are unaware of the greater task their labor is working towards illustrating a modern example of Marx’s concept of estranged labor.
Estranged labor is Marx’s explanation for how the Capitalist system reduces the worker from an individual to a means to an end. He describes four ways in which this estrangement occurs: alienation from the product, from the act of production, from their species essence, and from other workers (Marx 151–157). In the Mechanical Turks example, the workers are alienated from the end product as they have no say in the final product, only what they are assigned to do. They are alienated from the act of production because when they Turk they are unable to produce something of value, instead they are paid a wage for a task. The alienation from their species essence occurs because on-demand laborers are forced to work at menial tasks for the profit of the task giver instead of working to fulfill their own interests or wants. And finally, alienation from other workers is achieved through the platforms themselves as they enable the bourgeois to pit workers against each other in competing for the lowest wage per task possible.
This alienation extends to the content moderators at Cognizant who go through hundreds of flagged Facebook posts every day while earning wages that are a fraction of those earned by the actual Facebook employees (Casey 2019). Instead of using Facebook as a social network, these employees are subject to viewing the content that is explicitly banned from Facebook as a job. With no agency over what is allowed and not, they are subject to alienation from the end product as they are extensions of Facebook’s policies, alienation from the act of production because their work is only to filter content for other users instead of generating new content, alienation from species essence because the workers have to put their personal welfare aside and just deal with the trauma of working there, and alienation from other workers as they are under extremely tight deadlines and quotas that they cannot fight against as there are other potential employees willing to deal with the low pay and bad conditions. Aided by technology, low skill tasks are being sold to the lowest bidder creating downward pressure on wages.
Marx warns against this in The Marx-Engels Reader, where he outlines the concept that wages shrink as productive capital increases and further divisions of labor result in continually lower wages (Marx 138). This concept is taken to its extreme in the case of piecework as the laborers aren’t paid a wage but a per task bounty of sorts. By lowering the skill level necessary to complete these tasks, Amazon is able to give its task givers great rates when hiring Turkers while conversely paying them as little as possible for their labor. The argument could be made that the Mechanical Turk site and others like it only serve to provide a platform for giving out and finding work. This can be true for certain types of on-demand labor where the laborer is supplementing their income. When considering workers at Uber or at Facebook’s content moderation team staffed by Cognizant, however, it becomes clear that the needs of the workers are being ignored for the sake of profit.
Marx outlines the concept of commodity fetishization as the reduction of a commodity to its perceived relative value to other commodities instead of being the sum total of the social relations necessary to create them (Marx 146–151). In the case of Cognizant/Facebook, the end product of a Facebook feed free of banned content is delivered free of charge to the end-user. The end-user is also allowed to report posts they think are in violation of Facebook’s standards. However, the mechanisms that allow for this are largely obscured as the end-user would likely be uncomfortable to find out that the workers responsible for providing a filtered feed, one of Facebook’s main features, were being compensated poorly and were suffering great deals of trauma as a result of their work (Casey 2019). Though content moderators take great pride in their work, their compensation and treatment do not reflect the critical role they perform.
Commodity fetishization is shown here as the workers who are suffering greatly while providing one of Facebook’s main value propositions are being paid as if the work they are doing is somehow not critical to Facebook’s success. They are only considered as their economic value in terms of the low skill job they are performing. Engineers that work for Facebook make multiple times what the content moderators do as the work they do is considered high skill. These wages only reflect the relative and subjective value that Facebook and society have placed on them rather than the actual impact they have on the end product. The argument is not necessarily that the engineers are being paid too much, but that their relative value to the content moderators is a result of societal interpretations and is therefore inconsistent with the reality of what they are producing. Though Facebook would not exist without software engineers to build out the actual website and its functions, to say that the moderation of the content that makes Facebook a social network is worth 1/8th that of the software needed is a result of the subjective value we place on engineering vs content moderation (Casey 2019). The origin of these exchange values, and by extension class struggle, lies in the ideas and culture that we perpetuate.
Marx states that the dominant ideas of a time are merely a reflection of the views of the class that controls the means of material production, arguing that those with the means of material production also control the means of mental production (Marx 170). In today’s world, the elite and successful extol “workism” where identities and purpose are tied to work and careers (Thompson 2019). Marx would argue that this is alienation from species-being as the workers are inadvertently focusing on work over personal fulfillment and needs. This reinforces class struggle since workers are earning wages that do not meet all their needs and because there is little to no welfare or healthcare outside of employment, people are forced to work to survive without the freedom to consider that they are working for the best interests of their employers and not themselves. As companies glorify the benefits of on-demand work, it is important to consider the multiple negatives that arise.
Due to commodity fetishism and estranged labor, the value of low skill work is degrading as platforms allow for further divisions of labor perpetuating downward pressure on wages. Workers are seen less as people and more as the sum of their profitable output. This results in further alienation as these low-skill workers are unable to advocate for themselves since they are unable to survive without wages. The platforms and requesters, on the other hand, are able to pick and choose from the pool of workers desperate to survive (Gray 2019). Since these workers are not in traditional career paths, they are at a greater risk of being left behind in the economy as entry-level requirements rise and wages fall. With few alternatives, they are forced to take whatever work is available, and the lowest requirements for hiring are in on-demand labor. Though Marx’s communist revolution has yet to arrive, the current plight of on-demand laborers is dangerously close to enabling a capitalist dystopia that would be foreign to Marx only in its technological sophistication.
Text caption for the above image
Karl Marx- “Why have you not joined the struggle to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”
Little Girl- “But Karl I’m only 8”
Karl Marx- “You’ve got nothing to lose but your chains”
Works Cited
Gray, Mary and Siddharth Suri. 2019. Algorithmic Cruelty: The Hidden Costs of Ghost Work. From Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass.
Marx, Karl. Estranged Labour. From The Marx-Engels Reader. pp 70–81. [Pages 151–157 in the reader]
Marx, Karl. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof. From The Marx-Engels Reader. pp 319–329. [ Pages 146–151 in the reader]
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. From The Marx-Engels Reader. pp.146–200. [Pages 157–184 in reader]
Marx, Karl. Wage Labour and Capital. From The Marx-Engels Reader. pp 734–59 [Reader: pps 132–139]
Newton, Casey. 2019. The Trauma Floor: The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America. The Verge.
Thompson, Derek. 2019. Workism Is Making Americans Miserable. The Atlantic.
Zittrain, Jonathan. 2009. Minds for Sale. YouTube.com.
Originally written for ISF 100A, Fall 2019
