DC LABORFEST
Celebrating Labor Arts
Organized and presented by the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, the DC LaborFest features a wide-ranging selection of art about work, workers and workers’ issues.
CHESAPEAKE CLUW NON-TRADITIONAL TRADES FASHION SHOW LUNCHEON: Sun, May 19, 2p (JUST ADDED!) Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass: Sun, May 12, 1pm – 3pm LABOR NIGHT AT D.C. UNITED: Sun, May 12, 7p TAKOMA TRIVIA: THE LABOR EDITION: Mon, May 20, 7:30p See below for detailed event write-ups and links to purchase tickets or RSVP. |
Sun, May 12, 1pm – 3pm
Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008 In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed, a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work. Click here for details Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none. There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in—and all too often overwork and underpay—a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can’t get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Gray and Suri also show how ghost workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity—rather than misery—for those who do it. About the Authors MARY L. GRAY is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She is also Associate Professor of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in the Media School, Anthropology, and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary draws on anthropology, gender studies, and media theory to understand how technology access, material conditions, and everyday uses of media transform people’s lives. SIDDHARTH SURI is a computational social scientist whose research interests lie at the intersection of computer science, behavioral economics and crowdsourcing. His early work analyzed the relationship between network topology and human behavior. Since then he has become one of the leaders in designing, building, and conducting “virtual lab” experiments using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Most recently, he has been studying the behavior and dynamics of the crowd workers themselves. |