Transcripts For CSPAN2 Mary Gray Ghost Work 20240713

To understand why people are anxious to see how concerned they should be. And what is changing and what is different this time. And what can we do to ensure that the coming era of change leaves not just a productivity growth but some degree of shared prosperity. Our focus is on the labor market and how we make the labor market function while for as many workers if possible. Also the challenge and the lesson if you read a report which was just released last week. One of the things that we say is a critical economic lesson of the 20th century. Is that a wellfunctioning labor market is the foundation for a healthy middleclass and without that foundation of opportunity and prosperity its very difficult for other things to work well. It also makes work work and that is why its such an honor to have mary kay mary gray here today talking about her book ghost work just to give you a tiny bit of background she is a call drill cultural anthropologist. Her earlier work has been on the communication and use of technology of young people and how they use technology and other means to i establish identities. She was recruited as a young fella to Microsoft Research to work on projects unspecified in once there got interested in the question of how Artificial Intelligence it kind of hides inside the machine. You can see a the uniformity of scenes there. The enter mediation between machines and people and identity to the many purse to participants involved. I thought it was quite mind blowing. We are delighted to have mary here she is can the speak to you for about 25 minutes about the book and then we are can have time for questions and answers so get your pencils ready and we will be delighted to hear your questions. [applause]. Think you and thank you for indulging me and giving me a little bit of a lecture to set up the conversation. How many of you have heard about the recent decision in california bill five i hope that comes up in q a how many of you have ever received a 1099 or done contract work. Wonderful. And how many of you you dont have to and how many of you you dont have to how many of you have a friend who has used a ride sharing app called uber . See the. Here we go with that. We all have a stake in this conversation. Arguably. What i want to offer you today is a definition my coauthor came up with this term not to describe kinds of work so as not about a particular set of niche jobs its to describe the reorganization and the dismantlement of fulltime employment and what we wanted to think about were the conditions that are created through the erasure or the opacity around worker compensation. Keep in mind and you will probably you will notice in the book you will never find the word or references to ghost work. That was quite intentional and like anything when you publish you dont it you dont control it out of your hands. What is the mechanism behind the kind of work we are talking about and what connects this kind of work that im get a be describing to other kinds of Platform Work you might be familiar with. In that what you want to understand is that by the early to 2000s can pewter scientists and internet engineers they took the same sort of mechanism for calling and putting out a particular call that would be able to draw up software to execute the program. They could threaten people into the executable. It could help them with their work which was around data labeling and other kinds of tasks. We are to suggest to you that this is just the beginning and is the piece of this as you can see. Its any business that has a task it wants to demand or request help with and something that can be put on a platform that is effectively broccoli brooking this relationship. This is any task based project driven work. Like hold onto that and think about how much work it could of developed if you are applying that mechanism to the distribution of requests for work. And people been able to being able to pick up those tasks. If they had been anything last year. In many ways we havent come to the floor with the framework. If its not robots what is it it is potentially ghost work. Importantly you are probably familiar with the category of what we will call online to offline platform services. They are using the same mechanisms its an api it puts out a request some become pick up this food delivery to this address and the platform is participating in the exchange by recording when the food is picked up and delivered. Giving an address. That portion of the work is automated. The value of someone being there to deliver the food that is the part of the equation that we arent considering we are aware of it because me because is because we can see those folks. I dont think anybody would of been knowing what we were talking about until Cambridge Analytic appeared and provides another service that is trade need Artificial Intelligence. They are in a loop for performing a very important service. We are focused on this vast world of business startup. Below the surface of anything you will see before the consumer. Its the world of editing testing data labeling which might be familiar to some of you in the room. Many of the tasks do drive Artificial Intelligence. They are what help structure clean data set. Importantly seen the number of jobs that are saying its actually quite hard to nail the ai thing were to skin a keep a person threaded into a moment of a service request. So anytime you have gone on to a website and have a little help window pop up you know its a mixture of script in a person who is assisting you. And think about that world of work youve a person who is doing something on the spot that cant be quite completed by automation. There are some points of reference that come to mind. Please as a thread together. This is not new. This is continuity here. And how we have treated people for their we have imagined. In the day of tech styles we could have manufacturing knock out a shirt but could it flourish the button in the bow. That was a matter of decades. It eventually made it possible for piecework to go away. And in other cases both labor cost but also the reality of the automation. The bow itself being too sophisticated for a tech style machine to be able to consume through automation. It meant a person was kept around. Its also in the world of federal Contract Labor. They are made famous in the film and figure who could at the time be brought in to serve as computers. When the need in the demand for their services eventually disappeared they could be let go. Was it less value. We didnt have a way of looking at employment and seen these women as valuable because we have already moved forward an idea of what it was to value work. It was fulltime employment. It was a particular bodies. They have very specific roles to play. Anyone not playing those roles seemed expendable. To continue this by the 1960s. In the advancement of staffing and Temp Services i point you to the beautiful book on the temp economy quite literally brokered on the devaluing of womens labor as a resource these are mostly young women. They make great office girls. They were also expendable. Keeping that threaded moving by the time we get to the 1980s and 2000 of Office Service work. It becomes much harder to make the case that people are doing something that can so easily be replaced because they are doing work that has also been done by workers in the United States it becomes much more obvious its where you can find cheap labor that is just as educated as anyone who is in the location that is generating the request for work. I lament to some of my colleagues that the settlement of the case against microsoft meant that we never resolved the question of what do you do in the case of employment that is necessary for a time its project driven. You might need something with this specific kind of expertise. You know your neck and a need them for more than 12 months. What ways do we have to value that worker. It is important to note that post 2000. Especially 2001 what happens we have effectively the. Com bubble burst its that moment that we resolved and settled without case law that we are going to leave questionable what to do with people who are necessary but not necessary as we are can hold them for a career and what we came up with in this settlement was a set of practices that keep the Contract Labor. That often dont leave them with the protection beyond that contract. To be able to say that im employed and these benefits come with my employment. If you think about the history that weve drawn in this case we see the setting in place from the beginning of the industrial era of laws around labor protection that mostly assume the valuable work is the work that cant be automated without much projection out about what might become the target of automation. Some policies built for assembly lines. And they were imagined to be the touch of automation. And then the Temp Staffing which has driven much of our Economic Activity is the growth of a service industry. It serves people and their request for needs more than serves the need to build something. To see the shift towards the information economy yes it involves people doing coding and other really valuable skills. Think about what it took to code up a website. How many people know what im talking about. That is now completely done with software. At that time we paid quite a bit of money to build peoples websites. That was the first work as a 1099. As you are thinking about what can be automated and what is in that work of dater david otter. That seemed beyond automation. Its really an open question. What is it that will be constantly on not horizon. We cant see growing into a career. Setting a distributed world of work is not the most obvious thing to do. It was hard to figure out where to dig in. We chose for businesses as case studies to be the site sites where we identified groups of workers how do they organize this work what does the workflow look like. Into the four companies that really stand for this world of the mechanism that can build out Artificial Intelligence but also keep you in the loop. There are two streams of work. If there is something i hope you take away this growing word its really growing into different directions. The increasing need to structure and analyze data so take the example of a radiologist. It is not a one and done matter. You might be able to really do a great job. That seems like theyre going to get rid of the radiologist. They can create mechanisms for getting outside of urban centers. You have also created a market for other kinds of diagnostics that are going to not is not a dr. Doing network or a radiologist. It might be a radiologist. So thinking about that world of work that is managing the information and the data that we are collecting that certainly will build the Artificial Intelligence that will take over the need for the hand. It is just as critical human and a loop information services. We come to expect as consumers that theres someone that can be able to answer my call 247. The reality is we are seeing a number of Small Businesses that want to be able to offer you a prompt to take your medication. And want not only that prompt to be sent to the parents but something that will tell you how the tear is going today. Its those kind of cases that are not fulltime employment. Those two streams of work are analyzed through the cases of companies that both do image tagging verification. We picked these things because they are easy to automate. And in the content moderation. Its the stream of work that we would be able to remove a human hands with automation and it is the fantastic boundary object. Its actually really hard to get rid of people from the task of reviewing content. Anything thats not an obvious black or right is something that is very difficult to automate. If you have humans deliberating over is that hate speech or does the love signal. If we debate that. How do you classify when is that hate speech and when is it a moment of intimate loving exchange. They are part of the solution for being able to facilitate an idea that is going on in that moment. If we all step away from social media we dont have to worry about this. The second set. The sales lead generation. This is a business. They are businesses serving other businesses. We chose the United States and india because we wanted a complicated project to work on. And you will notice some patterns perhaps in much of the case of workers in india. They were in the south and there is a lot of conversation about that. Im looking for anybody that would like to keep doing the statistical analysis. We verily dash mike barely scratched the surface. It comes from thousands of interviews of surveys. It would see the rhythm of those routines. In doing and the fieldwork it was also an effort to figure out how to we also look at the large scale data that they are producing. We were able to get to the transactional data for two of the companies. So we can see how many clients are requesting the services. And when i leave you with two findings. Hopefully this gives you a taste of whats in the book. The first is that like any open call any environment where youre saying there is no obligation here. There is no commitment to you. If you would like to come in and do something come on in. Guess what happens you end up with folks who are really in it. Theyre gonna make this into a fulltime income stream that theyve identified as enough money to make the rest of their economic reality manageable the have a percentage of people to do this work. Then you have another good core 20 . Im in a do this and in a manager for the set amount of time. Im to get to that in a moment. They are the bench that is there. When the 10 or so walk away because her kids are sick you as an end consumer will never know that the 10 who is a really good inefficient ever walked out. Those regulars are there effectively making themselves available to be on demand to the end consumer. Most importantly is a lesson that feels very important to me. You have a long tail of people who are experiencing these labor markets. Maybe they want to try debugging. Maybe they want to practice a language in they want to see is a smart interesting. Is it more viable than what i am doing today. Or can i mix it into the other things that i am doing. It makes any survey really challenging because if you ask someone in this world what is the first job in your second job they dont have an easy answer to that question. A different mental model for what theyre doing. It is creating these emerging mental maps. When you ask people what were doing. Ask that they work for Silicon Valley startup or that they are an entrepreneur. It means that they see themselves as a Small Business owner. Or that theyre they are selfemployed and free lancers. They are all on the same platform during doing the exact same task. How will they have different understandings of what theyre doing. As a core of what we need to talk about. What are they trying to meet the is not meant in formal employment. And we found several different things. Three kept coming up in all of the interviews in the survey work that we did watching them make decisions about whether they stayed or left these markets. It was to control their time at often meant they have other obligations and commitments it was to control the projects that they worked on. They have some sense of agency over what they were doing. They found that alienating. And lastly they want to control the work invited. Someday please ask what it means to allow people to make choices about who they work with and how it has upsides and downsides. And in this case seeing how much this is not a matter of flexibility i recommend everybody stop talking about this environment says to me as an anthropologist that there is an absence of the capacity to control. In these cases people are effectively wrapping work around their lives instead of their lives around work. And its not nice to have. When someone says that this kind of work allows her to live her ideal life. Theyre not talking about the translation work they are doing. Its been able to make room and had enough income to support the desire to do dance choreography. As the burdens of where we have most opportunity. It is working retail where do we go from here. That is the rest of the conversation. I just want to tee up what we think are pressing concerns the downside of the world of Contract Labor an independent worker environment is that there is no center of gravity. No anchor for that collective bargaining that has been the linchpin to advancing worker rights. But also things like wages. We need to remind ourselves of the market never dead. Did. It was always intervention in society saying we want to work to look like this. We want to have these kind of securities and benefits. We have not done yet done that yet for contract work. Its embarrassing to talk about this outside the United States. The Key Takeaways is we want to be able to organize workers and help them be able to shift the debate about what the needs are recognize they are never in these kinds of labor markets can be on a single site. They are not working with the unified professional identity that is so key how to organize it. If you dont see a common cause and the person that might be next to you during this work they are just an experimentalist. It is globally networked. There is not a way to do this kind of work arguably without seeing it as a labor supply chain to the global multinational that had information needs that are not in one language or cultural context. You need to see collectives and achievements. And not an individual giving you something. Its many people being available to you. For example when i ask about the right healing apps. Most of the time the thing that is really compelling is that you have several different cars hovering around your neighborhood that might be able to get you. If they could offer you can offer you at least five cars hovering the value is their availability to you. Their collective contribution of being available. We dont have to value that. I think for me that is the most important conversation to have. Why does it seem so easy to devalue people who are important to us. And i would argue even with the California Assembly bill five we dont have laws governing the world. What would it take to attend this world. Im not talking about an ecosystem that is a raw material or an environment to be tended to or protected. Im talking about seen as a social comment where many things are going on in the world of the workers who are making themselves available on these platforms what would it look like to see their needs and pray for ties those as necessary and it needs to be filled so that they can be available in this comment. You dont want this two just not care about the need for scheduling. Where their need for a wage floor. Its impossible to work on labor like this and not have a slide. With that. [applause]. We are can it take your questions but before i do that i will ask you a couple of questions. The first thing as im in ask asked questions from two different directions. I would like you to bring out something you did not bring up in your topic its not just the machine as saying here is the task. Through the platform itself. Could you just say a little bit more about that. They can at least in part force scheduled a managed bill. Through the internet. There is a way in which the management of this process is so one of the chapters is called cruelty. And it walks you through what it feels like to effectively be managed by a set of scripts. That are written by somebody making a request and just like any boss. A lot of bosses dont know exactly what they want. In those moments when a request is made. Its really clear on what they want. The cost of that is absorbed by the worker. So if i put a task on a platform and its been managed by algorithms there are things that can happen like in the book we described of having his work account suspended. And its not clear to him why it is suspended. It is not uncommon. Once its effectively locked out you are locked out of your workplace. I dont want to put this as a maniacal act. If you can no longer confirm the identity of someone who is working to an account who is not onsite. You also dont know how to issue their last paycheck. So as last paycheck just disappeared there is no person they are in contact with when they are doing this work. They can just be shut down. And they have no mechanism of appeal. I want to ask a question from another direction. With the rise of industry and people moving out of culture and piecework it was considered a big position that people have to leave their homes to work. I would what much rather might work wrapped around my life. I want the whole notion that we all had to commute somewhere every morning. Is one of the ways its one of the ways that hinders people from raising children and so on. Is there some upsides we should be thinking about. And is there a way to blend the virtue of those different models. This is in some ways for both me and said we are both more optimistic in the cover than the cover of the book suggests. There is a lot of potential here. Something specific. The number of people we talked with. This one woman who talked about being able to do this work and not had to sit in a two hour commute. As we move towards a Climate Action just to shout out to say what would it look like to say that work like this thats able to underwrite for people to be able to work in their homes or in the setting that is near them saying in a town supported wifi hot spot is the possibility embedded in ghost work. You talk about some of the ways that people doing ghost work not organized for protest. But to work collaboratively. That is another feature of the environment that may not be obvious to people on the outside. One of my favorite moments was when sid realized that the graphic finding we head of how much people were collaborating offline was something we were able to map and quantitatively measure. You have this core group of people that like any up the next thing they did was reach for peers. How to optimize my time and who are the bad actors in the scene. Have i make sure that i am advancing or finding other opportunity. There are very many reasons that they are social. We need the social exchange. They need to spend at least 20 minutes which means they will mentor each other for free. People invest in these very social ways. It is a really wonderful finding within the study but that does not go away no matter what kind of work you do. There is no job and often when tells me this is menial mindless work who would would need to communicate about that. I often take away that they are giving me a very poor signal of what kind of work they wouldnt want to do. Humans are very good at making what they do meaningful. We are devaluing it. Please raise your hand. Introduce yourself. Eric is a member of the task force. One of the distressing things over the past couple of decades is how many people have been left behind. What are symptoms if you look at the top half of the distribution. More than her independent contractors. Compared to the bottom half. They are just selling their hours not a task. Many of the people that example you gave from carmela. They like the flexibility they get. I always asked them about what theyre doing and many of them say they got paid more in their previous jobs but wanted to have more flexibility. Some of them even said that they liked the fact that there was an algorithm and giving in their jobs rather than the next bias dispatcher that they have to kiss up to. There are definitely cases that you give where they turn out really bad for people. Is that a symptom of their lack of Bargaining Power or is it a symptom of these particular institutional mechanisms. For after this project i really took away that its both. The reality if i think of an economist like dean baker or other people have said the biggest problem is structural institutional problems. I think there is culturally something going on and where we place our expectations and what makes a good job. We havent been paying attention to the shift to the Service Economy i think most people would a great much of our economy is growing around services what does that job look like and where are the places that we have intervened to say we are going to see that as a stable form of employment that leads to a middleclass experience or the possibility of people moving into the middle class globally. We do see it as part of the way of helping people to make it less likely or harder for people to do contingent work and more pushing them towards regular employment work. Would that be part of the solution or would that be not beneficial to them. If we knew how to provide basics to every working adult. The biggest challenge is that we are fixated on the good opportunities about fulltime employment. It leads to better opportunities in life. I dont see any evidence that that has happened globally. That was the most important thing to me. There is a certain cap in which you dont see the formal employment. You see a ton of economic opportunity. And you see a ton of Economic Activity. What is the expectation. What are the institutional agreements that are social contracts around anybody working. Unfortunately we are not starting from zero we are starting with ways of imagining how we structure work. I believe they have gotten the way of in the way of us thinking lets reboot. There are some good examples. It doesnt matter what kind of job we do. You can have basic needs met. To see the economic benefit of providing basic needs. To me this book is a Business Case to providing some basic benefits that would come with participating in economic life. It does not matter that a Company Needs you for 12 months or two weeks. How do i hold on to 70 for an extended. Of time and make it really hard for me to do without them. The services are about constantly anticipating and changing with consumer pace for their needs. We could think thats awful but most of us enjoy we are driven by consumer economy. How can we make that not hurt working people. And make a benefit to more people than the people that are cashing in on selling the goods. Think you i really appreciate all of this good work. My question is he began to speak to the fact that there is a social organization among many of the people in Platform Work. My sense is that there are social organizations periodic or episodic basis. How can i get these done. And where is a traffic jam. How do we move from that form of social interaction to agency that is sustainable. There is a lot of social organizations almost in any form of work. It finds a way. We havent figured out the institutional arrangements to get People Agency to address the economic issues. And then the people that have the power to control those issues. Do you see any room for optimism for development along those lines. I think those are the next steps that we have to figure out. The chapter on kindness is stranger is about the longterm relationship that people build. They are building their own tools to meet and discussion forms and safe book groups. These are people that will send each other birthday gifts. They are beyond the kind of social exchange in the moment about is this a bad employer or not. It means people are building up fairly strong walls. It can often be about we are really serious about that work. They are building on ramp to help people engage with specific examples but petition in campaign that workers organize. Its what they are already doing and the biggest challenge is that organized labor has a very specific model about how to organize people and it has not updated to deal with what are you doing when you independent parties. That is not the right framework either. They make an association legal. What are the ways in which you can bring labor to the table. Be the keeper of the keys one suggestion in the book is let unions be the place where somebody has work identity that is held. How do i verify this person if youre registered with the guild and you can say im with this organization. The business when they are neck and had to waste their time on that. And the union arguably wins. It mentions its the social organization of the workers. They have very simple else sourcing. They make multimillion dollar salary. How do we value work in the face of ghost work. You would have to be a real jerk to say i combust everything on my own. And so in those moments for that manager when they are able to ask for sundays help. When i ask for someone to help me with a range of things i cannot manage myself. In what world does that mean that there are people helping me out and they are just peripheral. Theyre not that important. So in many ways how do we recognize them serving us. The biggest challenge in front of us is that we have not learned. The people who take care of peoples children and parents would not be paid as poorly as they are. Taking care of kids that such a worthless job. I would really call attention to the pricing. Its not a market value. Its not about their value. How do we value the collective contribution of individuals. Keep that in mind. They are making themselves available to us. We are just compensated well for that. It doesnt have to be like that. Mit admissions really happy to see the book. There was an interesting cemetery. Businesses were demanding attention and workers were providing labor i thought it was interesting that it wasnt. It wasnt attention, attention or labor, labor. Can you talk about that . Who purposely put those words to be able to resonate with where we think about supply and demand and how we think about buyers and sellers. I need more training and economics. Trying to understand how we have come to treat labor like we talk about any other project it always confuses me. As a powerful relationship when someone can demand somebodys attention and someone can supply or provide the moment of service. Right now that is an asymmetry. What would it look like to turn that twosided market into an equitable exchange. Were talking about businesses. We might not have a better model for it. And really sure up what it means that this is this is a new main street. Information workers her last name escapes me. She has a book called private justice. Its all about the power relations please go ahead with your question. This is fascinating, thank you. I wanted to point out that you are mentioning textile workers. Sewing buttons about ten years ago it illegally as part of this vast homeworking network. Im curious with the orme the informal sector. A lot of it is underreported. What do you think is different about ghost work today is at the literacy or the technology its a great question. This can work has not gone away. I want to have two answers for you. What we had thought of is the informal markets. What would it look like to go in a different direction and say what does it look like to support Economic Activity thats not under one site. There is a notion that there is some sort of a trajectory we are all very nervous when you start thinking about linear trajectory. And cultural development. One comment would be what is going on there is the continued exploitation of workers who are providing service. What would we do to make any Economic Activity to bring dignity and respect to that work. To the second point that i think you are raising. The real difference i see in this kind of work is that it is i dont want to say its a volume issue. It can happen so quickly. As a thing that makes me most nervous. Is that tracing the abuse of people in the supply chains will be even more difficult than it is to trace the abuse of someone sewing on a button. That is difficult today anyway to know who is producing the shirt that im wearing. My hope is that the consumer you think about information this is the information we consume. We would all be better served if we have a better sense in support of the working conditions of work conditions of the people managing that information. Thank you so much. I think its wonderful that you had been here. You put them to a couple of traditions. In the Social Security system. It suggests that there are solutions out there. The question i had is since we know there are solutions how do we move a culture in a population in a country to the solutions. That is a great question. Im sorry we did not get to california bill five. It has always taken Civil Society consumer government, and businesses its not a Market Progress problem. How do we want to treat working people. When we see ourselves as people who might be doing this work or our loved ones and imagine what would it take to make sure that they have a good life i hope what it does is galvanize consumers to say you benefit, for anybody who raised their hand. They will not likely be able to survive california bill five. It does not see it as drivers. Thats i can win. And i think we all lose and so we are just kicking us can down the road. How would we come to grips with we have moved to effectively a Service Information economy how can we make that meaningful a dignified work. Before i say thank you mary. I just want to mention that there are two additional book talks. The other one would be oren cast. Talking about once in the future worker. I hope you will join us for those as well. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. [applause]. Look for us at Bradley University on monday. Frank michelman and sean kelly will discuss the tenure of the late republican congressman. And then on thursday we will be in washington dc for steve vogels recount of the cold war where the u. S. And British Forces sought to dig a tunnel in east berlin. That same night in new york travel writer paul cerullo will talk about his journeys along the usmexico border. Most of these events are open to the public and if you are in attendance please take a picture and tag us at books tv. Dot twitter. Also this evening, Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton share their thoughts on the women who have inch spired them. National Times National to become a Global Military and economic superpower, and former National Security Agency Contractor Edward Snowden talks about exposing the u. S. Governments Mass Surveillance Program and having to go into exile as a result. That all starts tonight at 7 30 p. M. Eastern. Check your Program Guide for more information. The book is called the deep state 15 surprising dangers you