In later tonight, former fbi agent Josh Campbell shares his thoughts on the fbi under president trump. That starts now. Check your Program Guide for more information. Here is author mary gray on labor and big tech. Welcome everybody. Thank you, thank you for coming. Im glad to see you all here. My name is a faculty member in the Economics Department and one of the cochairs of the mit work of the future task force that was commissioned by rafael wright, a year ago spring. The purpose of the task forces to engage and confront the sense that many have that the labor Market Technology is changing rapidly to understands why people are anxious, to figure out how concerned they should be, what is changing, what is different this time and what can we do to ensure that the coming era of change leads to not just productivity growth but to some degree of shared prosperity in our focus is on the labor market, on how we make the labor market function well for as many workers as possible, that is where we see as the opportunity and the challenge, the lesson if you read our Task Force Report which was just released last week, one of the things we say is, the economic lesson of the 20th century is that a wellfunctioning labor market is the foundation for a healthy middle class and for a wellfunctioning political system and without that foundation of opportunity and prosperity is difficult for many other things to work well. Our focuses on making work, work. Thats why its an honor to have mary gray here today from the Indiana University of research talking about her book, ghost work. And heres an actual person. Just to give you a tiny bit mary is a cultural anthropologist. Her earlier work has been on the communication and use of on young queer people and how they use technology and other means to use identity, identify one another and maintain an amenity and she was recruited as to Microsoft Research to work on projects, and once they are not interested the question of how Artificial Intelligence was fed by workers often times hidden inside the machine. So, you can see uniformity there and this is the intermediation between machines, people and often identities, theyre not obvious to the many participants involved. I read her book still in galleys. I thought it was mind blowing, and influence my own thinking and so we are delighted to have barry here. She will speak to about 25 minutes about the book and then there will be time for questions and answers. Future pencils ready and we will be delighted to hear your questions. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you for indulging me in getting a little bit of a lecture to set up the conversation. Im just going to stall for a second, how many have heard about the recent decision in california, California Assembly bill five. I hope that comes up in q a, prime time. How many of you have ever received a 1099 are done contract work . And how many of you, lets make it easier, how many of you have a friend who has used a ridesharing app called uber or left . Perfect. Here we go. So, we all have a stake in this conversation, arguably. What i want to offer you today is the definition, my coauthors came up with his stirrup back to describe particular kinds of work its not about a particular set of niche jobs but to describe the reorganization perhaps the dismantlement of fulltime employment and what we wanted to think about where the conditions that are created through the opacity around workers contributions to the value of ondemand work, what we are going to describe his ondemand work. Keep in mind and hopefully youll notice in the book you will never find the reference to ghost workers. Youll find reference to ghost work and that was quite intentional. Like anything you dont control anything when its out of your hand. I may have given you an idea of what is the mechanism behind the kind of work we are talking about and what connects this kind of work im going to be describing to ride hailing maps and other platforms you may be familiar with. But, you want to understand is by the early to thousands computer scientists and engineers realize they could take the same mechanisms for calling and putting out a particular call through programming interfaces that would be able to draw up software to execute a program and they could throw people into that so, they quickly ended up creating a mechanism that could help them with their work which was often around data labeling, other tasks that were piece work, youll be familiar with amazon mechanical turk more than any but we will suggest this is just the beginning, the piece of this world you can see. Before we have any business that has the task he wants to demand or request help with and something that can be put on a platform that is effectively brokering this relationship between a twosided market. In the abstract this is what is going on, this is any task based project driven work that can at least in part be sourced, schedule, manage, shipped and built an Application Program interface. Light, hold onto that and think about how much world of work it could envelop if you are applying that mechanism to the distribution of requests for work and people being able to pick up those tasks. Thats what i want to suggest is the framing we should be using not automation and i think if eric or anybody else had been at it anything even lasher talking about the future of work it was fear of robots. Thanks to second machine age we started thinking differently. In many ways we have not come to the floor with the framework, if its not robots, what is it . Were suggesting it is potentially ghost work and we need to stop it before its built into everything we do. Importantly, you are probably familiar with a category of online and offline Platform Services thats everything from hoover, left, dora, the same mechanism putting out a request for somebody to come pick up this food and delivered to this address in the platform is participating in that exchange by reporting when it is delivered executing a payment, scheduling where it will arrive, giving an address, that portion of the work is automated but the delivery, the value of somebody being there to deliver the food, bad is part of the equation we are often not considering. More increasingly we are aware of it because we can see those folks. If i had to content moderation was a form of this labor i dont think what anybody would have known what i was talking about. Now you all know that content moderation is the job people do. It is providing another service which is training Artificial Intelligence but there is a people and in luke that are performing an important service. We are focused on this vast world of business startups. Often they will be below the surface of anything youll ever see and that is the world the work i will talk about today. It is the world of editing its a world of usability testing, data labeling which might be familiar to some of you in the room, many of these different tasks drive intelligence and motivation they help structure clean dataset but importantly and increasingly seen the number of jobs saying its actually quite hard to mail that ai thing. Were just going to keep a person threaded into a moment of a Service Request that is tax base. Anytime you have gone on to a website and had a help window pop up you know its a mixture of scripts in a person who is assisting you so, and thinking about that world of work when you have a person that is doing something on the spot that cannot be quite completed by automation there probably some points of reference i come to mind and we cover this in the book. Its places to thread together. This is not new. There is continuity how we treated people who are there for what we imagine will be a moment because automation will come around and they will be replaced. That might look like piecework one in the days of textiles certainly it could have knockout a shirt but could it add the floors, the button, the bow. No. Usually thats a matter of decades. Yes, automation eventually made it possible for piecework to go away and textiles in some cases. In other cases both labor costs but also the reality of the paradox of arbitration and the boats out being too sophisticated for a textile machinery to be able to consume through automation mental person was kept around. It is also in the world a federal Contract Labor. We use the example of the women who are made famous in the film Hidden Figures who could at the time the brought into service computers which we know its a reference to the people not the machines. When the demand flooded their services and they eventually disappeared was it less valuable in seeing these women less valuable because we have already moved forward an idea what it was to value work. It was full time employment, and often particular bodies from his profession. Whiteman privilege who had specific roles to play. Anyone not playing the role seemed expendable. So, to continue this lineage, by the 1960s and the advancement of staffing and Temp Services that quite literally and i. You to aarons beautiful book on the economy he quite literally brokered on the value of the devaluing of womens labor as a resource because mostly young women were college educated. They made great office girls it was a nonoffensive term at the time. So keeping the thread moving by the time we get to the 1980s into thousands and the outsourcing and off shoring of knowledge work of office and service work it becomes harder to make the case that people are doing something that could so easily be replaced precisely because theyre doing work thats being done by workers in the United States. It becomes much more obvious this is a question of labor its where you can find cheap labor just as educated as anyone in the location generating the request for work. And i often lament perhaps just some of my colleagues dismay that the settlements of the case against microsoft are that involve microsoft meant that we never resolve the question of what to do in the case of employment that is necessary for a period of time, it is project driven. It might be something you need someone with the specific kind of expertise, coding, but you know youre not going to need them for more than 12 months for 12 weeks for 12 days. What ways do we have to value that worker. At the time we did not have a category for that. Its important to note post 2000 Silicon Valley and especially 2001 we have effectively the. Com bubble burst, it is that moment that we resolved swaddled without case law that we are going to leave questionable what to do with people who are necessary but not necessary as in going to hold them for a career and what we came up within the settlement were a set of practices that treat Contract Labor often through vendor Management Systems that often dont leave them with the protection beyond that 12 month contract to be able to say im employed in these benefits come with my employment. If you think about the history that we have drawn and it certainly is an argument, and a historical trajectory is an argument that in this case we see the setting in place from the beginning of the industrial era of laws around labor protection that mostly assumed the valuable work is the works that cannot be automated without much projection without write may one day be the product of automation so products built for Assembly Lines on those beyond the touch of automation and then those of the lives of ten staffing which is driven the Economic Activity globally and staffing industry that serves peoples requests for needs more than the need to build something. And then lastly to see this shift towards arguably the information economy that involves a lot of people doing Information Service work. Yes and involve encoding and other really valuable skills that take a great amount of training, but if you think about what it took to code up a website back in the two thousands and you had to hand quote html, how many people in the room know what im talking about. That is now completely done with software. We cant see growing into a career. That, let me give you how we studied this world because it isnt the most obvious to do. We chose for this assist as case studies to date the sites where we identified workers but also the companies to show the inside of their blackbox. How did they organized this work, what does the work floor look like and the companies that stand for this growth of the mechanism that can do without Artificial Intelligence and keep humans in the loop. Theres two streams of work into something i hope you take away is to see it growing into different directions. One is the need to structure and analyze data t so take the exame of a radiologist. Its not just a one and done matter. You might be able to do a great job of getting Image Recognition for particular problems in radiology that seem like they are going to get rid of the radiologist but other market phenomena are happening. We expanded the market for people using radiology and especially mechanisms for getting it outside of urban centers and places no ones been able to get access to the screen but also a market for other kinds of diagnostics that are going to require an amount of expertise by a medical professional. So its not a doctor or radiologist is might be a medical student or a new professional on the horizon. Thinking about the world of work that is managing the information and data that we are collecting that will build Artificial Intelligence and takeover the need for the human hand in the midbut then the second which is just as critical. The Information Services where we come to expect there is someone who will be able to answer my call 24 7. I would love if none of us have that expectation, to not feel like someone is expecting death of me but we are seeing a number of Small Businesses that want to be able to offer a prompt to take your medication if you are taking care of him elderly parent and want that to be sent to the parent and also something that will tell you how their care is going today. Those cases are in duluth and are not fulltime employment, they are task driven, project driven work. In the case of our study they are analyzed with companies that do image tagging location verification and we picked these people things people think are easy to operate. Another example of the stream of work that we would hope they would be able to remove human hands with automation and content moderation is the fantastic boundary object. Its hard to get rid of the task of the content is anything that isnt an obvious black or white is something that is difficult to automate. You have to have a yes or no and it tells you this and not that. If you have humans deliberating over is that hate speech and the debate that content moderators are part of the solution for being able to facilitate and identify whats going on in that moment. If we step away from social media we dont have to worry about this. So theres that option. Then the second translation and captioning a video in sales generations. We wanted a complicated project to work on it you will notice some patterns. There were lots of conversations about that in the qanda the material we have comes from thousands of interviews and rare in peoples lives to be able to see the routines and how they came in and out of these markets. So during this fieldwork its also an effort to figure out how we look at the largescale data that the companies are producing so we were able to get to the transactional data for the companies so we coul they couldw many clients are requesting how long they stick around and do they change what kind of requests they have. Hopefully this gives you a taste of what is in the book. There is no obligation and no commitment but if you want to come in and do something come on in and guess what happens. There is enough money to make the rest of their economic reality manageable because you got a percentage of people that will see the value in saying im going to turn to this work and then youve got another good 20 saying im going to do this for this set amount of time they have their reasons but importantly they are the deep backup because their kids are sick with the need to do Something Else you as an end consumer will never know the 10 thats really good and efficient at executing on the project hass walked out because the regulars are there effectively making themselves available. Lastly and most importantly this is a lesson that feels really important to me in the wake of the california case you have a long tail of people experimenting in these markets maybe they want to practice the language or can i mix it into the other things im doing so it makes any survey the bureau of labor statistics for contingent work challenging they dont have an easy answer to the question they have a different model for what they are doing in this distribution of participation is creating these emerging then told maps. When we ask people what are you doing the answer is a Silicon Valley startup or they are an entrepreneur which means they see themselves as a smallbusinessmallbusiness ownee selfemployed freelancers in some way they dont always understand the difference between the last two statements they were all on the same platform doing the same task. So, how would you survey this to find out the work attitude . How would they have a different understanding of what they are doing, and that is the core of what we need to talk about, what are people after when they participate in the labor markets and what is not being met but is met in employment. We found Different Things but three kept coming up in the interviews and survey work that we did watching them with decisions about whether they stay or left these markets. It was to control their time which also meant they had other obligations, other commitments. It was to control the projects theyve worked on to have a sense of agency over what they were doing because they went to environments where they were told what to do and they found about alienating. Last they wanted to control their work environment. This is the qanda what it means to allow people to make choices about who they work with and how that has both upside and downside. But in this case, seeing how much this isnt a matter of flexibility, so i would recommend everybody stop talking about this environment. Its about control and that says to me theres an absence into the diminishing of peoples agencies to be able to move into formal employment and meet other needs that they have. People are effectively wrapping work around their lives instead of their lives around their work and it doesnt nice to have in many cases it was to win in with other obligations that are demanding their time. So someone says that this kind of work allows her to live her ideal life she stopped talking about the translation of captioning work shes doing. Thats not her ideal life. Its being able to make room to do dance choreography. For me its important not to tell her shes wrong and she should go get a comparable job in her area which is service work where we have most Work Opportunities in the formal sector. Its working at retail. She didnt want to do that and she had an opportunity to do that and left it because she found this more manageable. So, where do we go from here and that is for the rest of the conversation. There is a chapter on that in the book that id want to tee up the pressing concerns particularly when im talking with labor organizers about what do we have to contend with because the downside of the world of Contract Labor and independent worker environment is that there is no center of gravity, no anchor for the collective organizing and bargaining that has been the linchpin to advancing workers rights but also things like wages. So i will just put out there now if anybodys wondering if the market is going to solve the wage situation for contract workers, we need to remind ourselves the market never did. It was always intervention, society saying we want word to look like this. Wwe wanted to have these kind of securities and benefits. We havent done that yet for contract work at all in the United States and this is always an important point. The key take away is if w we wanted people to organize workers in the and help them be able to shift the debate about what their needs are and recognize they are never in the sky and if labor markets going to be on a single fight, they are not going to have a single employer of record. They are not working with a unified professional identity that is the key to helping you organize if you dont see a common cause in the person next to you might be getting this work because they are just an experimental list is not a way to do this work without seeing it as effectively a labor supply chain to global multinationals that have information needs that are not in one language or one cultural context. You need to see collective achievement, the Value Proposition of the labor platforms is not an individual giving something. Its many people being available to you. When i asked about the writer hailing app and the thing that is compelling is that you have several different cars hovering around the neighborhood who might be able to get you. If you saw one car and was a competing company that could offer five cars kind of hovering come to value they are offering is the availability to you. The collective contribution of being available. We dont know how to value that arguably. I think that for me is the most important conversation to have a multiits easy to devalue people that are available to us. And i would argue even with California Assembly bill five, we dont have laws governing this world yet. I dont think we do. So what would it take to tend to this, and i think theres some argument to be made. Im not talking about an ecosystem to be either attended to, protected or pillaged, and talking about seeing it as a social, and where many things are going on in the world of the workers were making themselves available on these platforms, so what would it look like to see their needs and prioritize those as necessarily needs to be filled so that they can be sustainably available in the commons. Or the need for healthcare for example, so i will leave you with those thoughts, and before that, its impossible to work on this and not have a slave to to thank everybody involved in this project. So, with that. [applause] br going to take your questions but before we do, i want to take the prerogative of asking a couple. The first thing is im going to ask from two different directions. First, id like you to bring out something you didnt bring out but is in the book, about the way that its not just saying here is your task, but the way that people are potentially hired and fired it through the platform. Can you say a little bit more about that and what it looks like . When i was saying the program could at least in part damage, we can recite that by the end of this talk through the api in the internet, there is a way in which the management of this process is so early days would be a nice way of putting it. One of the chapters is algorithmic cruelty and it walks you through what it would effectively be like to be managed by a set of scripts. I dont want to fancy it up with ai, so a set of scripts written by somebody making a request. Lots of bosses dont know exactly what they want, right once somebody is very clear on what they want for the cost is absorbed by the worker. So, if i for example put a task on a platform that is being managed by algorithms, in the book we describe the most distressing case of having his work account suspended. You are locked out of your workplace but even more unsettling and again i dont want to put this as a maniacal act if you can no longer confirm the identity of somebody working through an account you dont know how to issue their last paycheck. It can just be shut down. Now i want to ask a question from another direction its considered an imposition to leave homes for work and you said we want people. Why do i have to leave my house, why cant i visit my family, i want the whole notion thats one of the ways it hinders people from raising children and so on. So there are some websites here. Its more optimistic than the cover of the book suggests because there is a lot of potential here. Its to do this work and not have to sit in a twohour commute. As we move towards the Climate Action just a shout out to say work like this and being able to underwrite and having this municipality support for people to be able to work in their homes and supported wifi hotspots. You talk about the way people doing work into that as a future of the environment that isnt obvious to people. The finding we had of how much people are collaborating offline to map and quantitatively measure. When they got serious about turning this into an Economic Opportunity and next thing they did is reach for peers. How do i make sure im advancing or finding other opportunities so there is very pragmatic reasons that are social. For the other computer scientists but spent decades working with the human computation and closed minded people talk to each other. My other favorite conversation is they spend 20 minutes rolling me with you mean people mentor each other for free and all i can think is what is the world of economics . [laughter] seeing all those places where there isnt a direct payoff and get people invest in these ways of connecting and collaborating with each other is a really wonderful finding within the study but that doesnt go away no matter what kind of work you do. There is no child and often when somebody told me this is menial mindless work who would need to communicate about that i often feel they are giving a signal of what kind of work they would want to do but people doing this work know how to make meaning out of what they are doing. They are good at making what they do meaningful. No please raise your hand, the associate director of the task force will have a microphone. Eric is a member of task force. One of the things the past couple decades is how many people are left behind. Wages are lower in other dimensions in terms of job security. I would be interested in hearing more about the things youre describing that are symptom versus cause. If you look at the top half of the Income Distribution a disproportionate number of them are independent contractors, Small Business people, lawyers, consultants compared to the bottom half that are selling their hours and on the bottom have many like the flexibility they get. Some of them said they even like the fact that its an algorithm giving the job they have to kiss up to at the service that was always unfair to them so theres definitely cases you give where this turns out bad for people budown to fourpeople but there g power from other forces as a symptom of these particular mechanisms. After this project it took away that its both. I think of an economist like dean baker or others that said the biggest problem is the institutional problem and that is part of it. There is culturally something going on and where wev we placr expectations of what makes a good job and we havent been paying attention to the shifted Service Economies people would agree much of the economy is growing around services, providing information and entertainment. Break that down into what does the job quite and where have we intervened to say we will see that as a sustainable form of employment that leads to a middleclass experience with a possibility of people moving into the global. Is a part of the way of people having to make it less likely or harder to do contingent work and more pushing them would that be part of the solution packs i think we could remain agnostic if we knew how to provide basics so the challengee is we are fixated on the good opportunities. It leads to better opportunities in life and i dont see any evidence that that has happened globally. Its the most important thing studying the United States and india is a certain path you dont see the expansion. You see a ton of Economic Opportunities and a ton of economic activities, but the issue is what is the expectation around anybody working. We are not starting from zero, we are starting from coloniali colonialism, ways of imagining how the structure work that i believe have gotten in the way of us thinking and i think theres good examples. Examples. Sweden is a good example, where it doesnt matter what kind of job you do. Youre going to have basic needs met. And we havent gotten to that place in the United States to see the economic benefit of providing the basic needs. To me this book is a Business Case of providing some basic benefits that would come with participating in Economic Life in the United States. So that it doesnt matter that a Company Needs you for 12 months or 20. So, that wont hurt you economically. And the businesses that hurt economically by needing to predict how the life hold on to somebody for an extended period of time and make it hard for me to do without them. So i would argue there are specifics. They are about constantly anticipating and changing the consumer case of needs. We can think thats awful but most of us enjoy the fact that we are catered to as consumers. That can be an ugly thing and i think about being an anthropologist im kind of neutral on it. We are driven by the consumer society. How can we make that not heard working people, how can we make it a benefit to more people than the people who are cashing in on selling the goods. I appreciate his good work. My question and you began to speak to the fact there is a social organization for many of the people in platform work. My sense is the social organization has mostly the task how can i get this done and so on and what is your experience, how do we move from that form of social interaction to asian event is sustainable and build sustainable interactions over time that can engage people with the power to change the Economic Conditions i think that is the big challenge because theres lots of social organizations in any form of work and finds a way that we havent figured out the institutional arrangements to give People Agency independent people who have control. Do you see any room for optimism or development along those lines because i think that is the next step weve got to figure out. Im smiling because the chapter called kindness of strangers is about the longterm relationships people build into building their own tools to text each other and sit in channels together over years these are people who will send each other birthday gifts and a laptop if somebodys laptop dies consider our deep connections beyond the social exchange in a moment. We are serious about this work but theres a lot of people that arent into those are the places where being able to build on ramps that help people engage in activities together we did some very specific examples of different campaigns for workers organize that are good signs. There is a specific model about how to organize people and it hasnt updated to deal with what do you do when you have independent parties. Its the case of antitrust you have a bunch of independent workers or Small Businesses that are colluding. That is an the righ outright frk either so we havent moved to a place that says make the association legal, make organizing legal and what are the ways in which you can perhaps bring labor to the table to be the facilitator of the connections didnt be the keeper of the keys. One of the Biggest Challenges is how do i verify this person scamming me. If you are registered and can say i am with this organization the business wins into the union arguably when. The book mentions the social organization of peace workers handed enables very simple outsourcing of the tasks of say managers who make multimillion dollar salaries. Theres a bunch of examples. That is the heart of the problem. Youd have to be a real jerk to say i accomplished everything on my own. For that manager when they are able to ask for somebodys help, but think about that word outsourcing. When i asked a personally to help me with things i cannot manage myself, in what world does that mean those people helping me out our peripheral. Its the biggest challenge ahead of us is that we havent learned i like to put it this way. If we value people serving us, then the people who take care of peoples children and parents wouldnt speak it as poorly as they are. It takes no skill so i would call attention to the pricing the dissent about the market value. The support isnt about their value. Its that we do not get, i am very hopeful here we have yet to land how to value the collective contribution its individuals aggregated to serve others. They are making themselves available to us. There is an asymmetry where businesses demand attention and workers are providing labor and i thought it was interesting but it wasnt and i wonder if you could talk about that analytic asymmetry. I put those words to be able to designate supply and demand. I need more training in economics that trying to understand how we treat labor like we talk about any other product sold has always confused me because that is the power of the relationship when someone can demand someones attention and somebody can supply that moment of service. Right now that is an asymmetry what would it look like to turn the twosided market into an equitable exchange. If i was talking about businesses, we might have a better model for it and that would be a leap forward how do you recognize them as a Sole Proprietor and shore up what it means like this is a new main street chambers of commerce could be involved to see that these individuals providing our Sole Proprietors and they are different than what we have seen before on the mainstream but no less valuable as providers. There is a book called private justice that is all about the power between. I have a friend who immigrated from laos to canada and it was a part of this homeworking network so im curious the sectors know about three quarters of jobs in this country and probably more because of opposite is underreported. What do you think is different about the work today is that the illiteracy, the technology, and what might actually caused this change . Cynic that is a great question. Asking about the continuity this kind of work hasnt gone away. I want to answers for you. One is we thought of as informal market what would it look like to go a different and say whats it like to support Economic Activity thats not under one site with one employer. They have trajectories of Cultural Development so one comment would be whats going on there is the continued exploitation of workers providing Service Rather than calling it an informal. What would we do to make any Economic Activity to bring dignity and respect that to the second point you are raising the difference i see in this kind of work is that it is i dont want to say it is a volume issue but its so distributed and can happen so quickly this is what makes me most nervous. Tracing the abuse of people in the supply chains will be even more difficult than it used to trace this totrace the abuse ofy selling on a button because they are in your home or in settings where it would be difficult to monitor what might be happening, how are they being forced to work. And thats difficult today anyhow to know the supply chain behind who is producing the shirt im wearing or the food i eat. If we think about information, dont we want to know the work conditions of the people that had a hand at producing it in place a bet with elections coming up with content moderation for example, they would all be better served as the citizens if we had a sense of supporting the work conditions of people managing that information. We have time for one more question. Elizabeth andersen, by the way. Thank you so much. My question related to you as a cultural anthropologist you pointed to a couple of what i will Call Solutions now the property to keep the proper system that suggests the institutions are there. The question is how do we move a culture, a population, a count country. That is a great question and ii am sorry we didnt get to california. [inaudible] has always taken several society consumers, government and businesses. This is a fundamental social question. How do we want to treat working peoplpeople, and one with no bae that what it does is galvanize consumers to say we benefit, we benefit from these. From anybody that raised their hand, they will not be likely able to survive the california bill number five. They said it isnt going to comply. It doesnt see them as the opportunity. That isnt going to win, and i think that we all lose so we are taking this can down the road. How do we come to grips with we have moved to a Service Information economy. How can we make that meaningful dignified work . Before i say thank you, i just want to mention there willl be to further put the talks during the course of the semester. She will be talking about her book called the job, and now at the Manhattan Institute and talking about the war. Co. Worker from a different perspective. I hope you will join us for those as well. Thank you. We appreciate it. [applause]