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News on Labor & Economy
Collecting information about one group can facilitate control over an entirely different group—a phenomenon we term refractive surveillance. We explore this dynamic in the context of retail stores by investigating […]
From the Pinkerton private detectives of the 1850s, to the closed-circuit cameras and email monitoring of the 1990s, to contemporary apps that quantify the productivity of workers, American employers have […]
In The Datafication of the Workplace, the Data Justice Lab examines the quantification of work and workers — from hiring and interviewing to employee monitoring and performance assessment. In a […]
In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed, a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work. Hidden beneath […]
This is the first report of a Keystone Research Center project on the “Future of Work.” The aim is to identify public policies that could help ensure that the application […]
The Driverless Report from sociologist Steve Viscelli, in partnership with Working Partnerships USA and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, provides an in-depth analysis of how technology, labor practices, and public […]
In the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s report The Future of Warehouse Work, scholars Beth Gutelius and Nik Theodore discuss how technology in warehouses likely won’t cause dramatic job loss, but […]
In the Roosevelt Institute report Beyond Automation, law professor Brishen Rogers argues that information technology, not automation, is the greatest threat to workers today because it grants companies outsized power […]
Technological changes in the workplace are increasing productivity and opportunities for some American workers, displacing others, and requiring many to develop new skills. At the same time, demographic changes suggest […]
At the 2019 Data for Black Lives conference panel session “Black People vs. Robots: Reparations and Workers Rights in the Age of Automation,” panelists discussed the impact of automation in […]
Few studies attempt to demonstrate whether and how systemic racial inequality might form on the web. I use racial formation theory to conceptualize how race is represented, and systematically reproduced […]