Academic labor is information labor too

A recent column in The Nation describes the plight of Columbia University graduate students as they try to organize in the face of not only resistance from a newly-conservative National Labor Relations Board (which in 2004 overturned a 2000 ruling granting graduate students at private universities the right to organize), but an administration recommending anti-organizing tactics which may in fact be illegal:

The memo, dated February 16, 2005, is signed by none other than Alan Brinkley, a well-known liberal historian who is now serving as Columbia's provost. Brinkley has gone out of his way to assure outside observers, including New York State Senator David Paterson, that "students are free to join or advocate a union, and even to strike, without retribution." Yet his February 16 memo, addressed to seventeen deans, professors and university leaders, lists retaliatory actions that might be taken against students "to discourage" them from striking. Several of these measures would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act.

Such measures include telling graduate student teachers and researchers who contemplate striking that they could "lose their eligibility for summer stipends" (i.e., future work opportunities) and also "lose their eligibility for special awards, such as the Whitings" (a prestigious scholarship and award program). Yet another proposal cited in the memo would require students who participated in the strike "to teach an extra semester or a year" as a condition for receiving their scholarly degree.

The article nicely ties such questions over the employment status of graduate students to the wider issues of the "corporatization" of the university (both public and private) and the questions (from both the right and the left) about the state of "free speech" in the US university today:

Ironically, although conservatives continue to see liberalism as the bogeyman, the rise of a corporate labor model in higher education may pose a far greater risk to academic freedom and free speech. Historically, let's not forget, the leaders of the academic freedom movement recognized that the only way to prevent corporate trustees and other outside interest groups from violating the free speech rights of their professors was to establish a system of faculty self-governance, peer review and long-term job security. Otherwise, any professor who voiced unconventional or unpopular views was extremely vulnerable to getting fired.

Viewed through this lens, the unionization campaigns at Columbia, Yale, Brown, Harvard, Penn and other institutions may be the last, best hope for stopping administrators from imposing a corporate labor model on universities that erodes faculty power--and with it academic freedom.

At my own university, which as a public, state university has allowed graduate students the right to organize since the late 1960s, the graduate student workers face both a seemingly impotent administration and a hostile, "neoliberal" state legislature in an environment of budget cutbacks to the university across the board. At issue are cuts in wages (which are already below what the "market" of peer institutions pay), and an increase in health care benefit costs (benefits crucial to young families where both parents are often in school). Here's the way our Teaching Assistant's Association describes their current situation:

In a move to gain political points with the public, Republican members of the committee refused to allow the contracts onto the floor for a vote, claiming that public employees were "responsible" for the State's financial woes-despite the fact that money had already been budgeted to pay for the contracts. After months of lobbying and public protest by TAA members and other unionists across the state, the logjam was finally broken. There was a price, however: a threat to "make public employees pay" for health insurance in the next round. [...]

Members felt that the state was violating a tacit agreement that had held for almost 20 years: state workers (including TAs and PAs) would take lower pay increases in exchange for good benefits (like $0 health insurance premiums). The UW-Madison's TA/PA wage package was already near the bottom of the Big 10; grad employees at peer institutions were making on average over $1,000 a year more. UW administrators understood the growing gap and its implications for grad student recruitment and retention and made strong statements in support of the union's position, but to little avail. A split in the management team, however, did not mean progress at the table.

Here at Madison, a Spring 2004 strike by the TAA won some media attention and perhaps built some solidarity among members, but has not helped their contract plight and inevitably provided ammunition for their neoliberal critics in the legislature.

All this should be a reminder to students of "information labor" that the academic labors of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination (aka. research, writing, teaching) are important areas of study and activism as well. For an admittedly uneven but certainly sincere primer on some of these issues, see Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Office hours: Activism and change in the academy (New York: Routledge, 2004). Or take a minute to actually talk to a graduate student worker about the conditions of his or her information labor in academia in the twenty-first century.

Rebranding "telecommuting" as "homeshoring" and "homesourcing"

When trying to trace dialectical changes in both the technological environments for labor and the social relations of labor, changes in terminology can point to productive moments for analysis. For example, the skyrocketing use of the terms "offshoring" and "outsourcing" in the 1990s points to not only the technological ability of transnational firms to globalize their operations and markets in new ways, but also to the recognition by media actors, political actors, and the public at large that these issues deserve scrutiny (or, at the very least, sell papers and get votes).

Recently I've noticed a new complementary set of buzzwords out in mediaspace: "homeshoring" and "homesourcing." Might be useful fragmentary evidence for a nice study on the recent history of technological and social change in the world of work.

For example, a 2004 CNET News article cites an IDC report about "homeshoring" and "homesourcing" using the example of firms choosing to employ remote call-center workers not via overseas telework, but through domestic home-based telework:

The practice [...] can avoid a potential pitfall of sending such work overseas, IDC suggested: foreign agents less familiar with U.S. customers. "There are currently upwards of 100,000 home-based phone representatives in the United States," IDC said. "Compared with traditional outsourcing and offshor(ing), companies utilizing home-based agents can access highly skilled representatives that are closely attuned to the U.S. market at very reasonable cost."

A key aspect of "homeshoring," as with "offshoring," is in this case not only spatial flexibility to search for low-wage workers, but temporal flexibility to find just-in-time workers who are easily dismissed after the need for their labor passes:

IDC said companies are turning to homeshoring in response to call center challenges such as the need for superior agent quality, frequent turnover and the seasonal nature of the business. [...] "Accessing high-quality agents is not limited to those within commuting distance, and agents can be contacted when needed instead of occupying call centers during periods of very little call activity," IDC said.

A 2004 Minneapolis/St. Paul Star-Tribune article similarly points to call-center labor as the canonical example of when "homeshoring" makes sense, but "offshoring" does not, because of cultural and language differences between customers and workers:

The best example is the often-offshored call-center function. Offshoring customer support might be cheaper, but it can be tremendously frustrating for customers. Challenges around language and culture frequently are compounded by a lack of understanding of the American buying experience. Since an expectation about good customer service was never established, no one measures the frequently negative impact this "cost-saving" measure is having on the relationship with the customer and eventually the bottom line.

The article author, CEO of a management-consulting company, argued that "homeshoring" schemes could target US areas of depressed wages -- much like Michael Porter's classic 1995 Harvard Business Review argument on the "competitive advantage of the inner city" -- and yet still remain within the cultural and linguistic boundaries of mainstream (affluent? white?) US consumers:

I can imagine other homeshoring scenarios in rural America and in those industrial cities hit hard by downturns in manufacturing. Mayors and community leaders could cooperate with cost-cutting businesses to hook up out-of-work Americans hungry for just the sort of jobs being shipped overseas. Innovative solutions could be found to solve related issues around benefits, such as forming cooperative ventures that allow homesourced workers to buy their own benefits at a discount. The possibilities are endless once the ingenuity of the U.S. entrepreneur is unleashed. Before business executives start dismissing this idea as impractical, they should consider a few very practical realities: People living in rural or economically depressed locations don't require the same high wages and benefits of people living in urban areas.

Even a Motley Fool essay has weighed in on "homeshoring" (which they correctly recognize as "telecommuting") as an obvious win-win scenario for both management and labor (not to mention consumers):

For the employee's part, telecommuting offers more job flexibility than he'd have in an office. It lowers the cost of buying workplace attire, as no one's around to see whether he's answering phones in his pajamas -- and even better, no one cares, as long as the work gets done. And let's not forget the extra hours that working from home adds to one's free time every day, hours that don't need to be spent commuting on subways and highways, to and from an office. Throw in the fringe benefit for society at large, in getting all those workers off the streets, getting their auto emissions out of the air, and keeping the gasoline they'd have been using from tipping the U.S. trade account deficit the wrong way, and this looks like a solution that just can't be beat.

The Fool is correct to identify "homeshoring" and "homesourcing" as simply strategic terms for "telecommuting" (or, more accurately in my mind, "telework") meant to bolster the public relations image of firms who engage in these labor relations. But none of these articles acknowledge that there are potential downsides for labor to being "homesourced." In fact, researchers who have explored the history of home-based labor throughout the twentieth century in the US have consistently noted that such labor relations often enable minute fragmentation, intense surveillance, and profound alienation (in several senses) of labor -- especially female labor. Some quick cites:

Sheila Allen and Carol Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities (London: Macmillan, 1987). Allen & Wolkowitz defined “homeworking” (or “outwork”) as “the supply of work to be performed in domestic premises, usually for piecework payment,” and usually by women. [1] They argued that while such work was historically subject to investigation and legislation in both the US and Western Europe, the issue disappeared after World War I until the 1970s. Today, female homeworkers are too often “casualized workers”: “those who, though in reality permanent members of the labour force, are treated as temporary workers to whom the employer owes no legal obligations.” [5] But, argued Allen & Wolkowitz, such homeworking remains “invisible” as most labor statistics focus on (male?) full-time, regular employees working outside the home. Consequently, the authors relied on other sources such as women’s own histories and biographies. They concluded that “homeworking must be examined as waged labour incorporated into capitalist relations of production”; even though it is “casualized” employment, even though it takes place in the domestic sphere, it is still wage work.

Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds., Homework: historical and contemporary perspectives on paid labor at home (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Fourteen essays covering the history and current politics of home-based labor for women. The introduction notes the ambivalence about this situation: “That homework presents itself as a more flexible and attractive option for working mothers is itself a commentary on the structure of our political economy, which provides working mothers with so few options. Yet throughout these studies we hear the voices of women who gain a sense of self-worth and independence by earning wages at home. In exchange for low wages, many experience a greater sense of autonomy and control over both their work and family lives -- a freedom from direct supervision of bosses and an increased flexibility in the structure of the workday. From this perspective, then, homework represents not exploited labor but the attempts of women to find more humane alternatives to a labor market alien to the needs of working parents.” [6]

Eileen Boris, Home To Work: Motherhood And The Politics Of Industrial Homework In The United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Boris argues that “[t]he woman who earned wages at home not only illuminates the problems of the working mother but also has stood at the center of a century-long argument over state intervention in the labor contract.” (1) Any historical study of (women’s) homework, then, should focus not only on the construction of gender differences, but also on the gendering of state action. To this end, Boris tries to “uncover the ways that different groups have defined the relationship between a public realm of paid labor and a private domain of the home under industrial capitalism” (3) by focusing on four key periods in the history of homework: the response to the first law against tenement homeworking, New York’s 1884 law against cigarmaking; the period between World War I and the New Deal, in which ideas of patriotism and “states’ rights” entered the homework debate; the New Deal labor laws and their effects on homeworkers; and finally, the renewed interest in homework during the 1980s, from both new telework possibilities and Reagan-era deregulation of textile homeworkers.

Andrew Gillespie and Ronald Richardson, “Teleworking and the city: Myths of workplace transcendence and travel reduction,” in James O. Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama and Barney Warf, eds., Cities in the telecommunications age: The fracturing of geographies (New York: Routledge, 2000), 228-248. Argued that “‘places of work,’ in the sense both of individual workplaces and of the agglomeration of such workplaces into cities, are highly functional and effective forms of human organization, and as a result are likely to prove considerably more persistent and resilient than the technological futurists would have us believe.” Instead of simply substituting for transport, “the new communcations technologies seem, conversely, to be associated with mobility-intensive and spatially dispersed activity patterns.” [228-29] Very nice, short, concise article laying out a useful set of definitions of “telework” and showing how simple, linear, environmentally-benign outcomes (eg. virtual workplaces or smaller cities or less travel) are unlikely.

Ursula Huws, Werner B. Korte and Simon Robinson, Telework: Towards the elusive office (Chichester ; New York : Wiley, 1990). Study of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy (the “Empirica” study) of 4,000 managers, 2,500 citizens, and 14 companies. Found 72% of teleworkers were female. Argues against a technological determinist view of telework, saying managers only allow it when it allows them to retain staff or cut costs, and workers only consider it when they have no alternative.

I'm thinking about all this right now because I'm engaged in my own study of "homesourced" labor as I look at the recent history and geography of practices involved in the remote contracting of (mostly female, highly-skilled) home-based realtime closed-captioners in the US. My case meshes with some of the research above, but breaks some expectations of both exploitation and professionalism as well. More fragmentary evidence to come ...

New labor rules in India and the effect on information work globally

Recently the government of India passed changes to its labor laws that change the spatial-temporal, and by extension also the technological and social, division of labor between men and women. As the Calcutta Telegraph reports that "The government today made changes to the Factories Act 1948, allowing women to work night shifts" -- that is, hours between 10 pm to 6 am -- "provided adequate safeguards are available in factories". Note that information technology firms in some states in India had already secured such an exemption, but now exemption would not be required anywhere in the country and any firm could take advantage of it. Industry officials predicted that firms in the highly-competitive export garment industry, the IT hardware assembly industry, and the call center industry stood to benefit the most from such rules.

Further insight can be found from an article in The Indian Express, where the new rules are reported as "Meeting a longstanding demand for gender parity in the workforce" (but by whom?) and as a "win-win for India Inc." since "Garment units already employ 60% of women workforce" and "Women [are] preferred to men as workers, considered more patient, attentive, [and] loyal." No mention of whether women are also paid less (which in aggregate I have no doubt they are).

Labor and women's rights advocates were apparently split by the decision. Some applauded the fact that legal equality for women in access to employment was now being achieved; however, others feared that now night shift work would be made mandatory for many women: "women will be forced to work night shifts to be able to hold their jobs, particularly in low-level manufacturing operations." Further some pointed out that "You have to ensure that women are working in clusters and in adequate numbers as a safeguard against any kind of sexual assault".

I think this raises a thorny issue of the difference between equality, equity, and justice in the workplace. In a universal sense, subjecting female workers the same set of regulations over their labor as male workers brings "equality" to the two groups in the labor market. However, if the normative social world of women and men in a given context differs so dramatically that women are regularly exposed to assault in particular spaces and/or at particular times, according "equality" in these spaces and times without addressing issues of equitable safety and security protection would, I think, arguably amount to an injustice. And of course if wages accorded to women are substantially less than those accorded to men for the same work in a given social circumstance, due mainly to cultural norms legitimizing wage discrimination -- which I have to believe is the case in India, just as it is here -- then "freeing" women to work longer hours amounts to an inevitable downward pressure on the wages of all workers, male and female alike.

Of course, these aren't just questions for the Indian citizenry to ponder, as the article makes clear that it will be in export processing zones -- areas of global trade, foreign direct investment, and transnational "offshoring" well-used by firms which are ostensibly based in our country -- where these new rules will have the greatest impact. Interestingly, the new Indian labor law did not affect the services sector -- the sector of such activities as retail sales, food preparation, janitorial cleaning and security provision -- where firms are unable to substitute global labor.

More on H-1B workers and geographic location

One interesting question that the H-1B visa program raises, especially with respect to "information labor," is what particular sites are requesting and receiving the greatest number of H-1B visa approvals and hired foreign workers? An article in the Cincinnati Business Courier reprinted on MSNBC recently focused on the rustbelt as a site of acute H-1B need (as opposed to, say, the high-tech-worker-laden coasts):

A Courier review of federal records indicated roughly 1,000 companies that operate in Cincinnati sought permission to hire more than 18,000 foreign employees in the last five years. Consulting firms, universities and medical organizations are the biggest users of the program.

The story quoted a Cincinnati hospital administrator who uses H-1B labor as saying "There just aren't enough Americans coming out to fill these jobs. They may be available to people on the East or West Coast, but they're less available to people in this part of the country. It's harder to get people to move here."

What's even more surprising -- and more geographically significant -- is that the "outsourcing" and temporary services industry in the US is also involved in requesting H-1B visa workers. For example:

In some cases, companies file under multiple names or use temporary employment agencies or consulting firms to file applications on their behalf. Cincinnati-based outsourcing company Convergys Corp. has filed 108 applications under 15 different names, seeking permission to hire 1,323 people in Ohio, Florida, Utah and Texas. It has filled computer analyst positions, as well as marketing staffers, statisticians, associates and consultants.

So a person brought to work in the US for a firm supposedly needing an unique individual with rare qualifications is actually subcontracted through an outsourcing intermediary and not considered a permanent employee? Sounds like there is much more "play" in the system for particular persons targeted for particular jobs (on paper) to actually be shuffled around by recruiting firms, not only from firm to firm but from state to state -- where not only job descriptions, but also local labor markets, may vary greatly. Was this part of the intent of the H-1B program?

Still need more information to piece together this puzzle. Here are some more H-1B-critical online resources to follow up (which may be approaching this issue from very different political-economic standpoints): The Organization for the Rights of American Workers (www.toraw.org); zazona.com; h1b.info

So where do IT workers stand?

If on the whole, a vast portion of the workforce is "working more but earning less" (see last post) due to inflation rising faster than salaries, where do IT workers fit in this mix? We know that a polarization exists in the workforce; the top 5% of workers did not see their wages stagnate, but actually experienced gains. Are IT workers generally to be found at the top, or the bottom?

First of all is the thorny problem of defining just who is an IT worker, and thus how many IT workers there are. For the moment, consider a recent Information Week analysis which claimed
"IT employees and managers represent only about 2.5% of the total American workforce. That would equate to about 1,500 households for all IT professionals" or an estimated 3.38 million workers.

If we look to unemployment figures alone, according to Information Week, those estimated 3.38 million US IT workers appear to be doing better than other workers:

Unemployment among IT workers stood at an annualized rate of 3.7% for the four quarters ended March 31, according to an InformationWeek analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data issued late last week. A year earlier, IT unemployment hit a post-boom high of 5.5%. Last quarter's IT unemployment rate reached its lowest point since the final quarter of 2001, when it was 3.7%, too. [...]

The number of unemployed Americans looking for IT jobs last quarter fell to 131,000 from 149,000 from the previous quarter. [...]

In the mid- to late 1990s, propelled by year 2000 code remediation and investments in enterprise and Internet technologies, IT unemployment hovered between 2 and 3.4 percentage points lower than overall unemployment.

But remember, wage stagnation might easily be coupled with low unemployment numbers. We'll need more fragmentary evidence to proceed further.

What about looking at corporate profits in the IT sector? The Contra Costa Times reports that in the San Francisco Bay Area, a high-tech crucible, corporate profits recently hit a high point:

The 100 largest public companies in the nine-county Bay Area by revenues generated an average profit of $648 million in 2004, according to the Times annual survey of the region's corporations. That was 93 percent higher than the average profit for the region's 100 biggest public firms during 2003 [...]

Yet local representatives of capital still claim that the Bay Area is "unfriendly" to business: "The Bay Area is not business-friendly. As companies expand, they will probably hire people outside of the Bay Area, in other states or other parts of California," said a Bay Area financial manager quoted in the article.

What level of corporat profits would be required to equal a "friendly" climate, anyway?