Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World

Puentes, Jennifer

doi:10.1177/0094306118755396e

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Previous work has pointed out the potential conflicts between abstract indicators and people analytics for measuring work [42] [49]. Our study extends this body of work by providing a clear demonstration of such misalignment of performance indicators used by Etsy to measure seller performance.…”

Section: Abstraction and Indicator Manipulationmentioning

confidence: 50%

“…Visible labor is identifiable and overt, performed in physical workplaces, recognized by management, employees, and consumers, paid, directly contributes to profit, and has been long-term, full-time, and regulated by formal laws [42]. Theoretical and analytical works have discussed the recursive nature of visibility and invisibility working together in an ecology [49], the socio-spatial, socio-cultural and socio-legal dynamics causing invisibility [21] and the legal implications of invisibility of work [42]. Collectively they have argued that whether work is visible or invisible has implications for regulations, compensation, social justice, and socio-technical system design.…”

Section: Related Work 21 Invisible Work: Mechanisms and Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous works have focused on the various types of invisible work across different technological platforms, online communities and for technology workers [42]. Shevchuk et al [47] analyzed the invisible work performed by freelance workers in managing schedules, working non-standard hours and being responsive as they work with and report to clients across time zones.…”

Section: Technology Invisible Work and People Analyticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the technological changes enabling online exchanges such as those on the Etsy platform have also contributed to the invisibility of work. Invisible labor is defined as "activities that occur within the context of paid employment that workers perform in response to requirements (either implicit or explicit) from employers and that are crucial for workers to generate income, to obtain or retain their jobs, and to further their careers, yet are often overlooked, ignored, and/or devalued by employers, consumers, workers, and ultimately the legal system itself" [42]. The term invisible work was coined by Daniels in the 1980s in the context of women's domestic work [9] but since then it has been applied to many contexts such as service work of employees in airlines and hotel industries [23], care work by nurses in healthcare [1], and in the invisibility of work created by technology such as for crowd work [35] or gig workers [44], freelancers [47], digital paid and unpaid labor in user-generated content [22] etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Making crafting visible while rendering labor invisible on the Etsy platform

Razaq

Kolko

Hsieh

2022

Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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Historically, crafts have been associated with women's small-scale creative production in the home, equated with hobbies or amateur production, and devalued in comparison to both art and industrial production. During its early years, Etsy was seen as a champion of "handmade", bringing visibility to crafts and providing economic value. This paper presents results of a qualitative study with 18 small online sellers of Etsy platform. Our study shows that Etsy's sociotechnical design results in a high burden of invisible labor for sellers, including categories of labor not replicated by other online platforms. These new categories include negotiation and articulation work around defining and defending "handmade" products, understanding one's intellectual property and how (and whether) to defend that IP elsewhere on the platform, understanding working of platform algorithms and adapting to changing platform regulations. Our findings provide new ways to frame the challenges faced by producers/sellers on emerging marketplace platforms.

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Section: Abstraction and Indicator Manipulationmentioning

confidence: 50%

Section: Related Work 21 Invisible Work: Mechanisms and Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Technology Invisible Work and People Analyticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Making crafting visible while rendering labor invisible on the Etsy platform

Razaq

Kolko

Hsieh

2022

Designing Interactive Systems Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This embroils them in performativity: to generate high quality engagement, they must appear to care (Sauer & Penz, 2017). Yet emotional labour is not, typically, simply performative, but rather involves the production and enrolment of affect as part of the work done, with wider consequences for the experiences of emotion workers (Bolton & Boyd, 2003; Hochschild, 2012; Puentes, 2018). For instance, Bolton and Boyd (2003) observe that a consequence of providing emotion work, even in a highly commercialised setting, is the development of a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of those toward whom emotion work is directed.…”

Section: Caring On the Frontlinesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Compassionate responsibilisation in a neoliberal paternalistic homelessness system: ‘They’re not just numbers to me, I do actually care’

England

2022

The Sociological Review

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Frontline workers in welfare systems are often understood as an ‘uncaring’ group, with their affective labour co-opted and reframed in terms of systemic efficiency. Yet they also operate at the frontlines of neoliberal paternalism, their work structured by encounters with extreme hardship, required to address this through ‘pedagogical interventions’ aimed at instilling a competitive, individualistic ‘self-care’ mindset in applicants. Approaching care as a universal need, an embodied practice, and a location of resistance to capitalism, I explore how actors at the frontlines of welfare governance mobilise care in their daily encounters with welfare subjects. Reporting upon 54 extended interviews with frontline workers within the post-2015 Welsh homelessness system, I argue that care is central to the operation of the neoliberal paternalistic welfare system, providing a motivation for workers to engender compliance with neoliberal paternalistic methods of governance. I illustrate this with the example of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, drawing upon three findings. First, workers operate from a core caring sensibility, caring despite structural constraints. Second, responsibilisation is conceptualised as a strategy which, through its focus on individual empowerment, becomes one of care. Third, however, the focus of these interventions was performative, giving workers strategies to help clients fit into the system and thus increase the legibility of their deservedness. Thus responsibilisation, a technology associated with state abandonment of welfare subjects, was used by workers as a strategy to enable meaningful care in the context of the intense constraints of their role.

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(De)subjectivation of Workers in the Marketplace’s Warehouse Space: Digital Dictate or an Industrial “Bazaar”?

Starovoytenko

2022

Inter

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Despite the enormous amounts of human resources engaged in warehousing, warehouse labor remains virtually invisible to the public, both among consumers and in the academia. A lot of research is dedicated to the transformation of labor relations within platform economy, including precarity and “uberization” of labor, as well as digital technology-mediated surveillance and control over employees during working hours. At the other “pole” are numerous studies on the informal (“garage”) economy. This article is based on a 1.5-month ethnography I conducted in the summer of 2021 in the warehouse complex of a prominent Russian marketplace. Engaging in a dialogue with both “poles” mentioned, my observations in the warehouse suggest the simultaneous coexistence of two realities. The first deals with various forms of digital control of employees, ranging from access to the workspace to the regulation of output and eventual earnings. The second is predominantly informal and is based on the deliberate restriction of workers' access to “rare” resources (“work”) and information (“details”). Here I attempt to show the complex, at times conflicting interaction of formal and informal components of warehouse labor, combining the neo-Marxist conceptual apparatus with the metaphor of C. Geertz's “bazaar economy”.

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Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

Making crafting visible while rendering labor invisible on the Etsy platform

Making crafting visible while rendering labor invisible on the Etsy platform

Compassionate responsibilisation in a neoliberal paternalistic homelessness system: ‘They’re not just numbers to me, I do actually care’

(De)subjectivation of Workers in the Marketplace’s Warehouse Space: Digital Dictate or an Industrial “Bazaar”?

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