About

DigiLabour is a research lab based at the University of Toronto. Funded by the Canada Research Chair in Digital Labour, the lab focuses on research and knowledge mobilization on labour and technology, addressing (a) historical and intersectional inequalities in the digital labour landscape; (b) worker-led tech governance; (c) digital solidarity economies. DigiLabour values policy- and community-oriented research, rooted in global perspectives on labour and technology, especially from the Majority World.

This stream situates contemporary digital labour within longer trajectories of classed, racialized, gendered, and global inequalities, with a focus to date on Latin America. Digital labour is not a break from the past, but rather an update of historical and persistent forms of labour and inequality, which makes a nuanced understanding of both change and continuity essential when new technologies are introduced at work. At the micro-everyday level, this stream pays attention to empirical phenomena, such as data workers, click farm workers, tech workers, cultural workers, and other sectors. This framework understands intersectionality as a perspective that brings together queer, feminist, racial, class, and decolonial approaches to address multiple forms of oppression and inequalities. At the political economy level, this stream traces long lineages of dependency in digital labour, drawing on Marxist dependency theory, which addresses the international division of labour and geographically specific forms of labour exploitation. This level of analysis examines AI value chains and other global dependencies in specific sectors, in order to understand the global inequalities embedded in the empirical phenomena under study. Therefore, this stream connects micro- and macro dimensions of the historical and global inequalities of digital labour, producing theoretical contributions to understanding why digital labour inequalities are so persistent.

This stream investigates how workers themselves, and under what conditions, can collectively have a voice in the deployment and governance of technologies, whether AI, data, platforms, or other emerging technologies. It defines worker-led tech governance as workers’ capacity to intervene in and shape how technologies are used, managed, deployed, and refused in the workplace, and how these struggles can generate expanded workers’ rights. Worker-led tech governance is pursued through practices such as collective bargaining, awareness-raising campaigns, policy advocacy, and worker organizing. Worker-led tech governance emphasizes worker-centred interventions to negotiate the parameters, values, and uses of technologies. This stream treats tech governance as relational and context-dependent: its shape, scope, and outcomes vary according to the power resources available to workers in specific sectors, countries, and moments, which is why a transnational and worker-centred analysis is necessary.

This stream focuses on the ways workers are creating worker-owned alternatives for labour and technology, exploring grassroots projects that are experimenting with collective ownership and democratic governance, reimagining and designing tech otherwise from the workers’ perspectives. Digital solidarity economies are a response, rooted in Latin American traditions, oriented toward more just and inclusive digital economies focused on workers’ needs. On one level, they reflect the ongoing digitalization of the solidarity economy. On another, they embody struggles to build digital economies grounded in solidarity as a core value. From this perspective, workers are imagining, designing and building labour and technology otherwise. Digital solidarity economies provide an ample and global framework for expanding and connecting various movements that do not always walk together, such as platform cooperativism, feminist economies, intersectional struggles for autonomous infrastructures, digital commons, and free software movements, among others. It emphasises the strength of both grassroots and more institutionalized collectives who are fighting for digital sovereignty and autonomy from below, seeking to address the infrastructural, economic, and social dependency on major tech companies, moving beyond traditional policy and regulatory frameworks. By recognizing these projects as prefigurative, this stream examines the ways workers imagine and co-design sociotechnical systems through shared learning by trial and error. It also looks at how workers learn to build these collectives from below. The research on digital sovereignty from workers’ perspectives sits in this stream.

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