(Boitempo, June 2021)
Edited by Rafael Grohmann
Platform labour is now embedded across society. Terms such as “platformization,” “uberization,” “data,” and “algorithms” have become central to the vocabulary of contemporary capitalism. At the same time, workers’ struggles have taken on new forms through initiatives such as platform cooperativism, digital unionism, and worker-owned platforms. In Laboratories of Digital Labour, social scientist Rafael Grohmann offers a wide-ranging overview of research on labour and technology through 38 interviews with leading scholars from Brazil and around the world, including Virginia Eubanks, Jamie Woodcock, Ursula Huws, Ludmila Costhek Abílio, and Ricardo Antunes. One of the book’s central lessons is that the current landscape of platform labour is not as inevitable as it may appear, but it is a laboratory. On one side, capitalism experiments with new mechanisms for controlling and subordinating workers; on the other, workers, researchers, and organizers are developing alternatives, building prefigurative projects, and challenging the precarious conditions of algorithmically managed work experienced by thousands of workers around the world. The book invites readers to understand digital labour not as a fixed technological future, but as a contested terrain in which different futures of work are actively being built.
