The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation—A Knowledge Graph of Human Rights Protection for Platform Workers

Abstract

Digital technology has had a profound and extensive impact on social development and labour methods. The trend of automation in digital employment platforms has raised concerns about ‘machines replacing humans’. Moritz Altenried, the author of The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation, is a researcher at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University of Berlin and the German Institute for Integration and Migration Research. Through in-depth case studies in industries such as logistics, gaming, crowdsourcing and social media, Altenried reveals the true face of labour in the digital age. He points out that the digital factory, centred on algorithmic management, continues the labour control methods of traditional factories. Far from replacing humans, digital factories require more high-quality labour to maintain the flexible accumulation of digital capital. By using core concepts such as ‘digital Taylorism’, ‘multiplication of labor’ and ‘digital infrastructure’, Altenried demonstrates how digital technology continues the labour control logic of traditional factories while achieving the globalization, fragmentation and flexibility of labour through algorithms and platforms. This book reveals that the digital factory is not the end of traditional factories but rather their transformation and expansion in the digital age. Human workers controlled and concealed by the digital factory urgently need new ways to protect their labour rights. Traditional factories managed their workforce through precise organizational structures and management systems. In the digital age, traditional physical factories have gradually declined, and they have been replaced by digital platforms that control the organization of labour. Altenried breaks the stereotype that ‘technology replaces human labor’, allowing readers to see the continuation and variation of labour under digital capitalism. Despite the rapid development of digital technology, human labour has not been replaced. Instead, it exists in a more concealed and complex form behind algorithms and platforms. He calls on society to pay attention to ‘ghost workers’ such as Amazon warehouse temporary workers, game ‘gold farmers’, crowdsourcing workers, social media moderators and so forth and reflect on the ethics and social responsibilities in the development of digital technology. These workers struggle in the cracks between algorithms and platforms, facing problems such as low pay, high-intensity labour and unstable work. Their stories reveal the exploitation and inequality behind digital capitalism. In response to the technological substitution theory of ‘machines replacing humans’, Altenried proves through examples that many seemingly automated labour processes actually rely on a large amount of human labour to support. For instance, the training of autonomous driving technology and the review of news content both require human participation. The development of digital technology does not simply eliminate living labour but redistributes and reconfigures it. Human labour remains indispensable in the digital age. The term ‘digital Taylorism’ is used to describe the persistence of the traditional Taylorist system in digital platforms. In traditional factories, the Taylorist system controlled labour through various means, including the separation of planning and execution, the decomposition and standardization of tasks and precise supervision of workers. These measures helped to rationalize high-intensity work processes and prevent and dismantle workers' resistance actions. Digital factories accept a wide variety of workers they need rather than producing large numbers of industrial workers. This is the core feature that distinguishes digital Taylorism from traditional Taylorism. The connection between digital factories and traditional factories lies in the fact that both are characterized by various technologies for organizing production processes, labour division and controlling human labour. However, due to the differences in the allocation of human and material resources connected by digital technology, the former has more coordination and accuracy. Digital technology and automation are eliminating unskilled, routine labour. In automated platforms, the vast amount of work that seems to be done automatically by machines is, in fact, distributed to different human workers around the world to be accomplished collectively. Digital Taylorism involves a series of developments and changes in the labour field, including process standardization, process decomposition, reduction of technical requirements, automated management, algorithmic collaboration, digital measurement and labour supervision. Through automated monitoring, guidance and evaluation, each labour link is measured and optimized more precisely. In the book, the concept of ‘multiplication of labor’ focuses on the overall transformation process of the labour structure and trends. It reveals that through the combination of fragmented reorganization of labour and precise control of the labour process, digital capital is accelerating its accumulation in an elastic form. Altenried points out that the labour force under digital Taylorism is highly heterogeneous, flexible and unstable, which is precisely the key contributor to the multiplication of labour. The multiplication of labour encompasses three meanings: First, the standardized work procedures enabled by digital technology and automated management allow for the rapid absorption and replacement of workers, making global temporary cooperation among diverse and heterogeneous workers possible. Second, this temporary cooperation blurs the lines between working hours and free time. Last, the marked alienation in the geographical distribution and mobility of the labour force has led to the reconfiguration of gender division of labour and a sharp increase in flexible employment. The multiplication of labour not only describes the current attributes of labour such as heterogeneity, flexibility and diversity but also reveals the further intensification and complication of the global unequal labour structure. With the spatiotemporal radiation power of digital technology, platform companies can manage a global and uninterrupted standardized labour process. It is not difficult to find in case studies that through control measures such as zero-contract employment and piece-rate wages, labour speed and intensity are directly linked to wages, thereby transferring some inherent risks in labour to individual workers, which is increasingly conducive to the elastic accumulation of digital capital. The notion of ‘digital infrastructure’ describes the functions and forms of digital platforms in the digital society. Digital platforms, while influencing the spatial distribution of production and labour, have also become a new type of infrastructure. Altenried illustrated via social media the diversity of digital platforms as workplaces, which include roles such as security guards, programmers and content moderators. In the work of reviewing social media content, outsourced workers scattered across Berlin, Austin and Dublin often face significant execution pressure and psychological risks from excessive exposure to violent content. Altenried pointed out: ‘Instead of a borderless global labor market, crowdworking platforms are digital factories producing a complex geography of labor connected to physical and political spaces (e.g., national legal frameworks) in multiple ways’. Digital platforms can organize labour processes and social cooperation across time and space, which brings multiple social impacts on the organization, composition of the labour force and labour–capital conflicts. At the same time, it also reconstructs the flow patterns of the labour force and gender division of labour. Although digital factories offer individuals the possibility of holding multiple unstable jobs, the mechanisms of racial, class and gender inequality still exist within them. Digital platforms should also assume the labour protection functions that traditional factories have in the social space. The core conclusion of this book is that digital factories do not signify the end of traditional factories but rather their transformation and expansion in the digital age. Altenried keenly perceives the historical continuity of labour systems in the digital era. He not only critically examines the realistic foundation of the technological substitution theory but also urges researchers to pay attention to the marginalized workers obscured behind the glamorous discourse of technology. The human labourers controlled and obscured by digital factories urgently need new labour rights protection systems. This book provides a comprehensive knowledge graph of human rights protection for platform-based workers. The gig economy, through digital platforms, offers diverse employment opportunities for labourers. This novel employment model has garnered significant attention in the fields of law and human rights. Altenried's research contributes to the discourse on safeguarding the human rights of platform workers in three key dimensions. First, the observations in this book offer an ethnographic empirical research approach to the human rights impact of digital labour. Altenried provides a multi-ethnic cultural perspective on the human rights situation of platform workers. He conducted a 7-year ethnographic study in various types of employment platforms in both Eastern and Western countries. He observed the working process in Amazon warehouses and conducted research interviews with the ‘gold farmers’ in China's ‘game factories’. He presented the differences in labour ethics views on digital game work between Western gamers and Chinese ‘gold farmers’ in an interesting dialogue format. The operational logic of digital factories has led to the blurring of subordinate labour relations in new forms of employment, thereby placing workers outside the scope of labour law regulation and directly affecting their labour rights, social insurance rights and health rights. In digital factories, the traditional employer–employee relationship is opaque, causing digital platforms to neglect their responsibility to respect workers’ basic human rights protection, such as the lack of collective bargaining rights, insufficient social security, weakened labour remuneration, unlimited working hours and inadequate health policies. Second, the research in this book provides a theoretical basis for the legal approaches to safeguarding the human rights of platform workers. The risks brought to workers by digital factories mainly include: the lack of labour standards protection, high risk of work-related injuries but insufficient relief channels, the absence of vocational skills training, unreasonable performance system constraints and so forth. Altenried holds that digital factories still carry the social space functions of traditional factories, which provides a basis for platform companies to bear the legal responsibility for protecting workers’ human rights. Only by breaking away from the path dependence of traditional labour relations and reshaping a more inclusive and sustainable labour protection legal system can we better cope with the challenges brought by the digital economy to human rights protection. Third, the content of this book provides practical experience for non-legal approaches to safeguarding the human rights of platform workers. The book points out that crowdsourcing workers have spontaneously taken collective actions, and various forms of resistance have emerged. Crowdsourcing workers have engaged in collective discussions through online forums. They have carried out digital strikes by posting evaluations of digital platform task issuers and their tasks through a browser plugin called ‘Turkopticon’. Crowdsourcing workers have also written pamphlets on the minimum requirements for crowdsourcing work. They have managed to make their voices heard and put forward political demands. In recent years, many countries and regions around the world have begun to improve legal systems that safeguard the basic human rights of platform workers and strive to protect their various rights fairly in judicial decisions. The Platform Work Directive [EU] 2024/2831 (PWD) seeks to improve platform workers’ conditions by strengthening their rights to transparency in automated decision-making and monitoring. The Supreme People's Court of China has issued the ‘Opinions on Providing Judicial Services and Guarantees for Stable Employment’ and a series of judicial precedents to clarify the standards for determining the labour legal relationship between digital platforms and platform workers and to safeguard the digital labour development rights of platform workers. The research content of this book provides a theoretical basis and practical experience for further improving the human rights protection system for platform workers.