Working for the Platform: How Platforms Commodify and Control the Labour Relationship

This paper takes you beyond the log in screen and into the world of platform mediated digital labour. Based on an 18-month ethnography of working and hiring workers on three online labour platforms, this paper engages with the minute design features and digital tools that conditions both worker and client users to align with the platform’s vision of the labour relationship. In this paper I argue that both the worker and the client are subordinated by the platform’s commercial drive for accumulation, managing both parties in the labour relationship as workers that produce the labour relationship as the commodity for sale. Consequently, I argue that this exploitation becomes stacked on top of the existing exploitation between worker and employer in the labour relationship, introducing new dynamics of exploitation and inequality to the experience of work. Through screenshots of the platform interface and rich analytical descriptions, this paper make visible into these often-hidden labour relationships.

Bio

Monique McKenzie is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Her research interests are centred on the new and emerging methods through which individuals build their incomes and wealth. She has studied precarious work contracts including creative freelancing and platform work, and currently the role of assets in building wealth in the 21st century. She has published work on the platform economy, precarious labour and the asset economy.

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