The crisis of precarious labor in
LIS is ongoing and fundamentally damaging to both workers and the LIS
professions as a whole. Marx’s writings on communication, particularly in the Grundrisse, lay out how he considered it
a form of work[1];
this analysis is often overlooked by other theorists and critics of Marx, but
it is crucial for how we approach a discussion of information work. Marx’s
analysis of communication of work, as well as Lazzarato’s work on immaterial
labor (and his theory’s shortcomings), are both valuable for assessing,
theorizing, and developing solutions to precarious labor and its negative
impacts in LIS both past and present.
Although Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor is useful for discussing information work as it relates to cultural content creation and influence - Lazzarato defines the concept as ‘labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’[2] - it can also serve to obscure the material basis of information work. The physical infrastructures and manufacturers that support information systems are very much material and inextricable from information work, even work that is many steps removed from the mining, shipping, and manufacturing processes that build the tools and networks for communication and information work.[3]
Even within LIS, using unpaid or temporary labor to do basic maintenance tasks can obscure the materiality of information work. As Wildenhaus notes, “On this tendency for maintenance work to be jettisoned onto unpaid interns in archives, archivist Hillel Arnold refers to the ‘complicity [of archivists] in erasing others’ by ‘filling ongoing operational maintenance work with unpaid internships, or part-time and temporary labor.’”[4] Higher-level information work is then left to the professionals in the field, and it not only gives the impression that their work has little materiality but also implies that the physical labor in LIS is of little to no value. There is also an important discussion to be had - although it’s perhaps too lengthy for this piece - about how and to whom the term “professional” is applied in LIS, and how that impacts the discourse around both precarious and stable labor.
Part of
what allows for this obfuscation of labor through unpaid or precarious workers
is the constant drive to innovate within capitalist society in general and LIS
in particular. Marx and Engels write that “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the
relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”[5]
“Innovation” and “flexibility” become the watchwords in late capitalism that
signal shifting labor and social relations. Workers are expected not only to
themselves be innovative, but to accept “innovation” within the workplace
without complaint. “Flexibility” in jobs is sold to workers as a positive
feature, but far more frequently leads to the proliferation of temporary,
part-time, and under-compensated labor.
The research currently happening on precarious labor, particularly by people like Karly Wildenhaus and the Collective Responsibility project team, is invaluable at making clear the connections between changing production relations, “innovation,” “flexibility,” and neoliberal capitalism. Wildenhaus’ research illuminates the fact that although unpaid internships have generally been believed to be a necessary step to reaching secure employment in LIS, they in fact have the opposite effect of driving down wages and undermining full-time labor.[6] The Collective Responsibility project’s data collection backs up this assertion with hard data; from their survey of 100 current and former grant-funded digital LIS workers, 66% who were rehired at an institution after the completion of their initial temporary contract were simply rehired into another temporary position.[7] Discussing the nature of temporary labor in LIS brings us back to the idea of immaterial labor and how, despite its drawbacks as a concept, it can still be useful for analyzing the current precarity situation.
The research currently happening on precarious labor, particularly by people like Karly Wildenhaus and the Collective Responsibility project team, is invaluable at making clear the connections between changing production relations, “innovation,” “flexibility,” and neoliberal capitalism. Wildenhaus’ research illuminates the fact that although unpaid internships have generally been believed to be a necessary step to reaching secure employment in LIS, they in fact have the opposite effect of driving down wages and undermining full-time labor.[6] The Collective Responsibility project’s data collection backs up this assertion with hard data; from their survey of 100 current and former grant-funded digital LIS workers, 66% who were rehired at an institution after the completion of their initial temporary contract were simply rehired into another temporary position.[7] Discussing the nature of temporary labor in LIS brings us back to the idea of immaterial labor and how, despite its drawbacks as a concept, it can still be useful for analyzing the current precarity situation.
Tiziana Terranova, in a discussion of technocapitalism, hits on a fundamental issue in a constantly-revolutionized sphere of production - the potentiality of immaterial labor within workers. “However, in the young worker, the ‘precarious worker,’ and the unemployed youth, these capacities [for immaterial labor activities regarding cultural content] are ‘virtual,’ that is they are there but are still undetermined. ...postmodern governments do not like the completely unemployable. The potentialities of work must be kept alive, the unemployed must undergo continuous training in order both to be monitored and kept alive as some kind of postindustrial reserve force.”[8] The key here is the emphasis on a “postindustrial reserve force” and the “potentialities of work.” Owners and managers are finding it more beneficial to themselves and their profit margin to not only subdivide labor processes, but to subdivide labor power as much as possible. Structures and business models like the gig economy and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - a website that allows businesses to essentially crowdsource minor computing or data work by paying freelancers to perform simple tasks like identifying image content that AI is unable to do - are a perfect example of the amount of profit that can be generated by the precariously- or semi-employed. This unstable but highly profitable model has been infiltrating LIS for decades, helped along under the guise of innovation and flexibility.
Moving forward, I think it’s essential to examine this precarity crisis in LIS in much greater depth. Further exploration of subjects like the contested uses of “professional,” what is meant by “continuous training” (as referenced by Terranova above) and how that both applies to LIS workers and is upheld through practices like work skills-related public library programming, and other similar topics can provide more useful scholarship and discourse around the relationship between LIS and labor. Though beyond the scope of this piece, I think it would also be valuable to examine some important relationships: the invisibility of archival labor and that labor being undervalued; neoliberalism and its connection to the concepts of “flexibility” and “innovation,” particularly in LIS; and the question of immaterial labor and social reproduction in libraries and other public-facing LIS spaces. There’s already excellent work being done within MLIS programs and professional organizations to conduct research, and continuing this work both at the theoretical level and as praxis is sorely needed. Professional organizations should be conducting regular censuses of their members and their employment situations. MLIS programs can encourage their students as well as their faculty to engage with this type of research. Advocating and agitating for fair labor practices in LIS requires research, assessment, and education, and the discourse around precarious labor is finally becoming more fruitful and widespread.
[1] Fuchs, Christian. Digital
Labour and Karl Marx. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,
2014.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Wildenhaus, Karly. “Wages for Intern Work: Denormalizing
Unpaid Positions in Archives and Libraries.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 1
(November 25, 2018). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.88.
[5] Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist
Party,” Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol.
One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.
[6] Wildenhaus, 2018.
[7] Rodriguez, Sandy. “Collective Responsibility: Seeking
Equity for Contingent Labor in Libraries, Archives, and Museums.” Working
Paper. University of Missouri -- Kansas City, 2019.
https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/69708.
[8] Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor.” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58.
https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-2_63-33.
