Social Europe
politics, economy and employment & labour
16th April 2020
This series is a partnership with the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
Artificial intelligence is often associated with prophecies of job destruction. Yet an army of workers in the global south is being pressed into action.
In discussions about the locations comprising the key productive nodes of artificial intelligence and other next-generation digital technologies, African workers rarely get a mention. Autonomous vehicles, machine-learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems—how many of these technologies are ‘made in Africa’? The answer, actually, is ‘all of them’.
In a paper from which this article is derived, we make visible the invisible and bring to light the role African workers are playing in developing such key emergent, and everyday, technologies—which underpin, or soon will, the enormous profits made by large technology companies based in the global north. In the context of hyperbolic claims about automation and robotisation—and the impending technological unemployment they are predicted to herald—human labour, including that of African workers, remains very much a part of contemporary digital capitalism.
We conducted a five-year study (2014-19) in South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, involving in-depth interviews and group discussions with more than 200 stakeholders—including workers, managers of outsourcing firms, government officials, trade unions, employment agencies, private-sector associations and industry experts. This enabled us to construct a snapshot of the key ways in which African digital labour has been integrated into the production networks of digital products and services being deployed around the world.
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We focused on machine learning and digital decision-making. These activities are performed by workers employed within firms or operating as freelancers through digital work platforms (such as Upwork, Freelancer.com and Amazon Mechanical Turk), which act as intermediaries between employers and workers in a planetary labour market. Much hides behind the sleek, automated surfaces.
African workers play an important role in building and maintaining these technologies—acting as ‘data janitors’. Real people are still needed to structure, classify and tag an enormous amount of unstructured information for companies using machine-learning algorithms in their products.
While many scholars are predicting that machines will replace humans in the production process, thus increasing unemployment around the world, automation is not always what it seems. Technological advances and use of machines in production can destroy jobs in one location (primarily richer regions), yet can also open up many lower-income work possibilities for workers in poorer countries.
Once we acknowledge that many contemporary digital technologies rely on a lot of human labour to drive their interfaces, we can begin to piece together what the new global division of labour for digital work looks like. We need detailed empirical studies of where value is created and captured in these production networks, which are opaque by design. Research can start to make the invisible nodes of these chains more visible and highlight the pay and working conditions of the workers who make everything possible.
This is not to say that many of these digital workers are poorly paid by local standards, or that they are ungrateful for their jobs. But high unemployment and a large informal sector mean these digital jobs receive overly positive reviews, while the risks are sidelined. And digital workers in Africa are still earning only a tiny fraction of the profits generated from their labour.
The contemporary digital economy thus offers jobs and opportunities to African workers, but even more of an opportunity to the international corporations which seek to profit from their labour. There is no easy means for firms and individuals based in the world’s economic margins to move up global value chains, but this does not mean that we should throw up our hands and accept the status quo.
As digital connectivity spreads to the last corners of the world, we hope this knowledge will help build a greater socio-political response to the relatively labour-intensive nature of the contemporary digital economy, in which African workers play a significant role in value creation. Once we acknowledge that many contemporary digital technologies rely on a lot of human labour to drive their interfaces, we can begin to piece together what the new global division of labour for digital work looks like and aim—at both the global and local scales—to make some of these value chains more transparent, ethical, and rewarding.
Meantime, there is still much to be done to understand better African digital labour, to challenge labour processes and employment relations, to improve the quality of work and to identify the common interests of workers—and the ways their labour connects distant sites of production and consumption.
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Mark Graham is professor of internet geography at the Oxford Internet Institute and director of the Fairwork Foundation. Mohammad Amir Anwar is a lecturer in African studies and international development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh.
The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—’polycrisis’, for example, even ‘permacrisis’. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?
This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!
Against the background of the European Commission’s reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.
Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.
Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.
The International Labour Organization’s Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.
This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.
The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.
This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.
Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.
To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.
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