THE MAKING OF A CYBERTARIAT: Virtual Work in a Real World

THE MAKING OF A CYBERTARIAT: Virtual Work in a Real World Ursula Huws New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003; 208 pp. Ursula Huws's collection of essays, The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World, reveals the work of an activist scholar committed to examining the material processes shaping human labour through information technologies. In articles ranging from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, most not written for academic publications, Huws tracks the changes she has seen both locally and globally in work environments under technological change. In particular, she notes how the introduction of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in office work has resulted in the deskilling and casualization of paid work, especially for women. Worksites are increasingly segmented across different geographical areas, including the home, while management and monitoring is concentrated and centralized. While these effects appear in other accounts of the globalization of work through technology, Huws looks at the specific practices inside information work through a feminist political economy lens which challenges dominant economic arguments from both Right and Left. Her examination is grounded in extensive empirical research into technological change in the workplace and in her own experiences as a teleworker and single mother. One of the salient points of Huws's analysis is her debunking of the "weightless economy" argument put forth by neo-liberal economists to represent the new global information paradigm (see especially Chapter 9, "Material World"). Huws argues that rather than eliminating commodity production in favour of dematerialized "knowledge production" (as declining industrial jobs in the West are said to indicate), the production of new commodities has increased worldwide alongside the expansion of new global markets. Huws maps this change through technology as part of an historical trajectory based on Marxist understandings of capitalist production, a thesis which she develops in earlier essays in the book (Chapters 1 and 2). Drawing upon the work of feminist historian Alice Clark in particular, Huws notes the historical change in work practices starting in the home through a process she calls "commodification"; with new technologies, the highly skilled production of goods and services originally done by both men and women in the home was replaced by increasingly specialized, fragmented and gender-segregated paid labour producing commodities for purchase by others. Under this transformation, unpaid domestic work was (and is) primarily done by women. Huws examines the gendered stratification of manufacturing and service employment which continues through restructuring in the "information economy," and notes how in the "new economy," the boundaries between the manufacturing and service sectors are increasingly blurred. Huws cautions against placing faith in economic statistics, particularly from those who promote "the weightless economy," without examining their basis. Statistics do not reflect the fluidity of job classification and reclassification since the introduction of information technologies. Job loss in the manufacturing and service sectors may reappear as an uncounted intensification of domestic work or unpaid self-service work. Similarly, the transnational movement of jobs may not be apparent in figures showing corporate productivity levels. Her point is that ultimately, through technologies, the commodification process turns paid service labour back into unpaid consumption labour in the home or self-service work as manufactured commodities replace services (she gives as examples the washing machine and ABM). Huws maintains that this process further divests consumers/workers of control over their lives at work and in the home. With the devolution of public services also comes the erosion of public space, and along with it a "commons" for public organizing. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Huws's research into teleworking focussed primarily on the economic transformations taking place in Britain and the global reorganization and distribution of information technologybased work (see Chapters 3, 4, 6 and 7). …