Information labor without borders

In the wake of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, frustrated by my national government's pitiful response as well as my national media's lamentable reporting, I found myself searching for international organizations which I could support in both the short-term disaster relief effort and the long-term goal of building a just and sustainable global society. "Doctors without Borders" (actually "Medecins sans Frontieres" or MSF) struck me as a great model of organized, distributed, transnational, nongovernmental, noncapitalist professional action -- so they got my monetary donation. On their English-language website (http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/) they explain their origins and goals:

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in nearly 70 countries.

Each year, MSF volunteer doctors, nurses, logisticians, water-and-sanitation experts, administrators, and other medical and non-medical professionals depart on more than 3,400 aid missions. They work alongside more than 16,000 locally hired staff to provide medical care.

In emergencies and their aftermath, MSF provides health care, rehabilitates and runs hospitals and clinics, performs surgery, battles epidemics, carries out vaccination campaigns, operates feeding centers for malnourished children, and offers mental health care. When needed, MSF also constructs wells and dispenses clean drinking water, and provides shelter materials like blankets and plastic sheeting.

Through longer-term programs, MSF treats patients with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, and HIV/AIDS, and provides medical and psychological care to marginalized groups such as street children.

MSF was founded in 1971 as a nongovernmental organization to both provide emergency medical assistance and bear witness publicly to the plight of the people it assists. A private nonprofit association, MSF is an international network with sections in 19 countries.

Now you might think this post is leading into a discussion about how new media networked information technology is giving a boost to such organizations in terms of fundraising, information distribution, press awareness, and on-the-ground coordination of volunteer effort. I'm sure that all of this is happening, but that's not what I'm thinking about today. Rather, I started wondering if there were any similar "without borders"/"sans frontieres" organizations out there which dealt more directly with what we might call "information labor."

A quick Google search turned up several variations on the original theme. For example, "Engineers without Borders" (http://www.ewb-international.org/):

Engineers Without Borders - International facilitates links and collaboration among its member groups toward improving the quality of life of disadvantaged communities worldwide through education and implementation of sustainable engineering projects, while promoting new dimensions of experience for engineers and engineering students.

Or "Reporters without Borders" (http://www.rsf.org/):

More than a third of the world's people live in countries where there is no press freedom. Reporters Without Borders works constantly to restore their right to be informed. Fourty-two media professionals lost their lives in 2003 for doing what they were paid to do -- keeping us informed. Today, more than 130 journalists around the world are in prison simply for doing their job. In Nepal, Eritrea and China, they can spend years in jail just for using the "wrong" word or photo. Reporters Without Borders believes imprisoning or killing a journalist is like eliminating a key witness and threatens everyone's right to be informed. It has been fighting such practices for more than 18 years.

And finally "Teachers without Borders" (http://www.teacherswithoutborders.org/)

Teachers Without Borders is a non-profit 501(c)3, non-denominational, international NGO founded in 2000, devoted to closing the education divide through teacher professional development and community education. We work primarily, but not exclusively, in developing countries, in order to build self-reliance, health, and capacity. We base much of the spirit and focus of our work on the inspiration provided by Jacques Delors' report: Learning: The Treasure Within.

At 59 million, teachers are the largest single group of trained professionals in the world AND the key to our children's future. Equally amazing is the estimated need for more than 30 million NEW teachers to achieve the goal of the U.N.'s "Education for All" initiative by 2015. The issues are complicated by the number of children who do not go to school at all - 104 million, 50% of whom live in countries touched by conflict.

Despite its crucial connection to economic and social development, teacher training is often uneven, protracted, or unsupported. In addition, teachers are rarely included in educational policy change or significant decision-making. Teachers are not just a resource for our children, they are the key to development. They know who is sick, who is missing, who has been abducted into the sex trade or conscripted into a military gang, who has been orphaned by AIDS, who is achieving and who is not. In short, teachers are society's glue, and they certainly deserve our assistance; otherwise, we are all left with a gaping digital, educational, and economic divide. If the key to economic development and our young people's future is education, then teachers should have resources, tools, and access to the Internet, as well as each other.

Teachers Without Borders was founded to addresses these issues. [...]

All three of these could certainly be considered part of the information professions in their own way -- providing information infrastructure (among other crucial infrastructure such as power, water, and transport); providing news information (and a basis on which to trust it); and providing educational information (and the means of understanding it). So my next question of course was: where are the library and information studies professionals in this mix?

Where are "Librarians without Borders"? Well, they're right here (http://www.lwb-online.org/) and they're brand new:

Librarians Without Borders (LWB) is an organization founded in February 2005 at the Faculty of Media and Information Studies (FIMS) at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in London, ON, Canada. LWB is composed of Master of Library and Information Science students, as well as FIMS faculty and students from other university departments. The group is already 50 members strong.

LWB is an organization that strives to improve access to information resources regardless of language, by forming partnerships with community organizations in developing countries.

LWB envisions a global society where all people have equal access to information resources.

According to a press release from the University of Western Ontario, an MILS student actually started the effort there:

Librarians Without Borders (LWB), a non-profit organization based in London, Ontario, and founded by Western MLIS student Melanie Sellar has launched its first international mission by organizing a much-needed medical library in Luanda, Angola.

Sellar was moved to start Librarians Without Borders after working with a graduate student from Angola named Jorge Chimbinda and hearing his stories about the devastating effects of a recently ended 27-year civil war in his homeland.

Working with Angolan partners, LWB is helping to develop a desperately needed collection of medical and nursing texts written in Portuguese. "LWB is unique from most other book donation programs," Sellar explains, "because its objective is to provide essential information resources in the official language of the country or region."

A building purchased by the Catholic Mission in Luanda has been repaired and is ready to function as a medical library to support students and faculty of the University of Agostinho, but it is lacking essential resources such as medical textbooks to stock the facility. As an alternative to aid donations, LWB intends to build partnerships with medical textbook publishers to help develop a medical library that will assist Angola with rebuilding its medical profession.

"By focusing aid on specific projects," Sellar says, "Librarians Without Borders will give its stakeholders a clear sense of what their support is achieving by providing a detailed plan of action and continual updates about how a project is progressing. In this way, we hope to give people the confidence that their support is really effective and a sense of participation in the process of social progress."

But there must be something going on in Canada, because early in 2003 another LIS student, Andrew Fraser (this time from the University of Alberta), wrote a historical argument outlining the need for an international "Librarians without Borders" organization which is still available on the web:

What is do done about the destruction of libraries in time of armed conflict. The recent looting of the National Museum of Iraqi in Baghdad in the recent Gulf War II highlights this issue. I propose an international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) called "Librarians Without Borders" modelled on the various professional organizations with "Without Borders" like Nobel Prize winning "Doctors Without Borders" and others NGOs like Engineers Without Borders and Teachers Without Borders. [...]

Librarians Without Borders or LWB assists in the rebuiding of libraries and archives after times of armed conflict,and natural and human-made disasters. A private, nonprofit organization, LWB is at the forefront of emergency rebuilding of public cultural institutions which house the collective knowledge of people effected by above listed calminities. Through longer-term programs, LWB hopes to assist in the training of librarians and archivists in the developing world.

(Cite: http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/global/andrew/into%20the%20flames.htm)

These recent efforts make a great start at linking up the international community of information professionals in service of global justice, especially those focused on the demonstrable historical importance, philosophical social necessity, and current technological possibilities of physical libraries as living institutions and organizations of information provision. But as far as I can tell, there is still no international network of such movements, and in particular no US presence in this project. Perhaps some smart and committed library students in the States (or even, dare I hope, in my state of Wisconsin) will find a way to meet this challenge?

Growing digitial divide in IT labor

Another article on tech employment, this time from the San Jose Mercury News (out of Silicon Valley itself) citing a Bureau of Labor Statistics data, reveals that the percentage of both women and African-Americans in IT jobs in the US has declined since 1996, with Latino-Americans making only slight gains:

Women held 32.4 percent of IT jobs in 2004, down from 41 percent eight years earlier, despite holding steady in the overall workforce. [...]

[T]he presence of African-Americans in IT slid from 9.1 percent in 1996 to 8.3 percent in 2004. They held steady in the overall workforce.

The Latino presence increased slightly in both IT and the workforce. But Latinos made up only 6.4 percent of IT workers, compared with 12.9 percent of the workforce. [...]

The percentage of whites has also dropped in IT from 85.1 percent in 1996 to 82.8 percent in 2004. Still, whites make up by far the majority of the workforce, both in IT and overall.

Asians stood out as the only overrepresented racial group in IT, making up 12.1 percent of IT jobs but 4.3 percent of the overall workforce.

(Cite: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/11954951.htm)

As with all reports on IT labor, the question arises "how is IT labor being defined?" Are these high-wage, high-status "knowledge worker" jobs which women and (most) people and color are trailing in with respect to their overall workforce representation, or are they low-wage, low-status "data worker" jobs instead? The report says the data include "IT jobs in industries ranging from banking to retail," and suggests,

Among reasons for the decline, one in three women in information technology holds (or held) an administrative job, such as entering data or operating computers -- the kind of jobs that have taken the brunt of cutbacks in recent years. Women have made up 80 percent of data-entry keyers since 1996, suggesting they aren't climbing the IT ladder [...]

The report does suggest some possible reasons for the unrepresentative social division of labor in IT: "lack of mentors and role models in corporate management, negative perceptions of IT work as isolating and geeky, and [...] the lack of student enrollment in math and science classes." These are all "human factors" sorts of reasons, blaming any workplace injustice on the individual strategies of managers or the individual skill sets of workers. There are whole other sets of possible reasons, though, including outright individual and collective injustices: from individual discrimination in hiring and education -- conscious or unconscious on the part of employers and teachers -- to collective discrimination through still-separate and still-not-equal primary and secondary education for students in socially-, economically- and politically-disconnected (even abandoned) neighborhoods and towns, levels of voluntary "enrollment in math and science classes" by students in those places aside.

Given earlier business press warnings that simply acquiring "IT skills" will not be enough to keep the US IT labor force "competitive" (profitable? exploitable?) in the face of global telematic labor competition, I would hope that the ability to produce and sustain a diverse IT labor force -- both diverse in the social groups that the labor force represents, and diverse in the skills beyond the technical that the labor force holds -- would be a top priority for political and economic decision-makers wishing to invest in the future of the US economy.

Reframing computer programming in a global labor market

As a former computer programmer myself, I found this article in Business Week kind of interesting. Apparently the meaning of "programming" has now narrowed into "technical" work which, by definition, can be outsourced/offshored and made into lower-paying, more-contingent labor. Thus would-be and current "programmers" are now redefining and remarketing themselves as business consultants:

As tens of thousands of engineering jobs migrate to developing countries, many new entrants into the U.S. work force see info tech jobs as monotonous, uncreative and easily farmed out -- the equivalent of 1980s manufacturing jobs.

The research firm Gartner Inc. predicts that up to 15 percent of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010, not including those who retire or die. Most will leave because they can't get jobs or can get more money or job satisfaction elsewhere. Within the same period, worldwide demand for technology developers -- a job category ranging from programmers people who maintain everything from mainframes to employee laptops -- is forecast to shrink by 30 percent.

Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis.

(Cite: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/tech/D8ARVH3O0.htm?campaign_id=apn_tech_down)

From my own experience, though, "programmers" have been competitively advertising themselves as anything-but-programmers for some time. In the early 1990s, I and the other folks in the MIS department where I worked as a "programmer" learned to seek job titles like "analyst" and to talk of ourselves as "internal consultants". Job trajectories careened between bouts of contract work with outside consuting firms -- both small and large -- and stints of in-house employment at firms large enough to demand their own MIS departments. There were more objectives to this "tacking" strategy than simply increasing one's salary: we "programmers" simultaneously sought positions where we could acquire specific new software and hardware skills (the latest database product, the latest server platform), and positions where we could claim a new set of core business familiarities and competencies (from engineering firms to banking firms to real estate firms and so on).

Much of this churning seemed to be driven by the pace of technological development on the "supply side" (software and hardware firms constantly updating old products and innovating new products) and the pace of technological competition on the "demand side" (business firms constantly seeking competitive advantage by hiring individuals with the most recent knowledge and experience to increase accumulation through the use of these new products). Both time scales were so short that they constantly reproduced a large project-based, just-in-time, external technology consulting labor market, while sustaining a small managerial-based, long-term, internal business strategy labor market.

Thus when Business Week cites figures illustrating the decline in "programming" jobs:

The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005.

I'm not sure that these statistics map so easily on straightforward and presumably easily-subsitutable "technical" jobs rather than more complicated "analyst" jobs -- both external and internal -- combining technical knowledge with business skills in varying doses.

No matter whether "programming" jobs are now declining in favor of "analyst" jobs, or whether such jobs have always blended into each other in practice, perhaps the salient question at this moment in time is, given the new discourse about the value of (supposedly) purely technical labor and the limits of (supposedly) purely technical skills, how should institutions of professional education and job training prepare the next generation of successful information laborers? How are information laborers going to understand their career opportunities, labor market competitors, and avenues for both professional growth and job security? The Business Week article warns that the previous academic markers of credentialing will be insufficient in a newly global competitive labor market for programming labor:

The average computer programmer in India costs roughly $20 per hour in wages and benefits, compared to $65 per hour for an American with a comparable degree and experience, according to the consulting firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.

According to the most recent data from the National Science Foundation, 1.2 million of the world's 2.8 million university degrees in science and engineering in 2000 were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, with only 400,000 granted in the United States.

The implication seems to be that the US needs to both award more computer programming degrees to increase the size of the US labor pool, and to increase the value and/or cultural meaning of that programming degree to distinguish it from those earned by competing labor pools. But in doing so, we in the US also need to reexamine the actual work practices of those we consider to be performing purely "technical" labor, because our ideals of what we're teaching our workers might not match the reality of what those workers are actually doing. This points not only to more engagement between "information studies" teachers and researchers and the science- and engineering-based teachers and researchers who credential most high-wage information laborers, but also to an expectation that those "purely technical" workers in the outsourced/offshored areas of the global labor market may not themselves be so different from domestic "analysts" as free-market advocates in business and government would like us to believe. Differences in wages paid and status assigned to these workers, in other words, might be less a function of a well-working market which automatically discriminates between differing levels of skill and value, and more a function of both strategic discourse on the part of firms which desire to find high-skill workers but pay low-skill wages, and wishful identity construction on the part of domestic information workers who are seeing their own horizons of opportunity shrink, yet are unable to feel solidarity with workers replacing them who might live a county, a state, or an ocean away.

Uncovering academic librarians

Another quick tidbit found on Inside Higher Ed, dealing with the supposed "silence" of academic librarians writing about the political, economic, and normative debates surrounding their profession. Scott McLemee writes fondly of these librarians,

Their work constitutes the real intersection of knowledge and power — not as concepts to be analyzed, but at the level of almost nonstop practical negotiation. It is the cultural profession most involved, from day to day, with questions concerning public budgets, information technology, the cost of new publications, and intellectual freedom. (On the latter, check out the American Library Association’s page on the Patriot Act.)

(Cite: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/06/09/mclemee)

But then he goes on to lament the lack of a collective voice that these information workers bring to the public sphere and the media landscape. He writes,

The answer might be the creation of a group blog for academic librarians — some prominent in their field, others less well-known, and perhaps even a couple of them anonymous. No one participant would be under pressure to generate fresh insights every day or two. By pooling resources, such a group could strike terror in the hearts of budget-cutting administrators, price-gouging journal publishers, and even the occasional professor prone to associating academic stardom with aristocratic privilege.

This is a great idea in my opinion, and obviously in the opinion of the legions of librarians out there who are already blogging, judging from the comments left on McLemee's piece. The article, with the addition of these thoughtful responses, turns from a call to action to an action resource, listing blog addresses and indexes for just the kind of purposeful debate that McLemee was searching for. (And let me say I'm liking InsideHigherEd more and more for just this reason -- the comments to its postings are the most civil and well-prepared I've seen on any web, news, or blog site in a long time). I share the belief that collective blogs rooted within communities of practice but intended to speak about and to the outside world of political-economic-social experience hold the best prospect of bringing the technological, spatio-temproal promise of blogging -- as crucial adjunct to and intermediary between both mass media and interpersonal interaction -- to fruition.

The changing mix of information labor in higher education

Over the past decade or so, those of us employed in what used to be called "state-funded" higher education have taken to calling our field "state-assisted" higher education instead, since in many states less than half of the funding for university systems now comes from state legislature appropriations (the rest usually comes from tuition, outside research grants, endowments, and things like patent royalties). Here in Wisconsin, where "state-assisted" means only about a 20% slice of the funding pie, we in higher education are trying to get a handle on the recent government budget plans announced by the Republican-controlled legislative committee overseeing such matters which continue their pattern of cutting college and university staffing funds for state information workers, and all but assuring continued tuition increases for state students hoping to one day become information workers themselves. (If you've followed my recent postings on funding debates over Madison schoolteachers and prohibitions on local communities raising the minimum wage you might be getting the picture that Wisconsin, long reputed to be a "progressive" state, is becoming more hostile to labor. Remember, this is also that state that pioneered national "welfare reform" posing as a jobs program.)

Now a recent report available from the National Center for Education Statistics (cite: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2005155) illustrates that all across higher education, a profound shift in the source of funding for educational and research knowledge work at the university is taking place -- a shift which also impacts the norms and goals of such work. The relatively new online journal "Inside Higher Ed" reports that while state-assisted, non-profit faculty jobs only increased 3% from 2001-2003, faculty jobs at private, for-profit colleges increased some 46%. Further, the report reveals some disturbing divides along geographic, gender, and ethnic lines with respect to job security aka "tenure":

Men held 61 percent of full-time faculty positions.

Three states — California, New York and Texas — have more than 40,000 full-time faculty members, while full-time faculty jobs fall below 2,000 in three states: Alaska, Delaware and Wyoming.

Of full-time faculty members, about 45 percent are tenured and another 20 percent are on the tenure track.

Full-time faculty members are most likely to be tenured at public institutions (48 percent), followed by private nonprofit institutions (40 percent) and for-profit colleges (3 percent).

Within public higher education, full-time faculty members are more likely to be tenured at four-year institutions (50 percent) than at two-year institutions (43 percent).

A greater proportion of male full-time faculty members (50 percent) than women (36 percent) is tenured.

A greater proportion of white full-time faculty members (47 percent) is tenured than are members of other ethnic groups: Asian (42 percent), Hispanic (41 percent), black (38 percent).

(Cite: http://www.insidehighered.com/careers/2005/06/02/profs)

Why does tenure matter? Why does diversity matter? Why does geography matter? All are related to the ability of academic faculty as a community to practice research honestly, openly, and for the long-term public good -- no matter what the profitability or social acceptability of that research might be at a particular point in the business cycle -- rather than for short-term private gain. A diverse faculty, spread among a variety of places, with enough tenured members to provide saftey and stability both generates new ideas and protects those ideas in the face of "common sense" and reactionary criticism (while at the same time subjecting those ideas to careful empirical and theoretical criticism, the value which academic study brings to knowledge production as a whole). But even apart from this, a secure, diverse, and dispersed community of scholars helps ensure that interested students from all backgrounds and all areas of the country may continue to find an educational niche to help them train and learn for the careers and lives they wish to lead.

Private, for-profit universities cannot create such a secure, diverse, and dispersed community. After all, they are not intended to. They are designed to appear when and where profit opportunities are greatest, "cherry picking" from the least-risky consumer trends, remaining "agile" enough in committment to any one norm or goal to shift on a dime if economic realities change unexpectedly (as they always do). They are designed to create short-term profit for their owner-investors, by selling short-term educational and training solutions to their student-consumers -- thus they offer at best short-term security to knowledge workers. They are designed to create a demand through marketing and then meet that demand through sales, not to work thanklessly but steadily for the public interest over a time scale of decades. Private, for-profit institutions of any sort are simply not designed to preserve and enhance collective culture, science, and wisdom. But as states defund primary, secondary, and yes, higher education to an alarming degree, they are in fact slowly but surely creating a private, for-profit educational system, leaving no institution standing to "compete" for the hopes and dreams of students or the wants and needs of communities in producing socially useful knowledge and socially productive learners.

Yes, I'm on a soapbox today. Education is a lifelong investment in individuals that yields lifelong dividends for communities. Therefore, the individuals who choose to labor in that field, training and learning for years themselves over a long-term life committment while often eschewing opportunities for short-term profits in their own work lives, deserve their community's investment in their efforts as well. Information -- knowledge -- must be produced, must be labored over, must be constantly questioned and refined ("sifted and winnowed" they like to say here in Wisconsin, even as they defund the university), and ulitmately passed on to generations of students, learners, and citizens, by someone. By educators, teachers, professors, staffers, and administrators. By information and knowledge laborers who shepherd this enormous resource of enlightment from mind to mind, community to community, order to bring value to us all.