Hidden Labor Research Articles

When Being a Data Annotator Was Not Yet a Job: The Laboratory Origins of Dispersible Labor in Computer Vision Research

Drawing on a comparative case study of four landmark image datasets that led up to the creation of a new job—data annotators—I examine the laboratory origins of dispersible labor in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The rise of large-scale datasets cannot be attributed solely to gig platforms that supply already dispersed labor. To transform data annotation from an in-laboratory, expert task to a microtask that can be performed by data annotators without scientific expertise, scientists introduced into and consolidated through the scientific literature and laboratory life of AI research new organizational repertoires of bureaucratic, centralized, algorithmic, and corporate control that each made data annotator’s work more dispersible. By bringing back the organization and control of scientific labor as a missing link between the technical and social dimensions of AI, this study has implications for research on hidden labor, algorithmic biases, and the future of knowledge work.

Social reproduction: the sidelined aspect in gender and agricultural research

IntroductionThis study explores women’s agribusiness by employing feminist theories to gain an understanding of the gender dimension of business beyond economic value, including non-material and non-market aspects associated with social reproduction.MethodsWe conducted fieldwork between July and October 2021 in Vietnam through in-depth interviews with 16 women entrepreneurs in towns on the border with China, who engage in livestock-trading, and in the Central Highlands, who engage in domestic and international horticultural trade.ResultsOur findings confirm that women entrepreneurs manage their business, family, and family relations together as one consolidated commitment in flexible, informal, and creative ways. Research focusing solely on economic analyses obscures not only women’s hidden labor and time in the household that enable men to dominate agribusiness, but also women’s resistance to male-privileged agribusiness.DiscussionPositioning social reproduction at the center of women’s economic activities enables researchers to have a full picture of how male-privileged agri-food systems are sustained, which is the first step towards disrupting existing inequalities in agri-food systems.

Professor-in-Training: Status Control of the Teaching Assistant

I examine the role of apprenticeship status in controlling the labor of unionized graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). In her book Coerced, Erin Hatton identifies status as a basis of labor coercion—particularly in nontraditional labor regimes—in which managers control workers’ access to status-based rights, rewards, and punishments. I expand Hatton's concept of status coercion to status control and distinguish between two types: despotic, in which status coercion prevails, and hegemonic, in which status consent prevails. I argue that status control of TAs is hegemonic, relying on their investment in a system of apprenticeship in which course instructors are a source of professional advancement, opportunity, and support outside of the TA job. I draw on autoethnographic fieldwork to analyze one expression of TA control, participatory management. In this model, the faculty instructor invites TAs to collaborate on course design and encourages routine discussion of teaching strategies, in which hidden labor is made regulable through “confession”. Identification with the instructor limits TA autonomy by disrupting alliances between TAs, and between TAs and students. I conclude by sketching variations in TA management and by discussing status control as a broader mechanism of extraction in the contemporary university.

Abstract P4-02-27: Preliminary Attainability Assessment of Real-World Data for Answering Clinical Questions about Breast Cancer Brain Metastases

Abstract Background Brain metastases is one of breast cancer’s leading causes of death, and the incidence is increasing with advances in diagnosis and treatment techniques. Nevertheless, these patients have fewer opportunities to participate in prospective randomized clinical trials because of the design challenges of increasing target population heterogeneity or differentiating the definition of endpoints and how the endpoints are evaluated. Real-world data has the potential that reaches the information at a blinded area of RCT approaches. In recent years, observational studies using real-world data have gotten attention for their capability to enhance an understanding of hard-to-reach RCT approaches. However, the yet incomplete gold standard of the study protocol and the unpredictable ’hidden labor’ of secondary use of clinical data become barriers to clinical researchers. In the study, we demonstrate data attainability assessment focused on clinicians’ clinical unmet needs in breast cancer brain metastases (BCBM) as a preliminary step of the observational study for screening study feasibility on a certain data source. Methods A breast cancer registry based on the clinical data warehouse (CDW) of Samsung Medical Center has been used as the data source (N=45,219, up to 31 Dec 2021). A total of 5 clinical questions (CQ) were presented as the result of the interview of two breast cancer experts about BCBM for the study (Table 1). Additionally, we conducted an attainability assessment for the population size and core variables constrained by a clinical question and a survey of 7 breast cancer clinicians for evaluation of the recognized clinical significance and research methods’ suitability for each CQ. A working group was formed for data attainability tests withal a person with experience in clinical research for at least several years across interdisciplinary areas, including clinical expertise, medical informatics, and epidemiology. For the first step, we declare the operational definition for the study population and core variables in which the research question is inherent conceptually. And appropriate data fields and value sets are figured out from the data set. Data attainability is examined via RWD extraction on the population size and availability of core variables. Result The collected five CQs were mostly about the relationship between brain metastases, systemic metastases, and systemic treatments. Other CQs were related to the relationship between brain metastases incidence and the type of neoadjuvant treatment or patients’ described symptoms. Assessment of the importance of clinical questions aligned well, especially for the questions with higher scores. (r=- · 98) For CQ E, filtered out not to fit the SMC BCR dataset at the early stage of the data attainability screening process due to lack of explicit data field or semantically related value sets for one of the core variables, ‘neurological symptom.’ For CQ A, B, and D, we could confirm enough population size and dataset for conducting the study, but additional logical reconstruction of data elements had needed. For example, we used the ‘clinical subtype’ variable, which is provided from SMC BCR, as pre-processed feature variable using an expert-knowledge-based algorithm. For CQ C, we were able to obtain pertinent data for the study only with direct data field match and explicit code set definition. Conclusion To effectively use CDW, the variables have to be interpreted and defined in a clinically meaningful way with the cooperation of clinicians and data science experts. For observational studies based on RWD, understanding the data source contents and clarifying the research question enough to translate to the data level is essential. The step-by-step protocol presented in the study could be applied to the other clinical researcher using RWD at preliminary feasibility screening. Table 1. List of clinical questions from expert interviews Citation Format: Min-Jeong Kim, Hyo Jung Kim, Danbee Kang, Hee Kyung Ahn, Soo-Yong Shin, Seri Park, Juhee Cho, Yeon Hee Park. Preliminary Attainability Assessment of Real-World Data for Answering Clinical Questions about Breast Cancer Brain Metastases [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2022 Dec 6-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(5 Suppl):Abstract nr P4-02-27.

Precarious digital mothering: creativity, entrepreneurship and hidden labor within digital foodscapes

ABSTRACT Digital foodscapes not only transform our everyday relationships with food but offer creative and entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper works to expand the Anglo-American focus of digital foodscapes scholarship in analysis of Japanese Instagram food influencers and their relationship to gendered social reproduction. Japan’s most prominent influencers are mothers documenting the bentos (boxed lunches) they prepare for their children, a meal suffused with socio-cultural meaning about good food and good mothering. I develop the concept of precarious digital mothering to examine the hidden, gendered labor created and magnified through Instagram bento accounts. I argue that the creative and entrepreneurial opportunities offered to women though Instagram are inseparable from the cultural meaning of bento as a judgment on good mothering and create a bind where digital success cannot occur without taking on additional domestic food work. Precarity is created both for the mothers who take on unpaid and unrecognized labor in the pursuit of Instagram success, and those who consume their content and the problematic narratives of food and motherhood it normalizes in its idealized and mediated performance.

The coloniality of labor: Migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in an Australian deindustrializing city

AbstractThis paper explores migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in Newcastle, a deindustrializing Australian city. Data for this paper were drawn from interviews conducted with young people who migrated to Australia as temporary and permanent residents. Drawing on concepts of coloniality, racialization, bodywork, and hidden labor, this paper demonstrates how, when looking for work, participants' names get attached to their racialized bodies—a situation which deems them as suitable or not for specific kinds of work. Their strategies of finding work differ according to their migration status; that is, temporary residents draw on their personal networks, whereas some permanent residents with full citizenship rights rely on social welfare support services to find work. However, irrespective of the different strategies used to find work, they all end up doing jobs that they described as “work which others do not wish to do.” I argue that these experiences re‐articulate the coloniality of labor because, as workers in these jobs, they play a crucial role in the economic transformation taking place in the city due to deindustrialization. This is not merely because they form part of the workforce responsible for working in unwanted jobs, but because they are also consumers of Newcastle's emerging welfare support and educational services sectors. The paper contributes to an understanding of how race shapes the labor market experiences of racialized youth in deindustrializing labor markets.

In/Visibility in Social Media Work: The Hidden Labor Behind the Brands

Despite the staggering uptick in social media employment over the last decade, this nascent category of cultural labor remains comparatively under-theorized. In this article, we contend that social media work is configured by a visibility paradox: While workers are tasked with elevating the presence—or <em>visibility</em>—of their employers’ brands across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more, their identities, and much of their labor, remain <em>hidden </em>behind branded social media accounts. To illuminate how this ostensible paradox impacts laborers’ conditions and experiences of work, we present data from in-depth interviews with more than 40 social media professionals. Their accounts make clear that social media work is not just materially concealed, but rendered socially invisible through its lack of crediting, marginal status, and incessant demands for un/under-compensated emotional labor. This patterned devaluation of social media employment can, we show, be situated along two gender-coded axes that have long structured the value of labor in the media and cultural industries: a) technical‒communication and b) creation‒circulation. After detailing these in/visibility mechanisms, we conclude by addressing the implications of our findings for the politics and subjectivities of work in the digital media economy.

Prestige and Gatekeeping in Postgraduate Journals: The Case of Postgraduate English

Relatively little has been said about the opportunities and challenges of digital, open access publishing as it pertains to postgraduate-led journals catering to postgraduate researchers.This paper draws on the authors’ experiences with Postgraduate English, one of the longest-running, born-digital journals for postgraduate researchers in English studies. It makes the case for the benefit of such publications within the prestige economy and describes the ways in which quality can be assured, challenging those who might see postgraduate publications as further diluting the pool of high-quality research. At the same time, the paper raises critical questions about who really wins in postgraduate publishing. While those who publish and edit can benefit from the prestige indication of these activities, ultimately host institutions may gain more from the relationship via the hidden labour costs behind such activity.

Effective Establishment of Hidden Labor Relations by Judges in Russia from the Perspective of Integrative Legal Understanding

The article analyzes the current labor legislation of the Russian Federation: considers the procedure and conditions for the emergence of labor relations, Рrotection of labor rights of the employee and compliance with the requirements of inadmissibility of abuse of labor rights by the employer when registering labor relations as an optional means, the authors of the article used in combination historical-legal and system-structural methods of cognition of the subject of scientific research.

The Hidden Labor of Civil Rights

From her 2013 directorial debut Gideon’s Army, on the trials of public defenders, to John Lewis: Good Trouble, her 2020 tribute to the late Congressman, Dawn Porter’s documentaries reveal the scope and scale of American injustice while never capitulating to pessimism. Whether focusing attention on the carceral system, abortion access, or voter suppression, her films suggest that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are upheld through the collective efforts of an earnest, anonymous many. In this interview, Porter reflects on the appeal of contradictory characters, her objective to “disappear” as a documentarian, and the challenges of completing a film during an international pandemic.

Negotiating sex work and client interactions in the context of a fentanyl-related overdose epidemic

Despite awareness of the role of drug use in shaping sex worker/client interactions, these dynamics remain poorly understood in the context of illicit fentanyl-driven overdose epidemics. This study examined sex workers’ experiences negotiating client interactions amidst a toxic drug supply in Vancouver, Canada. Findings draw from two ethnographic studies. The first, conducted between December 2016 and May 2017, examined the rapid implementation of several low-threshold supervised consumption sites. The second investigated experiences of women accessing a women-only site from May 2017 to June 2018. Data included 200 hours of fieldwork and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 34 street-based sex workers who use illicit drugs. Data were analysed thematically with attention to the risk environment. Participants described providing harm reduction services to clients as a means to reduce overdose-related risks, thus increasing sex workers’ hidden labour. Participants, comments regarding criminalisation and stigma surrounding drug use and sex work indicated a reticence to report overdoses, thereby potentially increasing the risks of overdose-related harms, including death. There is an urgent need for sex worker-led overdose prevention strategies that prioritise health and safety of sex workers and their clients with specific attention to how the criminalisation of particular drugs, practices and people contributes to overdose-related risks.

Hidden labour in funeral directing: providing care to ‘difficult’ dead bodies

ABSTRACT This article uses the case study of Ian Brady to examine the previously hidden forms of labour that funeral directors do in managing the remains of particularly controversial criminals. Specifically, we extend the concept of the ‘difficult dead’, which we use to describe those that have offended both legal and moral codes by defiling particularly vulnerable victims in life. This offending makes their remains ‘dirty’ and difficult to classify among other remains. They must be kept separate and controlled as an ‘other’ as they risk contaminating the public. With this in mind, the article argues that funeral directors conduct extra, hidden forms of labour in navigating the risk of becoming contaminated by the dirt attached to the remains of the difficult dead. We make three contributions. First, we drive forward the valuable intersection between criminology and death studies, which has overlooked the ramifications that ‘difficult’ dead bodies have on the labour of death professionals. Second, we highlight some of the limits in current funerary codes of practice. Third, we generate a starting point for a discussion on the labour of funeral directors when attempting to care for the remains of difficult offenders.

Скрытые трудовые правоотношения: актуальные проблемы правотворчества и правоприменения

The article analyzes the positions of experts in the field of labor law regarding the nature and types of hidden labor relations from the positions of positivism and the scientifically based concept of integrative law understanding. The author criticizes the conclusions of experts based on a positivist legal understanding according to which an employment relationship arises on the basis of the reclassification of a civil contract into an employment contract or a civil relationship into an employment relationship. Based on the analysis of labor law norms, law enforcement practice in labor disputes and scientific points of view of experts in the field of labor law, which is based on a scientifically based concept of integrative law understanding, the author comes to the conclusion that hidden labor relations are a type of labor relations, have signs of labor relations, are common in the judicial practice of labor disputes and are the most urgent problem of Russian labor law. The author analyzes two modern types of hidden labor relations from the position of a scientifically based concept of integrative law understanding: the conclusion of civil contracts instead of labor contracts and the actual admission of an employee to work by the employer or with the knowledge or on behalf of the employer or its authorized representative in the case when the labor contract was not properly executed, within three days and later after the actual admission of the employee to work. The author analyzes the ways of protection of labor rights and legal interests in the field of labor from the position of a scientifically grounded concept of integrative law understanding and formulates law-making proposals for changing the norms of labor law.

The platform as factory: Crowdwork and the hidden labour behind artificial intelligence

This article analyses crowdwork platforms where various forms of digital labour are outsourced to digital workers across the globe. The labour of these workers is, among other things, a crucial component in the production, development and support of artificial intelligence. Crowdwork platforms are an extreme example of new forms of automated measurement, management and control of labour allowing, in turn, for the creation of hyperflexible and highly scalable workforces. Particularly on so-called microtask platforms, work is characterised by decomposition, standardisation, automated management and surveillance, as well as algorithmically organised cooperation between a great number of workers. Analysing these platforms as a paradigmatic example of an emerging digital Taylorism, the article goes on to argue that this allows the platforms to assemble a deeply heterogeneous set of workers while bypassing the need to spatially and subjectively homogenise them. These platforms create a global on-demand workforce, working in their private homes or Internet cafes. As a result, crowdwork taps into labour pools hitherto almost inaccessible to wage labour. The second part of the article investigates this tendency by looking at two sets of workers: women shouldering care responsibilities, who now can work on crowdwork platforms while performing domestic labour, as well as digital workers in the Global South. While there are clear specifics of digital crowdwork, it is also an expression of broader transformations within the world of work, concerning, for example, new forms of algorithmic management just as the return of very old forms of exploitation such as the piece wage.

Erasing, Obfuscating and Teasing out from the Shadows

Three practice-based investigations discussed in this essay—Razing Manzanar II, States of Exception, and Palimpsest—correlate two seemingly separate conditions of invisibility. One is invisibility produced through the making and unmaking of spaces of internment or detention called forth through governmental utterances. The other is hidden labour, specifically related to architecture and built environments. These performance-installations reflect upon government-mandated, and now-demolished, camps and the labour occurring there. The sites of study include World War II-era Japanese American internment camps in the American West, where interned citizens wove camouflage for the US Army, and the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) in Paris used to detain French Algerian labourers during their war of independence. Most traces of the Japanese American camps are now invisible—razed long ago—but are acknowledged by government. The camps situated within the Paris city limits are also invisible, but not simply by erasure; they are obfuscated by government obstacles to locating them, with the CIV’s whereabouts, the city’s largest intentional camp, remaining elusive. While seeking to render sensible, or knowable through the senses, these internment camps, and the camp as a recurrent condition, my practices of installation and performing spatial labour also explore rendering visible otherwise-invisible labour. My labour is architectural, employing the discipline’s instruments, such as drawings and models. These labours take cues from Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture (2017) and age-old techniques of descriptive geometry and shadow projection. Juxtaposing these concerns problematizes both the now-razed architectures that once disappeared whole populations and (hyper/in)visibility (Kunst 2015) of spatial labour. Performed and installed spatial labours of erasing, obfuscating and teasing out of the shadows are the three modes of rendering the invisible visible I examine in this essay, arguing that the performative nature of the explorations is critical to rendering sensible what the artefacts normally conceal.

Performances of Spatial Labor

In this essay, I explore Performances of Spatial Labor—a set of practices that emerge at the intersection of the architectural and performative, the political and (in)visible—as critical actions that not only reveal hidden labor and laborers within processes of “making up” and “making real” works of architecture but also scrutinize questionable disciplinary acts that are themselves fraught with multiple forms of invisibility. Through this practice-as-research, I ask how labor associated with architecture may be reconsidered and revealed through the lens and practices of performance and how this shift in perspective may bring into focus not only the “thing done” but also the act of “doing.”

Diversity work and digital carework in higher education

This essay considers digital carework as a frame for the labor required by diversity initiatives in higher education. It situates diversity work in relation to affective labor and uses digital humanities as a case to explore how the emergence of information and communication technologies magnifies the labor demand. Finally, it considers how this hidden labor has important consequences for scholars who undertake diversity work.

Jarman, M.,Monaghan, L.and Harkin, A.Q. (eds) Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2017. 286pp £33 (pbk) £78 (hbk) ISBN 978‐1439913871

Jarman, M.,Monaghan, L.and Harkin, A.Q. (eds) Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2017. 286pp £33 (pbk) £78 (hbk) ISBN 978‐1439913871

The Empirics of Hidden Labor Force Dynamics in Germany

Abstract The unemployment rate is the core indicator when researchers and policy-makers assess the level of underemployment in an economy. However, accumulating evidence suggests that the unemployment rate is biased and underestimates the true level of underemployment. Closing this gap is especially important because the distortion systematically changes along the business cycle and affects the various subgroups of the population differently. Neglecting these effects when setting up policies might flaw its effectiveness and result in unexpected outcomes. Although the existence of these effects is widely agreed upon only little is known about the magnitude of these effects across various subgroups. Using a highly disaggregated dataset from Germany, this study examines the dynamics in labor force participation that go beyond the unemployment rate. Ample evidence is found that the discouraged and the added worker effect significantly affect particular subgroups in the German labor market. In addition, the discouraged and the added worker effect are generally found to be very symmetric in economic upturns and downturns. Moreover, the labor market reforms in Germany between 2003 and 2005 are found to have reduced the discouraged worker effect on average by 25%, leaving the added worker effect unchanged.

Indeterminate Subjects, Irreducible Worlds

Lodged in an impasse between questions of environmental justice and modes of capitalisation in the green economy, indeterminacy is a vulnerable and porous relation. Pollution activates a potentiality in the organism to be otherwise, to generate certain kinds of tumours, mini-deaths or mutations. Toxicity has an intermediary status that launches a mobility of effects that is often fragmented through sense organs, affirming forms of non-identity in biopolitical relations. Organisms are receptive to such bodily reconfigurations precisely because they are open to the material communication of the world. In contrast to the “hidden labour” of indeterminacy in capitalist modes of capture, this article crafts an analytics of indeterminacy as an interjection in the politics of environments. Through dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico and military bees, two economies of indeterminacy are discussed. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s notion of political economy, I argue that what is required is an economy of radical inequivalence; an excessive engagement with the possibilities of indetermining forces to make fleeting marks.