The Invisible Labour Loops Project as Portal—Framing Mother Labour through Animation

Crowdsourcing markets provide workers with a centralized place to find paid work. What may not be obvious at first glance is that, in addition to the work they do for pay, crowd workers also have to shoulder a variety of unpaid invisible labor in these markets, which ultimately reduces workers' hourly wages. Invisible labor includes finding good tasks, messaging requesters, or managing payments. However, we currently know little about how much time crowd workers actually spend on invisible labor or how much it costs them economically. To ensure a fair and equitable future for crowd work, we need to be certain that workers are being paid fairly for all of the work they do. In this paper, we conduct a field study to quantify the invisible labor in crowd work. We build a plugin to record the amount of time that 100 workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk dedicate to invisible labor while completing 40,903 tasks. If we ignore the time workers spent on invisible labor, workers' median hourly wage was $3.76. But, we estimated that crowd workers in our study spent 33% of their time daily on invisible labor, dropping their median hourly wage to $2.83. We found that the invisible labor differentially impacts workers depending on their skill level and workers' demographics. The invisible labor category that took the most time and that was also the most common revolved around workers having to manage their payments. The second most time-consuming invisible labor category involved hyper-vigilance, where workers vigilantly watched over requesters' profiles for newly posted work or vigilantly searched for labor. We hope that through our paper, the invisible labor in crowdsourcing becomes more visible, and our results help to reveal the larger implications of the continuing invisibility of labor in crowdsourcing.

Invisible labour exists within all forms of work. In looking to the future of work (FoW), this article reviews the literature on two separate examples; digital work and the 4IR, to uncover invisible labour within these futures. The focus of this article remains on paid work but recognises that ‘employed’ does not correlate with visible. In contributing to feminist labour geography, this review aims to collate, regroup and evaluate the literature on the FoW in a way which recognises ‘invisible labourers’ through redefining ‘work’ and expanding our perception of the ‘workplace’. It does so in three parts. First, feminist labour geography literature is reviewed to situate the article within its call to broaden the definition of ‘work’. Second, the review addresses digital work and the gig economy, to establish which labourers are receiving the most current academic attention and are, therefore, visible. Feminist literature on work and labourers within unrecognised economic spaces is explored through the example of digital sex work to draw on the concept of ‘invisible labour’ in digital FoW. Third, literature on technologies of the 4IR and labour will be reviewed, with particular reference to the global north bias in FoW studies. Finally, the review will apply the regrouping of the literature to the impending wave of automation in the global garment industry. The article identifies a risk of further invisibalising already precarious and marginalised garment workers and the FoW narrative moves beyond low‐skill labour. Highlighting the wider impacts on the FoW, beyond technology itself, this article calls for the labour geography literature to recognise the shift in our conception of ‘industry’ and women's experience of work within it to encompass invisible labourers' roles which are created, mediated and maintained by new technologies.

Ecology and Collaboration

We examined faculty perceptions of invisible labor at a large, urban, multi-campus community college. Semi-structured interviews with 16 faculty of various ranks, ages, gender, disciplines, and minority statuses were conducted and then later transcribed using NVivo. Open coding and constant comparison revealed 19 concepts, which were further grouped into five categories: academic, administrative, engagement, self-presentation, and adjunct versus full time. Secondary research questions examined the effort needed for invisible labor, what made labor invisible, and if demographic factors played a role in invisible labor. Participants highlighted time and volume of work as factors for invisible labor. Reasons for invisibility included location, lack of understanding, and unacknowledged labor. Faculty status was the only demographic factor identified by the participants as affecting invisible labor.

The hidden or overlooked nature of many of educators' professional activities complicates the already difficult task of supporting educators' labour—in both K‐12 and higher education settings. These efforts can be understood as types of invisible labour . Following PRISMA standards, we conducted a systematic literature review to answer a single research question: How have scholars framed educators' professional activities in terms of invisible labour? This systematic review searched 10 educational databases and identified 16 peer‐reviewed journal articles spanning 2011–2021. From thematic analysis of these studies, we developed a model of five types of invisibility that intersect and mask educators' professional efforts: background, care, precarious, identity and remote labour. The review also showed several overall themes related to educators' invisible labour, which we discuss in connection to the literature: effort is often semivisible, invisibility is subjective, effort by marginalised educators is often overlooked, labour in unexpected places often means effort is overlooked, and there are layers of factors masking effort. We then discuss implications for practice, starting with five invisible labour questions to prompt reflection, then how to apply invisible labour as an improvement lens for identifying needs, allocating resources, analysing jobs and tasks, and evaluating performance.

‘Invisible labour’ refers to forms of work that are not (fully) recognised as work – financially and/or symbolically. This chapter reflects on an ongoing project that aims to understand the kinds of invisible labour performed within academia and its impact on people who are tasked with performing it more than others. Creating an app that enabled academics to record their invisible work could, we hoped, help to address a hermeneutical injustice that obscures the status of these things as work. This project came with conceptual, methodological and political tensions, stemming in large part from how we were using time – and more specifically clock time – as our method. Reflecting on these tensions, we chart our attempts to enrich our ways of tracking labour, both through considering alternative notions of time as well as non-temporal methods. We conclude with a qualified defence of clock time; used as one method among many for capturing invisible labour, it can play an important role – particularly where it enables a playful subversion of the university’s own audit-culture.

ABSTRACTHigher education in South Africa faces the challenge and complexities of expanding to include a Black (Indian, Coloured and African) majority that was previously denied access. At the same time, global capitalism is entrenching neoliberal cultures, forcing institutions of higher education to restructure their academic labour processes into a quantifiable “assembly line”, producing more outputs with fewer resources. In addition to typical research responsibilities that form part of standard academic labour, most administrative tasks have also been delegated to teaching faculty members. Exploring the biographical experiences of the authors, this paper argues that neoliberalism and corporatization of the university results in the performance of “invisible labour” (Wichroski, M.A. 1994. “The secretary: invisible labour in the work world of women”. Human Organisation, 53(1): 33–41) by black women academics. This form of labour is unrewarded. Beyond the invisible expectations of being “role models” to students and peers, Black African women academics feel morally pressured to engage in “care work”, a role that is stereotypically associated with their social and cultural backgrounds. Similar to domestic roles historically associated with working-class Black African women in South Africa, this form of invisible labour is not recognized and is thus unpaid. It is not captured by the university performance metric systems, and therefore has no significant value for academic promotion or prestigious university awards. This has consequences for the occupational structure of South African universities, contributing to the perpetual relegation of Black African women to the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. Similar to the apartheid era, Black African women are thus excluded from structures of power and influence, remaining the academic housekeepers—forced to care generously with few resources or reward.

PurposeThe purpose of the study was to determine, first, whether both numeric diversity and racial climate impacted the psychological well-being and workplace experiences of faculty of color (FOC). But the authors also considered whether there was an “additive” effect when both diversity factors existed at the same time.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used surveys of academics from various backgrounds in multiple US regions to test the effects of numeric diversity and racial climate on three dependent variables – invisible labor, stress from discrimination and dissatisfaction with co-workers. For the purposes of the study, FOC were defined as black, Latinx and Asian faculty.FindingsThe results showed significant support for the authors' prediction that there was more stress from discrimination, invisible labor, and co-worker dissatisfaction against FOC in institutions with low numeric diversity and poor racial climate compared with institutions with high numeric diversity and a positive racial climate. They also found that negative impacts were smaller in institutions with both high numeric diversity and a positive racial climate, compared to institutions with high numeric diversity, but a poor racial climate. However, similar results were not found for institutions with low numeric diversity and positive racial climate.Originality/valueThe authors concluded that the findings showed that “diversity climate may be the primary driver of mitigating psychological disparities between FOC and white faculty”. They said that education officials should take action to construct a positive racial climate, but neither should they ignore numeric representation.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the market that white mothers created for enslaved wet nurses, the intimate labor that they performed in southern households, and the ways that this market intersected with slave marketplaces in the antebellum era. It argues that white mothers’ desires and demands for enslaved wet nurses transformed bondwomen’s ability to suckle into a largely invisible, yet skilled form of labor, and created a niche sector of the slave market. In these ways, white mothers were crucial to the commodification of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies, their breast milk, and the nutritive and maternal care they provided to white children.

This article describes a visual ethnographic intervention at a New York City public school. The intervention and the images that resulted—a series of life-size red wax rubbings on paper—work in relation to visual discourses and dynamics of contemporary school accountability. In the article, the author situates the images and image-making in the context of her broader multimodal qualitative study on teachers’ invisible labor in urban schools. The author makes sense of this visual ethnographic intervention through a series of three conceptual dyads: witnessing/ evidence; positionality/ art; and intimacy/ “tactile epistemology,” (Marks 2000).

While the progress of women in the sport industry has become more visible, there is still significant gender inequity. Extending the sport organizational literature, we argue that the unpaid, invisible, and emotional labor of women, especially those holding diverse social identities, is significantly contributing to gender inequity at the organizational level. In broader sport research, the micro, everyday experiences of women stakeholders and the connection to macro societal structures and ideologies have provided foundational insight to build upon. However, there is a need for research to focus on the meso-level organizational practices, policies, designs, structures, and culture to create real change. Therefore, we present a conceptual paper, focused on a meso-level analysis and the invisible labors that women stakeholders engage in, to extend existing work and provide a pathway for further investigation into gender inequity in sport.

The staff members from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago who oversaw the excavations at Megiddo relied upon skilled Egyptian workmen (Quftis) as well as local labourers during their excavations from 1925–1939. However, although there were more than fifty of these Egyptian workmen in all, only a few are mentioned in the preliminary and final publications produced by the project. They are what Stephen Quirke has called ‘hidden hands’ on excavations; an example of ‘invisible labor’, as discussed by anthropologists and sociologists. In any effort to reconstruct the lives and labours of these men, we are now at the mercy of what can be found in various archival sources. Data must be gleaned from, for example, requests for half-price railway vouchers for travel between Kantara and Haifa for specific workmen each season; field diary entries; black and white photographs; and occasional mentions in budgets or in passing within letters sent back and forth between Megiddo and Chicago. Still, from this fragmentary information, we can piece together a picture of these unsung members of the expedition, some of whom were present at Megiddo for more seasons than the ever-rotating members of the Chicago staff themselves.

Tasks on crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk often request workers' personal information, raising privacy risks that may be exacerbated by requester-worker power dynamics. We interviewed 14 workers to understand how they navigate these risks. We found that Turkers' decisions to provide personal information during tasks were based on evaluations of the pay rate, the requester, the purpose, and the perceived sensitivity of the request. Participants also engaged in multiple privacy-protective behaviors, such as abandoning tasks or providing inaccurate data, though there were costs associated with these behaviors, such as wasted time and risk of rejection. Finally, their privacy concerns and practices evolved as they learned about both the platform and worker-designed tools and forums. These findings deepen our understanding of both privacy decision-making and invisible labor in paid crowdsourcing, and emphasize a general need to understand how privacy stances change over time.

This research combines the frameworks of campus climate and invisible labor to investigate th eannual Southeast Asian (SEA) Admit Weekend programat the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). This research explores campus diversity work by asking how the SEA Admit Weekend program contributes to UCLA’s campus diversity and how UCLA as an institution continues to overlook SEA student diversity work. By utilizing campus climate, invisible labor, and interviews with UCLA students and staff affiliated with the SEA Admit program, this research uncovers the sociopolitical and cultural implications of student diversity work.The findings show that student diversity work, as demonstrated by the SEA Admit program, dismantles institutionalized racism, while UCLA as an institution overlooks the imposed student labor that this diversity work necessitates. As a result, SEA students face higher levels of academic stress, time constraints, and economic hardship. This research provides suggestions for how universities can further work with under represented student groups on campus to meet diversity goals.

Social workers have a prominent role in responding to cancer patients’ mental health needs. Given the risk of mental health distress in cancer patients, and given that social workers are responsible for responding to these needs, the purpose of this study was to explore how social workers describe their role in responding to mental health distress and suicidality in people with cancer. The Grounded Theory method of data collection and analysis was used. Eighteen social workers were recruited and interviewed. Social workers saw themselves and acted as an interprofessional hub for their patients. This approach was based on the values of holistic care, multiple treatment modalities, interpersonal consultation, and continuity of care. From this standpoint, social workers offered their patients (and at times, their families) comprehensive services providing emotional, behavioral and practical support within the hospital setting, but also outside of it in the patient’s communities. Consideration should be paid to promote systemic changes to acknowledge and compensate oncology socials workers’ invisible labor that includes both emotional carryover and continuous engagement in their role as liaison and intermediaries for their patients.