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News on Labor & Economy
Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral […]
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices […]
The dark side of the gig economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and how to make it equitable for the users and workers most exploited. When the “sharing economy” launched a decade […]
A 2019 report from New America’s Better Life Lab, Worker Voices: Technology and the Future of Workers, draws on interviews with workers across the US experiencing technological change. The report […]
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 […]