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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research
- Sprache: Englisch
Provides a global perspective on labor and technology, exploring resistance, solidarity, and alternatives in digital capitalism
The Handbook of Digital Labor critically examines how digital technologies are reshaping work and employment around the globe. Bridging historical and contemporary perspectives, this timely volume explores the dynamics of labor within digital capitalism using a critical framework that illuminates the systemic challenges faced by workers across diverse sectors. Dozens of contributing authors address key challenges including surveillance, inequality, and environmental exploitation, while highlighting innovative forms of resistance and organizing.
Organized into four sections—Working-Class Resistance, Digital Capitalism and Alternatives, Laboring under Digital Capitalism, and Theorizing Digital Labor—the Handbook offers a nuanced understanding of how workers navigate the intersection of technological advancement and capitalist development. In-depth chapters cover topics ranging from platform work to AI-driven labor processes—shedding light on the realities of digital labor.
Equipping readers with the tools to critically engage with labor struggles across diverse industries and geographies, the Handbook of Digital Labor:
- Offers interdisciplinary insights from leading scholars in media, communication, labor studies, political economy, as well as unionists, activists, and other on-the-ground practitioners
- Presents both historical and contemporary analyses of labor conditions under digital capitalism
- Advocates for actionable strategies to empower labor movements and build equitable and sustainable alternatives
- Features real-world case studies of worker resistance and solidarity across platforms and industries
Emphasizing both theory and praxis, the Handbook of Digital Labor is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, junior faculty, and researchers in media studies, labor sociology, and public policy. It is a vital resource for courses on digital labor, political economy, and social change within communications and technology programs. Labor organizers, policymakers, and industry professionals will find it an indispensable guide to navigating the complexities of work in the digital age.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Section I: Working‐Class Resistance
1 The Laboring of Labor Communication Research
Introduction
Class Tells
Class Struggle at Harvard
Theory–Labor–Praxis
Labor Convergence
Laboring Dialectically
Passing the Torch
Conclusion
References
Note
2 The Party's Over: Organizing Across the Contracting Divide at Google
Introduction
Beyond the Invisible Line: Outsourcing in Tech
Revenge of the TVCs
“What do the Steelworkers Know About Computers?”
The Party's Over
References
Notes
3 Organizing the Unorganized: The Case of Korean Truck Drivers—An Interview with Wol‐san Liem
Introduction
The Growth of Logistics and the Working Class
References
Notes
4 “The Coal Machine/What Will a Coal Miner Do?” Automation, Financialization, and Union Mobilization in Underground US Coal Mining
Introduction
A Praxis Framework
Mechanization, Automation, Digitalization, and a Reserve Army of Workers in the Coalfields
Energy Transition Initiative 1: Preserve UMWA Jobs—Coal Mining Technology and Worker Health
Energy Transition Initiative 2: Create New Jobs—Jobs for Displaced Coal Miners and Clean Energy Economy Technology
Energy Transition Initiative 3: Preserve UMWA Families And Communities—Retraining for Jobs in Coal Country Tech Hubs
Envisioning New Configurations of Worker Power in an Era Of Finance Capitalism: the UMWA Warrior Met Strike And Labor's Resurgence
Current and Future Directions
References
Notes
5 Pathways to Worker Empowerment in the Digital Age: A Comparative Analysis of Unions and Co‐operatives
Introduction
Motivations
Democracy
Equity
Political Horizons
Conclusion
References
Section II: Digital Capitalism and Alternatives
6 Digital Capitalism in the 2020s: Dividing the World
Introduction: Origins and Structure of Digital Capitalism
GEO‐Political Economy
An Unresolved Paradox
Conclusion
References
Notes
7 Labor and Surveillance: The Productivity of Being Watched
Introduction
Surveillance Capitalism is a Pleonasm
Productive Consumption
Control Crisis
Platforming Reality
The Perennial Question: What Counts as Labor?
Conclusion
References
8 “We Don't Need Unions at Amazon.com”: Historical Context and the Struggle to Organize an E‐Commerce Giant
Introduction
Amazon's Rise and Early Labor Organizing—A Brief History of Amazon
Traditional Methods and Demands and the Acceleration of Organizing
Amazon Hits Back, Old Battles Renewed
Historic Patterns, North and South
Organizational Novelties
Conclusion: Anti‐Unionism, Surveillance, and History
References
Notes
9 From “Barefoot Electrician” to “Electronic Supervisor”: Technology and Labor Politics in the Information Industry of China
Introduction: Chen Boda's “Electronic‐Centric Theory”
“Barefoot Electricians” and Electronic Literacy: Revisiting the Red Electronic Revolution
Daqing Oilfield: The Use of Digital Literacy
Barefoot Electrician and the System of Automation Machinery
The Neighborhood Factory that Produces Computers
Anti‐Modern Modernity and Industrial Democracy
Refusal to Start The Machine: “Electronic Luddites” Versus “Electronic Supervisors”
The Deceptions of Technological Determinism
Conclusion
References
10 Cybersyn
A History Sealed in Dust
The Debate and Myths About Socialist Economic Calculation
Socialist Economic Calculation in the New Century
China and the Legacy of Cybersyn
Summary
References
11 Regional Disadvantage
Introduction
The Rise of “the Valley”
Enterprising Individuals
Google and its Discontents
Black Lives Matter
Wfx (Work from Anywhere)
Conclusion: “Survival of the Flexist”
References
Notes
Section III: Laboring under Digital Capitalism
12 Global Inequalities in the Production of Artificial Intelligence
Introduction
Inequalities in the Global Data Work Market
A Four‐Country Study
Transnational Dynamics in Data Work and the Persistence of Historical Disparities
Conclusion
References
13 Platform‐mediated Informal Employment, the State, and Labor Politics in China
Introduction
State, Capitalist Development, and Labor Informalization
The Intersection of Class, Gender, and Migration in Platform‐mediated Work
Labor Responses to Exploitation and Inequality in the Platform Labor Regime
Conclusion
References
Note
14 “There is No Future in this Business.” Further Platformization of Ride‐hailing Service in China and the State's Intervening Policies under the COVID‐19 Outbreak
Introduction
The Platformization of Ride‐hailing Service in China: A Brief History
“The War of Allowance” and Taxi Drivers' Honeymoon Period with Ride‐hailing Apps
The “Whitewashing” of Illegal Taxis and the Legalization of Platform Gig Labor
Governmental Interventions
Methodology and Data Collection
Results
Conclusion: “There is no Future in this Business”
References
Notes
15 “It’s Not A Job That You Can Take Off”
Introduction
Theoretical Background: Sex Work in Digital Landscapes
Webcam Platforms and Subscription Platforms
Findings and Discussion
Conclusion
References
Notes
16 “Calibrated Servitude”
Introduction
Research Context and Approach: The Philippines, Cloudwork, and “Postcolonial Predicaments”
Moral Economies of Platform‐mediated Work
Calibrated Servitude: Workers' Strategies to Bridge Physical, Cultural, and Power Distance
Worker–worker Relations: Cascading Influence, Constructing Capital, Circulating Care
Rewards: The Fruits of Relational Practices
Calibrated Servitude In Cloudwork: Coloniality, Calculation, Care, And Capital
References
17 The Digital Hustle: Precarity Beyond Platforms
Introduction
Inventing “Digital Labor”
Growing Precarity, for Whom?
The Digital Hustle
Coordination
Maintenance and Cultivation
Compliance
Conclusion
References
18 Control and Flexibility in the Age of Globalized Production
Introduction
Global Commodity Chains and the “New Globalization”
Flexible Production and the Issue of Control
Digital Technology and Global South Development
Big Fish, Small Fish, and the Southern Seamstress: The Indonesian Case
Java Film, Star Inc., and the Multinational Clients
Conclusion
References
Section IV: Theorizing Digital Labor
19 Digital Labor and Digital Capitalism: A Critical Political Economy Perspective
Introduction
Some Foundations of Marx's Theory
Theorizing Digital Labor
Digital Labor on Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram, and Tiktok
Digital Labor and Digital Capitalism
Transformations of Digital Labor and Digital Capitalism
Conclusion
References
20 Digital Labor and the Domestic Sphere
Introduction
Waged Digital Labor in Factories and Offices
Digital Labor as Unwaged Labor in the Sphere of Reproduction
Digital Labor as Waged Labor in Public Administration
Discussion and Final Remarks
References
Note
21 Labor and Value
Introduction
Digital Labor: From the Postindustrial to Web 2.0
Platformization Beyond Digital Labor?
Labor and Value
Alternatives
Finance and Value
Risk and Insecurity
Conclusion
References
22 Circuits of Labor: A Holistic Model for the Making and Unmaking of Class Through the iPhone
Introduction
Digital Labor and ICT: An Overview
The Need to Connect
The Circuits of Labor (COL) Model
Short‐Circuits
Iphone and Foxconn
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 Same informational closed loop, different technological implemen...
Table 10.2 Comparing the information system capabilities between 1972 and 2...
Chapter 16
Table 16.1 Worker perspectives of cloudwork constraints and rewards of rela...
Chapter 19
Table 19.1 Digital capitalism's antagonisms
List of Illustrations
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 During World War II, the United Kingdom had already begun using ...
Figure 10.2 Viable system model (biological form).
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Robert Noyce speaks to male colleagues while women work.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Global flows of data work for AI production, showcasing three ma...
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 Comparing two types of drivers' monthly net income.
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Screenshot from an ad of cam services displayed in the Telegram ...
Figure 15.2 Screenshot of service pricing displayed in a participant's profi...
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 The international division of digital labor.
Chapter 22
Figure 22.1 du Gay et al.'s circuit of culture.
Figure 22.2 The formal and informal circuits of labor (CoL). To the left, th...
Figure 22.3 The book by Pun et al. (2011) showing Tian Yu, a Foxconn survivo...
Figure 22.4 The business model of Molleindustria, a group of radical game de...
Figure 22.5 Mobile phone video image of security guards beating and threaten...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research
Series Editors: Karin Wilkins, University of MiamiJanet Wasko, University of Oregon
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The Handbook of Digital Labor
Edited by
Jack Linchuan Qiu
ShinJoung Yeo
Richard Maxwell
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Notes on Contributors
Mark Andrejevic is a professor in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University. He writes about digital media, automation, and surveillance and is the author or co‐author of five books and over 100 research articles and book chapters.
Adam Arvidsson is a professor of Sociology at the University of Naples, Federico II (Italy). He has worked on brands, creative cities and professions, and the political economy of digital technologies. His most recent book is Changemakers: The Industrious Future of the Digital Economy (Polity 2019).
Arlen Austin completed his dissertation in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2024, focusing on the relationship between feminist theories of reproductive labor and the political economy of televisual and digital media. He is co‐editor, with Silvia Federici, of The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972–1979: History, Theory, and Documents. He is currently completing a new translation, introduction, and annotation of Leopoldina Forunati's classic work L'arcano della riproduzione for Verso Books. He is also co‐editor, with Jaleh Mansoor and Sara Colantuono, of Fillip Foglio G, Gendered Labour and Clitoridean Revolt. Leopoldina Fortunati and Carla Lonzi. His writings have appeared in numerous journals, including GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Viewpoint, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and TDR: The Drama Review, among others.
Matheus Viana Braz is a social psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Minas Gerais State University (UEMG), Brazil. He is also a professor in the Graduate Program in Psychology at Maringá State University (UEM). He coordinates the Laboratory of Work, Health, and Subjectivation Processes (LATRAPS) and is a Visiting Researcher at the Laboratoire de Changement Social et Politique (LCSP) at Université Paris Cité. His research primarily focuses on the digital platform economy, the role of human labor in the global AI supply chain, digital inequalities, and workers' health, with a particular emphasis on Latin America.
Enda Brophy is an associate professor in the School of Communication and an associate in the Labour Studies Program at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce. He has translated numerous works, including The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America by Gigi Roggero. He is a co‐founder of Contract Worker Justice @SFU, a coalition of workers, students, faculty, and trade unions organizing to bring cleaning and food services in‐house at Simon Fraser University.
Antonio A. Casilli is a professor of Sociology at Telecom Paris, the telecommunication school of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, and a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Institute on Innovation (i3). His research focuses on digital labor, data governance, and human rights. He is the author of the award‐winning book En attendant les robots (Editions du Seuil 2019), translated into several languages, and the co‐creator of the documentary mini‐series “Invisibles ‐ The Click Workers” (France Télévisions 2020).
Jenny Chan is an associate professor of Sociology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and an International Academic Advisory Board Member of the Work and Equalities Institute at The University of Manchester. She is the co‐author, with Mark Selden and Pun Ngai, of Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers (Haymarket Books & Pluto Press 2020), which has been translated into Korean (Narumbooks 2021) and awarded CHOICE’s Outstanding Academic Title in both the China (2022) and Work and Labor (2022) categories. Her recent analyses on coalition building among workers, students, and consumers have appeared in The China Review, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, and Critical Sociology, among others.
Changwen Chen is a critical/cultural scholar interested in the social history of learning and work culture, focusing on its intersections with technology, development, and post‐socialist politics. His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Cultural Economy, Social Media+Society, Chinese Journal of Communication, and e‐flux Journal. He earned his PhD in Communications and New Media from the National University of Singapore.
Hanlin Chen obtained his BA degree in Communication Studies from the University of Liverpool in 2024. His research interests focus on journalism studies, digital media audiences, and users.
Qinyi Chen comes with an interdisciplinary background with her MPhil degree in Digital Humanities obtained from the University of Cambridge and BA degree in Media and Communication Studies from Xi’an Jiaotong‐Liverpool University. Her research centers on the affective dimensions of contemporary transnational digital culture and aesthetics, as well as the behavioral and emotional responses to media use. Her research interests encompass gender and sexuality studies, subcultural studies, and memory studies. Her master’s thesis focuses on the phenomenon of the prevalence of melancholic elements in Chinese digital culture through the lens of psychoanalysis.
Nicole S. Cohen is an associate professor at the University of Toronto, in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology and the Faculty of Information. She is the author of Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill‐Queen’s University Press 2016), which received the 2017 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association, and, with Greig de Peuter, New Media Unions: Organizing Digital Journalists (Routledge 2020).
Maxime Cornet is a PhD researcher at Telecom Paris specializing in the sociology of artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on its impacts on work and employment in a globalized world. His research uses data science and social network analysis approaches.
Kate Crawford is an internationally leading scholar of artificial intelligence and its impacts. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR in New York, and was the inaugural Visiting Chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and The Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, won multiple awards, including the Sally Hacker Prize, and was named one of the books of the year by New Scientist and the Financial Times. It has been translated into twelve languages.
Greig de Peuter is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. He is co‐author, with Nicole Cohen, of New Media Unions: Organizing Digital Journalists (Routledge) and, with Nick Dyer‐Witheford, of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press).
Margherita Di Cicco holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Research Methodology from the University of Milan. She is currently a lecturer in New Media and Digital Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. Her research, positioned at the intersection of labor sociology, media studies, and digital ethnography, focuses on sex workers’ experiences in the platform economy, the broader implications of labor platformization, and the evolving landscapes of digital intimacies. Margherita is also a collaborator on the “Generations and Work” project at the University of Milan, which explores shifting imaginaries around work in Italy from a generational perspective, using a combination of in‐depth interviews and qualitative digital methods.
Leopoldina Fortunati is a senior professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics at the University of Udine, Italy. In the last decades, she has carried out several research projects at the international level and written intensively on reproduction labor and digital technologies. She is a member of the Academia Europaea and an ICA Fellow. Her works have been published in twelve languages.
Christian Fuchs is a professor of Media Systems and Media Organization at Paderborn University in Germany. He is a critical theorist of communication, digital media, and society. He is co‐editor of the journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Fuchs is author of many publications, including the books Social Media: A Critical Introduction (4th edition 2025, earlier ones 2021, 2017, 2014), Media, Economy and Society (2024), Digital Capitalism (2022), Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory (2020), Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (2015), Digital Labor and Karl Marx (2014), and Internet and Society (2008). For more information on his work, visit his website: https://fuchsc.net
Seamus B. Grayer is an activist and researcher based in Vancouver, BC. In 2020, he received his master's degree from Simon Fraser University for his thesis, which studied a stock photography platform cooperative as an example of worker resistance and self‐organization in Canada's cultural industries. He has worked in the local labor movement ever since.
Melissa Gregg is a professor of Digital Futures at the University of Bristol and a consultant on sustainability strategy to the tech industry. Over her ten‐year tenure at Intel Corporation, she established the User Experience domain, driving architecture roadmaps in the Client Computing Group, from Business Platforms to Smart Home and the experience strategy for Intel EVO laptops. As a Senior Principal Engineer, she secured executive support and built the first product team addressing Intel’s Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. Prior to working in industry, her publications include The Affect Theory Reader (Duke U P 2010), Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011), and Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy (Duke U P 2018). Her current writing focuses on the relationship between professional performance, technology design and management practices, and, ultimately, the climate costs that arise from their convergence.
Dr. Yanning Huang is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong‐Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. He received his doctoral degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include youth and digital culture, audience research, media gender studies, media and social justice, and environmental communication.
Ruotong Jia attained a bachelor’s degree in Media and Communication Studies from Xi’an Jiaotong‐Liverpool University (XJTLU). She is currently pursuing an MSc in Global Media and Communication through a dual program at the London School of Economics and the University of Southern California. Her research interests lie in digital cultural studies, youth cultural studies, and media and cultural studies, with a focus on feminist theories. By analyzing the intersection of media, culture, and gender, she aims to develop a deeper understanding of how digital environments impact cultural representation and social changes.
Clément Le Ludec holds a PhD in Sociology from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. His research focuses on subcontracting chains of AI labor between France and the African continent. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre d'Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques (CERSA) at Paris Panthéon‐Assas University, where he is working on digital platform governance.
Jiaming Liu graduated from the University of Liverpool with a bachelor's degree and will be pursuing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include the platform economy and social labor, media audiences, media regulation, and international news communication. Her dissertation, which focused on the news frames used by British media in reporting on China in an international context, won the Best Undergraduate Dissertation Prize from the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Liverpool.
Richard Maxwell is a professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. His publications include The Spectacle of Democracy, Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture, Herbert Schiller, Global Hollywood (co‐authored), Greening the Media (with Toby Miller), The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media, Media and the Ecological Crisis (co‐edited), and How Green Is Your Smartphone? (with Toby Miller).
Timothy J. Minchin is a professor of North American History at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He has written widely on labor and civil rights history. His previous books include Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980 (University of North Carolina Press 1999), and Empty Mills: The Fight Against Imports and the Decline of the U.S. Textile Industry (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). His most recent book is America’s Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign‐Owned Automotive Sector in the United States (University of Georgia Press 2021).
Vincent Mosco (1948–2024) is professor emeritus at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and a distinguished professor of Communication at Fudan University’s New Media Centre in Shanghai, was the author or editor of more than twenty‐five books on the political economy of communication, the social impacts of information technology, the future of cities, and the issues facing communications workers. He served on the editorial boards of communication journals around the world, was a founding member of the Union for Democratic Communication, and served for a time as chair of the political economy section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. He passed away in February 2024.
Jack Linchuan Qiu is Chair and Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has published more than 130 research articles and chapters, as well as 12 books in English and Chinese, including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (University of Illinois Press), World Factory in the Information Age (Guangxi Normal University Press), Working‐Class Network Society (MIT Press), and Mobile Communication and Society(co‐authored, MIT Press). Dr. Qiu is a recipient of the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy and an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association.
Dan Schiller is a historian of Communications and Information. After working at the University of Leicester, Temple University, UCLA, and UCSD, he finished his career at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, where he is professor emeritus. The author of Telematics and Government, Theorizing Communication, Digital Capitalism and other books and articles, his academic and journalistic writing is known across Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. His life’s work was published by Oxford University Press in 2023: Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications From the Post Office to the Internet.
Cheryll Ruth R. Soriano (PhD) is a professor of Communication at De La Salle University in Manila. Her research explores how platforms are embedded in social, technological, and economic infrastructures, and how platformization shapes the conditions for work and workers’ organizing practices. Dr. Cheryll is principal investigator of Fairwork Philippines and co‐investigator of the project, Platform Ecosystems and Transactional Cultures in Asia. Her books include Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube (with E. Cabalquinto) and Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (with S.S. Lim). She is also a co‐editor of Platforms & Society.
Intan Suwandi is an assistant professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and author of Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (Monthly Review Press 2019). She specializes in international political economy and global development. Her current research focuses on the impacts of global supply chain disruptions and the Global South resistance.
Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and in the Department of Sociology. Her book, Left to Our Own Devices (Oxford 2022), examines the ways that digital technologies shape the meaning of precarious work. She is a former member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, affiliate faculty at the Data & Society Research Institute, and sits on the City of Philadelphia’s Task Force for Domestic Worker Rights. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Virginia, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows, and her BA from Wellesley College.
Juana Torres‐Cierpe is a labor sociologist who holds a PhD in economic and political sciences. She is currently a researcher at the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. In recent years, she has specialized in topics related to platform labor in Latin America and the world of work behind artificial intelligence. Currently, she is analyzing the challenges of AI technological implementations among workers, particularly those involved in the French public administration.
Paola Tubaro is a research professor at the National Centre for Scientific Research and professor at the National School of Economics and Statistics in France. At the crossroads of economics and economic sociology, her current research explores the human labor underlying the digital economy, the ethical dimensions of big data and machine learning, as well as the impact of artificial intelligence on social inequalities, the spread of (dis)information, and the conduct of scientific research.
Hongzhe Wang is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University. He received a PhD in communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests focus on the intersection of the history of media technology, the global Cold War, cybernetics, the information society, and labor studies. He has long been involved in advanced studies in media‐centered humanities, social sciences, and artistic works. He is the founder of Beijing Media Group and Game Manual and co‐founder of Assembly. He lives and works in Beijing.
Dr. Ericka Wills is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, School for Workers. She conducts education programs, research, and outreach for workers and their unions, ranging from miners to flight attendants, and from steelworkers to teachers.
Jie Xiong is the Director of Global South Research Center at the International Communication Research Institute, East China Normal University. He is an expert in international communication and digital transformation. As a veteran consultant, Xiong Jie has led and participated in digital transformation and innovation projects for multiple leading enterprises. Xiong Jie’s current focus areas are the digital economy and relevant policies, as well as digital sovereignty of Global South countries. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Liverpool.
Xueer Yan holds an MS in Public Relations from Boston University. Her undergraduate degree is a BA in Media and Communication Studies from Xi'an Jiaotong‐Liverpool University. Xueer is interested in issues related to labor and sustainable development. She is currently learning and exploring fair trade practices by doing some voluntary work in China. Her favorite way to travel is to study and live in marginalized villages, learning intangible cultural skills from artisans based on the concept of fair trade.
Yushu Yin graduated with first‐class BA in English and Communication Studies from Xi'an Jiaotong‐Liverpool University. She received the National Scholarship and was recognized as an Outstanding Graduate. Yushu’s research interests include digital cultural studies, identity construction, discourse analysis, multilingualism, and multiple interviews. Her undergraduate dissertation, which won the Best Performance in Final Year Project, explored learner identity construction as a resource for critical learning, delving into how learners’ diverse cultural and educational backgrounds influence their self‐representation.
ShinJoung Yeo is an associate professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. Her publications include Behind the Search Box: Google and the Global Internet Industry (University of Illinois Press 2023) and Baidu: Geopolitical Dynamics of the Internet in China (Routledge 2022). She is co‐founder of Information Observatory with Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller. She is currently working on a people’s history of the New World Information and Communication Order.
Acknowledgments
The editors thank all contributors to this handbook for their labor of love in drafting and revising their chapters. We thank Karin Wilkins and Janet Wasko at IAMCR for connecting us with the publisher and providing initial advice on this project. Throughout the editorial process, we are grateful to have had the strong support of our colleague Marisol Sandoval, and from our master’s student assistant Weiru Cheng, who has been patient and meticulous. Thanks also to Nicole Allen, Radhika Raheja Sharma, and Ed Robinson at Wiley for their professionalism and editorial assistance.
Introduction
Jack Linchuan Qiu, ShinJoung Yeo, and Richard Maxwell
The term “digital labor” emerged with the penetration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and renewed debates among scholars centered around labor issues (Fish & Srinivasan 2012; Scholz 2012; Fuchs 2014). Today, network‐enabled digital technology has become ubiquitous. It is deployed from industrial to service sectors to countless everyday life scenarios, so much so that the term “digital labor” could obfuscate how the global working class is being recomposed and where working‐class power resides. Our intention for this handbook is therefore not to narrowly define “digital labor” as separate from conventional forms of labor. Instead, we put together this edited volume to shed light on changing labor processes, new working conditions, and workers' struggles in this period of major restructuring when digital technology is the fulcrum of global capitalist development.
In other words, rather than a single set of occupations, we understand digital labor as a dynamic, technologized condition of work, characterized by vastly different ownership schemes, labor processes, and reward systems. It is also a collective effort to build solidarity, within and across the platforms, unions, co‐ops, and industries, including not only “high tech” industries but also “traditional” ones where digital labor struggles are embedded but often concealed. A goal of this handbook is to render the invisible visible.
In 2022, over 250 million Indian workers and farmers, along with their allied students and civil groups, went out on the streets protesting against the attacks on workers' rights and the new agricultural policy by the Modi government that undermined farmers' livelihoods (Phawa 2020). In the same year, workers in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand organized major strikes against platform companies (Nguyen 2022). In 2024, South Africa's largest public sector workers went on to the streets and demanded wage increases (Casual Workers Advice Office 2025), while there has been a wave of strikes by transportation, ports, factory, and metal workers in Germany (Schuetze & Solomon 2024). Even in the United States where only 10% of workers are unionized, there has been a record high of collective actions among workers from various sectors such as mining, automobile, ride‐sharing, and Hollywood cultural industries (Moody 2023).
The new upsurge of strikes and collective actions around the globe demonstrates that the global working class is alive and resilient. They are inspirational and encouraging. However, to transform this into a meaningful global political project, the collective fight must be sustained and augmented, eroding the power of the transnational capitalist class (Gindin 2024; Sklair 2001). To search for working‐class power that could truly lead to radical social change, we need to have a clear understanding of the global working‐class dynamics within contemporary capitalism to harness and sustain working‐class power. We hope that this handbook can contribute to that goal.
Over the decades, crisis‐ridden global capitalism has been radically transformed. With falling rates of profit since the late 1960s, the Third World debt crisis since the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China's reintegration into global capitalism, the US‐led global system has changed significantly through structural adjustment, privatization, and financialization (Brenner 2002; Gindin & Panitch 2012; Schiller 2014). All these are accompanied, in most parts of the world, by austerity policies and attacks on labor. Within political economic dynamics, bolstered by techno‐utopian ideology, massive internet infrastructures across the globe were built unevenly. ICTs helped draw areas outside markets into the capitalist economy, reorganizing the production and distribution of goods and services, extending and deepening the global value chain for numerous sectors including media and communication (Huws 2014; Lotz 2018; Schiller 1999) and the IT industry itself (Yeung 2022). The restructuring of the capitalist economy built over the internet has also transformed the global labor market and labor processes, producing new working conditions, new grounds for labor struggle, and new networks of class formation (Dyer‐Witheford 2015; Huws 2014; Moody 2017; Qiu 2009).
With the recurrent crises of capitalism, followed by cycles of new technologies deployment, existing occupations are being restructured or disappearing, whereas new occupations, new patterns of work, working conditions, and new contradictions are emerging within the capitalist logic of profit maximization, imperatives of competition, and capital accumulation. The 2008 Great Recession and the COVID‐19 pandemic have accelerated these trends across the globe, exposing and deepening social inequality. Our handbook covers these tumultuous changes and is organized around four sections:
Working‐Class Resistance
Digital Capitalism and Alternatives
Laboring under Digital Capitalism
Theorizing Digital Labor.
A lead chapter sets the tone for each section and provides a broad introduction to themes that resonate with the set of accompanying chapters. The first part focuses on the different terrains of working‐class struggles and organizing efforts. These issues have been central to the work of Vincent Mosco, an activist scholar whose influence, directly or indirectly, has inspired the growth of interdisciplinary studies of labor and labor organizing in communications and other sectors. It is fitting that Professor Mosco's essay serves as the groundbreaker for this section and, indeed, this handbook, which we have dedicated to the memory of his life and labors.
The second section comprises essays examining historical experiments of democratic technology as well as structural conditions of global digital capitalism. It provides further context to the contemporary challenges faced by workers amid seismic political and economic shifts. Dan Schiller sets the stage for the section, illustrating how capital deploys digital technology to accelerate commodification and alters the political economy while opening up digital capitalism to new geopolitical conflicts, in particular between the United States and China. The section challenges the idea of a politically neutral process of technological development.
The third part is comprised of comparative case studies that share both critical and methodological frameworks to detail working conditions in platform work and beyond, which, despite the technological novelty, reproduces the global division of labor. This is a process full of durable inequalities as well as possibilities for worker empowerment. This section starts with work by Antonio Casilli et al. who discuss their multi‐country study concerning the production of artificial intelligence (AI) to illustrate the global challenges faced by a largely unacknowledged workforce.
The final section takes us to the theoretical realm of studying digital labor, led by Christian Fuchs, who introduces the broad conceptual framework and touches on the future political horizon. This part of the book gives readers an opportunity to engage with various theoretical debates centered around “digital labor” that have been discussed over the years. Most of these debates are likely to continue into the future with long‐lasting conceptual, practical, and political implications. They may also stimulate reimaginations beyond contemporary digital capitalism.
Section One: Working‐Class Resistance
The opening chapter is a semi‐autobiographical essay by Vincent Mosco, a true role model for students, scholars, and activists who work on issues of labor, communication, and digital media. It tracks his life trajectories from a working‐class youth to an activist scholar dedicated to critical political economy, policy research, and pedagogy. His lifelong efforts were shaped by his belief “that teaching and research are forms of labor and provide opportunities for praxis, the integration of thought and action.” When he began to incorporate labor studies into communications research, there were a handful of others who shared his radical interest in challenging the mainstream views of media and communication, especially as activists. By the end of his life on February 9, 2024, he had witnessed “the extraordinary growth of research in the field, today manifest most extensively in digital labor studies.” His chapter is imbued with solidarity with labor movement politics and action, as well as enthusiasm for new scholarship and how he insisted on “passing the torch” to his students and collaborators around the world. He urges researchers in the West to look beyond their borders—both national and scholarly—to reach out to “scholars in less developed parts of the world but especially in Africa where digital labor begins its journey through the international division of labor in the coltan mines that contain the rare minerals that power the digital world.” But most importantly, and in the spirit of the writers of the essays in this section and throughout this handbook, he encourages us to “join activist movements everywhere, from universities to Amazon warehouses, where some of the most important labor organizing is taking place today.”
Chapter Two by Seamus Bright Grayer and Enda Brophy, examines the hierarchical structure and disconnection between full‐time employees at Alphabet (and Google) and the large and overlooked workforce of temps, vendors, and workers at subcontractors. The “practice of contracting out,” they argue, both shapes the composition of labor and provides new grounds for organizing and resistance to digital capitalism. The chapter draws from research with Pittsburgh Tech Workers United (United Steelworkers Union Local 4040) and Alphabet Workers Union‐Communication Workers of America (AWU‐CWA). The authors identify a rift in the tech sector that sets up system‐serving conflicts between workers as the sector adopted ever more aggressive disciplinary strategies of corporate labor management. Many of the workers Grayer and Brophy interviewed noted that managers of both Alphabet and the outsourcing worksites discouraged solidarity, enforcing a key strategy to break up the composition of digital labor to maintain the advantage of capital over workers. Every effort of solidarity and labor organizing across the value chain and “contractor divide” is, in this sense, a significant threat to digital capital, as the latter reorganizes to reassert “employer power.”
Chapter Three by ShinJoung Yeo turns our attention to logistics and transportation. Yeo explains the rising value of logistics and the growing number of workers in this critical sector. Through the case of South Korean truck drivers, Yeo examines how global supply chains are linked in complex ways. After explicating the intersection of logistics, working‐class power, and global capitalism, Yeo presents an extensive interview she conducted with Wol‐san Liem, who worked with South Korean truck drivers and the Cargo Truckers Solidarity Division (TruckSol) for 15 years as Director of International Affairs at KPTU (Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union) and is currently working for the International Transport Workers' Federation) as Policy and Strategy Coordinator. The interview is wide‐ranging and details the composition of transport labor in Korea and truck drivers' place in the global logistics sector. The political struggles of workers seeking safer and more stable working conditions face many challenges in Korea, where the state has pushed back against organizing initiatives, strikes, and legislation for “safe rates” protections of truckers. The interview touches on questions about the limits and potentialities of worker power in logistics as well as international comparisons and solidarity among logistics worker unions and organizers, particularly the bilateral collaboration with Transport Workers' Union of Australia and Wol‐san Liem's work of transportation unions in Africa.
In Chapter Four, Ericka Wills offers a praxis‐oriented examination of automation, financialization, and union mobilization of underground US coal mining, which has become a “highly computerized industry.” A labor educator and activist, Wills explains how “processes of mechanization, automation, and digitalization in the underground coal mining industry have foundationally altered the nature of miners' work.” Wills frames these processes to provide insight into the restructuring of employment in coal mining regions of the United States, the rising demands for unions to fight the financialization of mining companies where private equity firms and investment funds (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street) have insinuated themselves to the detriment of workers and worker rights, and the increasing importance of mobilizing for union solidarity in the fight against these trends. She asks us to keep watch on the progress of collective worker power emerging in the era of finance capitalism “in every organizing drive, contract negotiation, and strike where workers hold the line.”
Chapter Five adds to the study of digital worker empowerment through the research of Greig de Peuter and Nicole Cohen, who have spent years studying workers and labor conditions in digital media, cultural industries, and the tech sector. Their work endeavors to answer questions about what spurs workers' organizational choices between unions and worker co‐ops and how each model addresses workplace democracy and racial and gender inequities. Through a comparative analysis, de Peuter and Cohen identify commonalities and tensions between the models to understand the political horizons of each kind of collective organizing and action. The comparative approach is innovative, emerging from critical debates around proposals for a “union co‐op model.” The empirical examples offered by de Peuter and Cohen provide an invigorating examination of how these organizing toolkits can enhance digital labor studies and inform activist “pathways to worker empowerment in the digital age.”
Section Two: Digital Capitalism and Alternatives
A goal of this handbook is to demonstrate that issues of digital labor are neither exclusively 21st‐century concerns nor are they peripheral ones. Rather, they are pervasive and time‐honored, even before the diffusion of personal computers. With this holistic view, we submit that digital labor is global and historical; that class identity and consciousness are malleable and contingent, rather than essential or fixed; and that labor solidarity and struggles continue to matter despite all the myths about digital technologies such as AI. Digital capitalism is neither natural nor is it the only destination for humanity. There were, are, and will be alternatives.
In Chapter Six, Dan Schiller examines the historical origins and contemporary characteristics of digital capitalism. Schiller's expansive understanding of the history of digital capitalism has developed over decades of research and analysis. In this chapter, he explains both the political economic continuities that ensure capitalist domination and discontinuities stemming from inherent vulnerabilities and tendencies toward crisis—via financialization, global debt crises, and unregulated activities, among which we might add climate change. In this context, tech companies' leading role in reconfiguring the “overall political economy” has provided an economic growth pole that also became a geopolitical flash point, particularly between the United States and China. In the digital geopolitical economy, US leaders have made it their mission to “maintain pre‐eminence over this technology … as the entire political economy is regenerating around digital systems and services.” Schiller argues that US tech hegemony is vital for its maintaining global supremacy. He shows how China has been “reorganizing its national political economy and, concurrently, seeking to bring other countries into its digital orbit: in short, attempting to reconfigure the overall political economy of digital capitalism.” The United States has contested this emerging power through aggressive trade policies, national security, and intimidation of its allies. But as Schiller points out, there is “no guarantee that U.S. measures to inhibit and retard China's innovation of digital technologies will succeed.” He suggests finally that “digital capitalism in the 2020s is likely to be marked by violent contingency, perilous confrontation, and continued geopolitical reconfiguration.”
Chapter Seven by Mark Andrejevic scrutinizes the central role of surveillance in the monitoring and control of labor from the industrial era to today's digital capitalism. He tracks the development of this techno power from Taylorist and Fordist models of control through to generative AI, the latest “control technology.” From its roots in industrial capitalism, surveillance has become more intense and ubiquitous under digital capitalism, extending beyond workplaces and into the realms of social reproduction and consumption, to reshape and control social life on a model that capital has imposed upon labor in general. As digital devices that we use for work and social and domestic lives intermingle, the motivations for monitoring practices are no longer distinctive. As Andrejevic puts it, “The tyranny of convenience can result in a form of surrender.” The digitalization of labor and lifeworlds depends on unregulated surveillance, which, if unchallenged, means “each successive generation of workers is likely to be the most comprehensively monitored one in history.”
Chapter Eight by Timothy J. Minchin elaborates on the historical context and struggle to organize workers at Amazon. Minchin, a labor and civil rights historian, opens his chapter with the news from 2022 of workers' winning the right to form a union at the Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. Understandably, the positive media response to this victory suggested that its achievement foretold a future of many more wins for Amazon workers elsewhere. Minchin suggests that such a forward‐looking assessment misdirected most commentary away from clear understanding of the actual mix of traditional (i.e., non‐digital, face‐to‐face) and novel strategies (e.g., social media) practiced by organizers and Amazon alike, where the latter drew on the anti‐union playbook of spies, “carrot and stick” anti‐union enticements, firing of “able activists,” fear mongering about “unwanted third parties,” and compulsory meetings. He shows that there were two important features of this victory that merit attention—the continuities with past strategies and tactics and the regional conditions of possibility for organizing in a union town like New York versus the unionization fights that took place in the South. His main example is Alabama where Amazon's anti‐union strategies beat back the unionization effort at the Bessemer fulfillment center. These regional disparities are illustrated by accounts of how organizers using some of the same principles and tactics that won in New York failed in a region where union density is negligible. Minchin reminds us that Amazon's empire is a big threat to workers in the non‐gig economy, from unionized workers in transportation, the Postal Service, to Whole Foods employees.
Chapter Nine digs into the history of China's high‐tech industry with the expert analysis by Hongzhe Wang and Changwen Chen. The authors explore “the intricate, sometimes contradictory, relationships” of technology and labor politics through their study of the development of electronic computers in China, from the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) to the post‐Mao period from the 1978 onward. They detail how the “technological advancements, national policies, and ideological constructs” shaped the achievements of the Chinese electronic computer industry, showing how computers were designed and deployed as practical tools for revolution and development while also serving as cultural symbols. For them, the computer industry's history reflects “the interactive relationship between technology and labor relations” in different moments of technological advances. It is noteworthy that the authors draw on extensive materials from both official and unofficial sources including memoirs, oral histories, propaganda pamphlets, underground publications, and People's Daily. They contextualize the effects of contending forces of “Cold War technological competition, socialist revolution, and the nation‐building efforts of developing countries.” Their historical insights, for instance into the “Shanghai model” based on the mass line of Maoism, provide fresh understanding of the techno‐politics of information and communication. During China's opening to the West, the authors argue that China passed through a brief period of socialist industrial democracy in technology and labor relationships, but because of neoliberal influences the labor‐technology relationship became more like “the classic form of labor‐capital confrontation in capitalist industrial modernity.” Wang and Chen describe how, in the post‐Mao period, American microcomputers came to symbolize digital technology bolstered by ideological influences of Cold War social sciences and the uptake of Taylorist factory management models based on data processing. They conclude that “the socialist tradition of techno‐politics was left behind,” replaced by technological determinism of “Third Wave neoliberalism.”
Chapter Ten extends the study of China's digital technology sector with Jie Xiong's surprising detour into the history of worker democracy under Salvador Allende's Chile (1970–1973), where Xiong finds inspiration in the design and development of Cybersyn, probably the first attempt to apply cybernetics to the management of a socialist economy. The idea was to create a network of computers that could rapidly respond with solutions based on real‐time information about such things as factory output, supply needs, transportation, food stocks, and communication to mobilize the population. The experiment in digital worker democracy ended with the military coup of September 11, 1973. In 1975, Pinochet's military government introduced neoliberal economic policy with help of the “Chicago Boys” and the blessing of the US government. In this chapter, Xiong challenges the idea of liberal economists that under socialism uniformity is pursued while diverse ideas are repressed, and that planned economies are unable to acquire and process dynamic economic data on a national scale. He explores the current technical and labor conditions in China's information technologies and asks whether the application of Cybersyn's goal of socialist economic calculation and planning could become a reality in China.
Chapter Eleven by Melissa Gregg focuses on Silicon Valley, the imagined ground zero where historical narratives of all‐things‐digital tend to begin. Gregg inquires into the reality of those beginnings through a cultural studies lens, finding the inherent instability of organizational models based on real and mythical efforts of the early techno‐disruptors, such as the emphasis on patriarchal hierarchies, symbolized in a famous photo at Fairchild semiconductors of white men in starched shirts and skinny ties huddled around their chieftain while women worked in the background. This would evolve into the disappearing or disparaging histories of women's groundbreaking work in computer technology and their mistreatment by heavily white, male‐dominant engineers and entrepreneurs. And it didn't help that looser organizational models rigidified into lumbering bureaucratic vaults of iterative innovation that would materialize in the built environment of “campuses” emanating outward from Stanford University to the broader Bay Area and beyond. Gregg's essay evaluates the rise and fall of The Valley following the diminishment of its demographic weight during and after COVID‐19. She cites the exodus of digital labor to “Zoom towns” in Bend, Oregon, Austin, Texas, and Denver, Colorado where remote work made attendance at the fancy campuses in the Bay Area less attractive.
