Not on air, but Online: The Labor Conditions of the Digital Journalist in U.S. Local Television Newsrooms

As American news preferences shift from broadcast to digital platforms, corporate-owned local television stations have hired digital teams to keep a growing array of mobile, social, web, and over-the-top platforms updated with revenue-generating and audience-friendly information. Yet, these workers are currently missing from the labor literature. Therefore, this exploratory study uses a political economy framework with a labor focus to begin to understand the day-to-day working conditions of these employees. Interviews outline workload issues including long hours of multitasking and nearly-constant connectivity even when off the clock, sped-up production expectations with a commodified information focus, and limited worker protections. The findings here aim to provide a starting point for digital journalism labor studies moving forward.

Platform scams: Brazilian workers’ experiences of dishonest and uncertain algorithmic management

This article discusses how Brazilian platform workers experience and respond to platform scams through three case studies. Drawing from digital ethnographic research, vlogs/interviews of workers, and literature review, we argue for a conceptualization of “platform scam” that focuses on multiple forms of platform dishonesty and uncertainty. We characterize scam as a structuring element of the algorithmic management enacted by platform labor. The first case engages with when platforms scam workers by discussing Uber drivers’ experiences with the illusive surge pricing. The second case discusses when workers (have to) scam platforms by focusing on Amazon Mechanical Turk microworkers’ experiences with faking their identities. The third case presents when platforms lead workers to scam third parties, by engaging with how Brazilian click farm platforms’ workers use bots/fake accounts to engage with social media. Our focus on “platform scams” thus highlights the particular dimensions of faking, fraud, and deception operating in platform labor. This notion of platform scam expands and complexifies the understanding of scam within platform labor studies. Departing from workers' experiences, we engage with the asymmetries and unequal power relations present in the algorithmic management of labor.

Labour and globalisation: complexity and transformation

As a matter of balance of the contributions joined in the Dossier, this final word draws a comprehensive picture of the issues discussed by the authors and raises some questions pointing to a possible agenda for current labor studies. First, it sparks reflections going in the sense of discussing the actual meaning of what is to be considered either “normal” or “healthy” after Covid-19 crisis. Then it addresses such discussion to the world of work with interesting consequences, asking what is actually “normal” in labor relations. In the same vein, it reminds us the role of the so-called “essential workers” during the sanitary crisis: a lot of invisible realities which are now becoming visible. On the other side, the author call attention to imminent economic crisis, affecting jobs and companies. Similarly, he warns about the worsening of the working conditions under a post-Covid world: no “return to normal” is envisioned without shaking important structures of the already-known world. One of those pillars is the North-South divide: according to the author, that divide is loosing because the neat two-worlds mapping is blurred today – we find informality on both “worlds”, as well as either digital economy and inequalites are present North and South, so clear-cut differences may tend to disappear. The author finally proceeds to make a short comment about every of the contributions to the dossier, pointing out what is crucial and distinctive in each of them.

Japanese labor studies: Women and non-standard workers

This article provides an overview of Japanese labor studies conducted since the 2000s; it particularly focuses on studies dealing with women’s work and non-standard employment. By reviewing these studies, the article aims to show how the Japanese employment system creates and maintains economic disparities between men and women and between different employment statuses. First, a review of the literature on women’s labor indicates that the Japanese employment system is discriminatory toward women. Specifically, the article finds that Japan’s long-term employment and seniority-based systems are preventing women from developing their careers. Next, the article reviews research on non-standard employment with a focus on disparities between standard and non-standard workers and explains how differences in human resource development policies have created and maintained large discrepancies between employment statuses. Therefore, the study concludes that the established Japanese employment system causes large disparities between men and women, and in employment statuses.

From Riots to Recession

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s goals, methods, and contributions. It sets forth the book’s central aim—to deepen scholarship on lawyers and social movements by closely attending to the richness and complexity of contemporary practice at the local level—and then describes the L.A. low-wage worker organizing campaigns through which this aim is pursued. The campaigns are situated within theoretical perspectives on movement lawyering, labor studies, and local government law, and then placed in historical context. Tracing the history of Los Angeles’s economic and political transformation—from the postwar era to the 1992 civil unrest sparked by the Rodney King verdict through the 2008 recession—the chapter shows how the campaigns grew out of trends producing greater inequality while also creating the organizational foundation of community–labor activism to challenge it. The concluding section provides a demographic overview of the industries targeted by the L.A. campaigns—garment, day labor, retail, hospitality, grocery, and trucking—and a road map of the chapters that follow.