Title
The Tools of Management: Adapting Historical Union Tactics to Platform-Mediated Labor
Abstract
At the same time that workers' rights are generally declining in the United States (US), workplace computing systems gather more data about workers and their activities than ever before. The rise of large scale labor analytics raises questions about how and whether workers could use such data to advocate for their own goals. Here, we analyze the historical development of workplace technology design methods in CSCW to show how mid-20th century labor responses to scientific management can inform directions in contemporary digital labor advocacy. First, we demonstrate how specific methodological tendencies from industrial scientific management were adapted to work in CSCW, and then subsequently altered in crowd work and social computing research to more closely resemble industrial approaches. Next, we show how three tactics used by labor unions to strategically engage with industrial scientific management in the mid-20th century can inform data-driven worker advocacy in platform-mediated work. Finally, we discuss how this history shapes our understanding of worker participation and the implications of using worker data for contemporary advocacy goals.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3359310
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Keywords
Field
DocType
crowdwork, industrial engineering, labor history, worker advocacy, workplace technology
Knowledge management,Business
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
3
CSCW
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vera Khovanskaya1837.44
Lynn Dombrowski2546.41
Jeffrey Rzeszotarski3143.78
Phoebe Sengers42274180.24