And as the Strangefolk mined deeper and deeper into the mountain,
holes began to appear, bringing with them a cold and bitter wind
that chilled the very soul of the Monkey
Gorillaz feat. Dennis Hopper, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head
Despite the claims of immateriality of the “economies of knowledge” (10.9), most workers in the technology sector—as we saw in the case of Foxconn—are far from being safe from sweatshop working conditions. This is a legacy that the technology sector received from the outsourcing policies of the manufacturing sector that we studied in chapter 8. Amazon for example, as a logistics company, makes use of supposedly “pre-digital” employment policies. Nick Srnicek in this regard:
Amazon has a notoriously low-paid workforce of warehouse workers who are subject to incredibly comprehensive systems of surveillance and control. These firms simply continue the secular trend of outsourcing low-skill workers while retaining a core of well-paid high-skill labourers.1
This continuity between the manufacturing and technology sectors is taken to the extreme by business models such as Uber, “which relies on a virtually asset-less form to generate profits.”2 This situation was encouraged by the pauperization of the global middle class after 2008, which gave this business model a workforce desperate to find any kind of employment (8.20). However, in recent years the outsourcing Srnicek talks about (a delocalization of labor) has not been tied to geography, and the threshold nature of digital networks has allowed for the creation of a localized delocalization, that is, the exploitation of the gig economy for the outsourcing of delivery services, a move that has led to the creation of virtual maquilas—temporary pools of freelance workers that lack benefits—encompassing a good part of the middle (and lower) class on a global scale. According to Srnicek, “class action calculations estimate that Uber would owe its drivers, if they were employees, $852 million [dollars].”3
The case of Rappi, a Colombian startup that offers delivery services, is quite revealing: according to a survey by the Labor Observatory of the Universidad del Rosario, 57% of rappitenderos (the “brand name” of the firm’s workers) are Venezuelans between 18 and 35 years old, of whom 91.2% are not affiliated to the national labor risk system, which means that they do not pay health and pension contributions and lack social benefits. More than half of the workers of a tech startup could easily fall into the category of refugees; the latest form of Agamben’s definition of camp (what happens whenever the exception becomes the rule) is virtual. On the other hand, this business model represents a gap in the health and pension system that could prove problematic in the medium and long term for the future of pensions in a country like Colombia and, in fact, probably for any developed country as well. The first world catching up with the third.
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