Being edgy and cool doesn't make tech companies any less exploitative

While skilled workers can demand higher wages, those with fewer skills have seen their position deteriorate.

It's not just women and minority workers that suffer under the Silicon Valley empire – it's also the entire class of white- and blue-collar workers they abuse

Jason Wilson

On Sunday, a New York Times article opened fire on Amazon's work culture by detailing a workplace that divides worker against worker and treats the sick and bereaved with no empathy.

The case was that Amazon's management practices were standouts. But the bigger picture is the way that the tech sector as a whole is reconfiguring work – by design, and sometimes by accident – is in a way that exacerbates inequality, and disempowers both white- and blue-collar workers.

On the broadest scale, technology is one of the largest factors contributing to the widening gap between rich and poor in advanced economies. The International Monetary Fund released a report in June which showed how “technological progress and the resulting rise in the skill premium” had dramatically worsened the position of less skilled workers.

While technologically skilled workers can demand higher wages, those with fewer skills have seen their position deteriorate, in some cases their jobs automated out of existence. (In fact, some economists argue that technology and automationhave been pressing down on job growth for the last 15 years.)

Naturally, all of this advantages those with good access to educational resources, and favours the traditionally privileged: rich, white men in advanced economies.

This is nowhere more evident than within the tech industry, which has a notorious diversity problem. Google's own reporting last year showed that its workforce was 70% male and 61% white; Facebook's latest report in June showed it was 68% male, and 55% white, with Hispanic and black employees making up 4% and 2% of the workforce respectively.

Where tech insiders don't dismiss concerns about diversity, they generally treat it as a “pipeline” problem which can be fixed by, say, providing incentives for more women to study Stem disciplines.

Unfortunately, research keeps showing thatwomen with just that kind of training leave Silicon Valley jobs at much higher rates than men, and much more quickly. They do so because of a culture that is perceived as hostile to motherhood and families, is dripping with nerd machismo, and is frequently openly discriminatory.

And then, there's how the technologies born in the Silicon Valley impact white-collar workers. New advances are promoted for their versatility and convenience, but research has suggested that for many of us, they simply blur the lines between work and home life, allowing our bosses to contact us at any time and encouraging us to think that we should never stop working.

It doesn't stop at the impact the sector has on the middle class, either. There are companies whose business model involves colonising whole other sectors – and making working-class jobs worse.

Uber has become a $50bn company by building an app that puts its drivers – which the company says are independent contractors – in touch with passengers needing rides. But its biggest advantage, and perhaps its real product, is its app: it interweaves data collection, customer ratings and flexible labour contracts into a new, subtly coercive form of employee management.

Alex Rosenblat, a researcher at Data & Society, a thinktank in New York, has extensively researched the working lives of Uber's drivers. They have told her how user ratings and other metrics (like ride acceptance/refusal rates and availability) are collected in order to carry out data-driven management.

“Low performers are criticised, good performers are praised,” she says. User ratings are at the heart of the process – Rosenblat says that to drivers they are “everything” – but it's never clear what kinds of things they have to do to get good ones. The company makes general suggestions, but Rosenblat points out that “Uber doesn't make the rules clear”.

This means that drivers wind up doing extra free labour – above and beyond what might even be necessary – to get higher ratings. This includes the kind of emotional and affective labour which has long been fostered in retail and service industries. Uber drivers provide bottled water and snacks and work hard on their repartee, for free: “[It's] the kinds of things taxi drivers do for tips. But Uber has taken out tips. So they're doing all this extra work for ratings,” Rosenblat said.

This means that “the passenger becomes a middle manager”. Their ratings provide the company with real-time performance assessments, but perhaps more importantly they encourage drivers to construct an affable persona in advance of those assessments. Meanwhile most of the drivers' interactions are with the app, and emails from the company.

Uber's work discipline goes beyond the body, and tries to work on the soul of contractors to whom the company says it owes nothing in return. Is this the future of work?

While some responses to the Amazon revelations have suggested that the problems of privileged tech workers are somehow definitively different to those at the bottom of the economic pile, the only way we can fix this is to respond collectively, recognising that everyone has a stake in humane, fairly remunerated work.

That response needs to demand not the wingback of technological progress, but a fairer distribution of its benefits. Labor-saving technology should benefit everyone, and not turn real human workers into robots or, worse, scrap.