Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine ‘technomadic’, or ‘technomediated’ mobile work at the levels of labour process and labour market. It investigates the promise of technomadic work at the level of the labour process, analyses the exploitation of technomadic work at the level of the labour market, and presents an instructive case study of the ways in which US workers are collectively struggling against such arrangements through the high-tech workers’ union WashTech, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. The following analysis remedies gaps in the literature on technology and work by examining two overlooked phenomena: firstly the way in which the production of mobile labour markets contradicts the liberatory promise of technomadic labour processes; and secondly, workers’ collective action against exploitation in the mobile, global labour market. By combining methods that interpret meanings within texts about labour processes with an empirical overview of trends regarding the labour market, this essay aims to contribute to the productive conversation between research in political economy and in cultural studies and to an understanding of divergence between the representations and experiences of technomadic work.
Highlights
Movement is pivotal to the development of industrial capitalist production
This paper examines the promise of technomadic work at the level of labour process, analyses the exploitation of technomadic work at the level of labour market, and presents a case study of the ways in which US workers are collectively struggling against such arrangements
As we examine WashTech’s mobilisation around technomadic labour markets, a note of caution on the effectiveness of offshoring is in order
Summary
Movement is pivotal to the development of industrial capitalist production. So are the newest information and communication technologies (ICTs). At the turn of the twentieth century, time and motion studies used photography and later motion picture film to scrutinise workers’ movements and expenditures of energy (Braverman, 1974; Brown, 2005; Burns, 1973; Ferguson, 1997). Management has long been concerned, with using the newest ICTs to reduce labour costs by streamlining the labour process. Labour historians from Karl Marx (1977) to Joan Greenbaum (1995) have critiqued the use of the latest technologies in the labour process to extract more surplus labour from workers. Such critics are concerned with studying the way ‘people of one
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