When something does go wrong, Uber drivers can’t tell the boss or a co-worker. They can call or write to “community support,” but the results can be enraging. Cecily McCall, an African-American driver from Pompano Beach, Fla., told me that a passenger once called her “dumb” and “stupid,” using a racial epithet, so she ended the trip early. She wrote to a support rep to explain why and got what seemed like a robotic response: “We’re sorry to hear about this. We appreciate you taking the time to contact us and share details.”

As a group of Uber drivers attempted to enter @Uber HQ to deliver 3k petition signatures calling on the company to change its unfair deactivation policies, security grabbed one of the drivers and threw him to the ground.

While critics use the language of the workplace to describe the treatment of drivers, the language of technology can deflect such concerns. When payments for trips are missing, labor advocates might call it wage theft, but Uber says it’s a glitch. When Uber charges passengers what it predicts they are willing to pay based on their route rather than standard rates, economists may call it price discrimination, but Uber explains it as an innovation in artificial intelligence....

Other tools, like the rating system, serve as automatic enforcers of the nudges made by algorithmic managers. In certain services on Uber’s platform, if drivers fall below 4.6 stars on a 5-star rating system, they may be “deactivated” — never “fired.” So some drivers tolerate bad passenger behavior rather than risk losing their livelihoods because of retaliatory reviews.

"When decolonial perspectives ground your research, they completely transform questions, methods, analyses, modes of representation, proposed interventions, and political commitments. A thread...

Decolonial perspectives transform research questions by centering longstanding power relations in analyses of contemporary challenges, including racial inequity, poverty, labor exploitation, misogyny, heteronormativity, transphobia, trauma, migration, & ecological instability.

A normative research question vs. one framed from a decolonial perspective: What are the causes of educational achievement gaps? vs. How can “achievement gaps” be understood in relation to modes of accumulation & dispossession mainstream schools were designed to facilitate?

Methodologically, decolonial perspectives challenge positivist approaches to data collection that legitimate colonially constituted categories, boundaries, modes of governance, ways of knowing, and societal hierarchies.

As compared to normative Western scholarly methodologies, approaches informed by decolonial perspectives include collaborating with members of colonially marginalized communities as co-theorists to analyze & respond to the historically constituted challenges they face.

Whereas normative analytical logics narrowly frame what counts as legitimate evidence to make particular kinds of claims, decolonial analyses question conceptions of truth that have parsed the world in service of toxic modes of accumulation & dispossession.

While an analysis that presumes the legitimacy of normative scientific truth might seek to use evidence to disprove racial inferiority, a decolonial approach rejects such debates, instead investing in imagining and enacting forms of racial redress and reparation.

Whereas normative scholarly work adheres to rigidly defined representational genres & is often restricted to paywalled journals, decolonial approaches seek to fashion new modes of representation & strategies/platforms for circulation that redefine & redistribute knowledge.

Canonical anthropological uses of “thick description” often result in exoticizing & pathologizing representations of race, gender, & class; decolonial approaches enact a politics of refusal, challenging the demand for ethnographic disclosure, particularly in Indigenous contexts.

Normative scholarship often proposes interventions that focus on modifying individual behaviors rather than transforming institutions; decolonial scholarship challenges the fundamental legitimacy of prevailing societal structures that have led to the misdiagnosis of problems.

Normative scholarship might propose interventions encouraging civic participation to strengthen US institutions in the face of perceived threats to democracy; decolonial scholarship seeks to reimagine governance because the US never was nor could ever be a legitimate democracy.

Normative scholarship often seeks to establish objective facts & eschews explicit political commitments, thereby explicitly committing to political reproduction; decolonial scholarship owns its politics & engages in knowledge production to imagine & enact sustainable worlds.

Normative scholarship might seek to document, analyze, & even revitalize Indigenous languages; decolonial scholarship engages in Indigenous language revitalization as part of broader political struggles over sovereignty, historical trauma, dispossession, & sustainable ecologies.

In short, whereas normative scholarship invites you to accept, reproduce, or slightly modify the existing world, decolonial scholarship insists that otherwise worlds have always existed & demands a radical reimagining of possible pasts, presents, & futures."

Vox, 10/11/2018

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Shortage of Skilled Labor Over Next 7 Years ……. #labor …… #work …… #skills ……. #career…….…

via Vox - All https://www.vox.com/

ICYMI <https://platformlabor.net/notes/reflections-on-a-food-delivery-workshop-that-almost-did-not-happen>

If you walk past Crave Fishbar on a weekday afternoon, you might make the mistake of thinking it’s open for lunch. The restaurant, located on New York City’s Upper West Side, certainly looks busy enough. via Pocket

The team decided to train the system on the previous 10 years of resumes sent to Amazon, which were mostly men.
When the algorithm reached its conclusions for what would be good and what would be bad in an applicant, it mirrored the hiring biases towards men that Amazon had shown in the past.

Honestly, I don't think this algorithm is bad.
It successfully reflected the bias of the organization.
While this is useless as a predictive tool, it's actually profoundly important as an auditing tool.

Working within a holacracy feels unnatural, compared to the way most companies are run. It involves forgoing one’s job title, taking complete ownership of one’s career development, and engaging with all colleagues as equals—transcending what Robertson views as outdated paradigms of power. Indeed, holacracy is designed to completely upend traditional hierarchy and replace it with a new structure that decentralizes power, essentially making everyone a CEO.

There's a lot to unpack here.
"unnatural" - as if the capital-management-labor hierarchy is found in biomes and geologic strata.
"forgoing [a] job title" - Which is often literal nonsense to begin with.
"making everyone a ceo" - which is basically the antithesis of what the CEO's role is.