GHOST WORK is written by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, senior researchers at Microsoft Research. Mary L. Gray is also a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and a faculty member at Indiana University. Their book's subtitle is "How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass" and deals with largely invisible human labor force who work to "make the internet seem smart." These gig-economy workers complete tasks like tagging images, adding video captions, answering a web-based chat query, or editing a product review, essentially providing employment on demand in a "fusion of code and human smarts." In this text, Gray and Suri explain the nature of ghost work and profile a number of individual workers, both in the US and India. They refer to a study by PEW Research showing that in 2015 roughly twenty million US adults earned money completing tasks distributed on demand. Thus, Gray and Suri's work highlights a surprisingly big subset of the workforce that is being transformed due to automation and artificial intelligence advances. However, once this situation is described and it seems pretty clear what is involved, Gray and Suri go on at length with background (including historical context on piecework) which distracts from the book's overall value. They do argue that the opportunity for exploitation exists, especially when a worker's goal is twenty dollars (or five dollars per hour) without any kind of benefits and added cost of the time looking for work. This is also further explored in Mary Gray's opinion piece published in early May by the Washington Post where she notes, "workers in the gig-driven ghost economy have no shared workplace, professional identity or voice to call for change." Subsequent sections of their new book discuss the power of collaboration and the importance of paying attention to employee welfare and the "double bottom line." Their conclusion offers a brief outline of several technical and social fixes (e.g., universal healthcare, paid family leave). Well-researched and documented, roughly twenty percent of GHOST WORK's content is bibliography, notes, appendix and index.

Business and civics classes may find discussion prompts here, particularly in conjunction with more recent studies from PEW about concerns related to automation (2018) or contrasting views on the future economy and democracy (2019). Or, perhaps students could investigate some of the platforms for freelancing like UpWork. Gray and Suri also write about the creation of "MTurk so that Amazon could not just offer a marketplace of books and other durable goods but make labor itself a service that anyone could find and pay for through the Amazon website." That seems highly relevant given yesterday’s announcement by Amazon of a $700 million investment in upskilling for its employees.

Links in live post:
https://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/01/hidden-global-workforce-that-is-still-fighting-an-eight-hour-workday/?utm_term=.95e776bf5cdd
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/09/13/in-advanced-and-emerging-economies-alike-worries-about-job-automation/ https://www.upwork.com/
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/05/20/how-do-oecd-forum-attendees-compare-with-general-publics-around-the-world-on-views-about-the-future-economy-and-democracy/
https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-pledges-upskill-100000-us-employees-demand-jobs-2025

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri addresses a new kind of worker: one who bridges the gap between what AI can and can not do. As Gray and Suri note, “the great paradox of automation is that the desire to eliminate human labor always generates new tasks for humans.” This book is about the gray area between the robots taking over and humans.

These workers are the ones that decide if a picture that was flagged is obscene or not - is that a thumb, or something else? - after AI runs it through it’s algorithm and can’t distinguish between the two. They’re the people who have to decide if something constitutes hate speech or is a right-wing politician on a rant. They decide if a person posing as an Uber driver is really a registered Uber driver, etc. Generally their jobs are controlled by an API that spits out micro-jobs as fast as they come in, and workers clamor for this “piece work” not unlike the piece-work of the early industrial era.

Ghost work is the bridge between AI an an automated future; and as Gray and Suri attest, these jobs complicate the the dominant story of humans being replaced by robots. Yet, these workers are generally invisible, poorly paid and have few protections. (Of course, as they point out, “according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 52 percent of today’s employers sponsor workplace benefits of any kind.”)

The book represents five years of anthropological study of workers in the US and India that use four “ghost work” platforms to make a living:
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk); LeadGenius; Microsoft’s lUniversal Human Relevance System (UHRS); and Amara.org.

There are a lot of stories about these workers and the opportunities and hardships this sort of piece work represents for them. For one woman in a rural village in India, whose takehome pay of $350 a month makes her the richest person in the village, ghost work is a fantastic alternative to other local options, but that doesn’t mean it is fulfilling.

As Gray and Suri note, this field of work is growing rapidly and is only slated to grow more in the future, and so it is important to understand how such ghost work could effect society and people on a larger scale. To this point they offer a number of potential ways to mitigate the experience for people doing these jobs (Step 1: Employers, realize there are humans working at the other end of the API).

This book has an excellent history of piece work and temp work, leading up to the rise of the gig economy and ghost work in general. If you’ve ever been curious why tech has built it’s foundation on contract labor, this will give you the historical context. It’s a bit wordy at times and some of the concepts are repeated more times than are necessary. But it is an interesting look at a class of workers few people realize are even there.

Ghost work, like capitalism at large, has a number of myths that make the magic possible, particularly around the flexibility and autonomy these jobs are supposed to provide. The flexibility in scheduling these jobs really involves being on call 24 hours a day - hypervigilance is required to get new jobs before others snatch them up. All the risk and investment of this type of work lies with the employee - when there are problems with the technology behind the platform, generally workers don’t get paid.

Gray and Suri have a two groups of suggestions on how to “fix” ghost work and make it a sustainable class of employment, from both a technical and social perspective.

On the technical side, ghost workers need more tools for collaboration, and a “digital watercooler” where they can discuss work issues with their fellow contractors. Shared workspaces issues by companies could also provide physical collaborative spaces for workers and decrease feelings of disconnectedness and loneliness. They also suggest that employers could create “flash teams” that work together on vexing piecework projects. Finally, they’d like to see “portable reputation systems” whereby ghost workers could share their portfolios of work and demonstrate their range of abilities across different proprietary platforms where they work, to make it easier for employers to find the talent they need.

There are also social fixes to make the work of ghost workers more tolerable. Importantly, they suggest, employers need to build empathy for workers, and institute a “good work code” for supply chains that involve ghost workers. This could involve pledging minimum weekly payments, non-discrimination policies, or agreeing to not charge workers fees to receive the money they've earned. We also need better employment classifications for ghost workers and gig workers everywhere; and a safety net for future workers as this realm of work continues to grow exponentially - the authors argue that the gig economy makes the strongest case yet for universal healthcare, public education, paid family leave, and municipal co-working space. Finally, unions and platform cooperatives could work as a countervailing force to hold platforms accountable - if they existed.

Consumer action is the final suggestion as a “fix for us all.” Just as consumers have won victories for workers after the terrible fires in Bangladesh garment factories through the Bangladesh Accord, and likewise for tomato growers through the Fair Food Program many fast food chains have adapted, consumers could also demand reasonably decent conditions for workers from the tech companies that use ghost work. Whether or not they will remains to be seen.

This is a wordy book and could have used some tighter editing; some of the concepts are repeated ad naseum. Yet it is an excellent look at the horizon of gig work and where automation meets humanity, and where it could go from here. These contingent labor markets have seen sharp growth, and are only continuing to grow as a share of overall work.

GHOST WORK

At times, the book Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass gives off the vibe of a labor-leaning screed against the on-demand gig economy.

To start, the term “ghost work” is itself an arguably unfortunate turn of phrase from authors Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri. Certainly their intention is to highlight the “invisible” nature of the work that gets done on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Amara or Upwork, much of which represents the last mile that ultimately powers artificial intelligence and machine learning. Yet words matter; and while Gray and Siddharth mean “ghost work” in the “I see dead people” sense (which itself is not necessarily positive) it’s difficult to shake the way it characterizes this kind as opposed somehow to work that is “real” or “tangible” or, worse, that “matters”.

This colors their commentary somewhat, as portions of the book do have the subtext about how exploitative crowdsourced work can be for those who supply the labor that makes it possible. While the authors acknowledge the social benefits of such arrangements, especially in the developing world and particularly in India, they repeatedly emphasize its dehumanizing aspects. Workers are reduced to account numbers plugged into and managed by a string of application programming interface (API) code. They are unable to get the help they need to do their work efficiently, much less organize to demand better working conditions and rates. Most importantly, their compensation fundamentally depends on the whims of the often faceless and nameless individuals and corporations on the other side of the platform as well as the platform itself—the latter of which can arbitrarily restrict access to the marketplace as it sees fit.

It’s easy enough to divide ruminations about the internet economy as either optimistic or pessimistic. In that regard, Ghost Work falls squarely in the latter category, albeit owing to the authors’ desire to shine a much needed light on the challenges of on-demand work arrangements as experienced by those who have come to rely on them.