AI must be addressed as a labor issue, and workers should be part of decision-making in AI policy. Moving beyond common AI tropes and assumptions of mass job displacement, we seek a deeper understanding of how AI is reshaping the value of work, workplace conditions, underlying business models and ultimately, power relations.
Labor Futures
We interrogate how technology is disrupting, destabilizing, and transforming many aspects of work and employment.
Team Members
About
Public debates about “the future of work” are often shaped by hype cycles and industry-driven narratives about the inevitability of tech innovation. Yet these narratives can obscure — or outright dismiss — how technologies impact workers, sidelining and disempowering them and further entrenching racial, gender, and economic oppression.
Our work challenges the assumption that workers are merely passive recipients of technology, and that automation is the solution to a wide range of complex social and economic problems. Through rigorous empirical research and targeted engagement with stakeholders and decision-makers, we aim to create opportunities and levers for workers to shape the technologies that impact their everyday lives. We investigate critical labor topics to shift narratives, expand debate, and inform policy and practice.
Over the years, our work has explored the role of digital worker surveillance and algorithmic inequality, how the tech industry and corporate power are reshaping the economic and political landscapes of labor, and how precarious gig platform models erode labor rights and workplace standards. Today, we focus our attention on applied research, and are pursuing new research on rapid developments in AI and its impact on labor. We are also introducing research that complicates conversations about the future of work by examining issues at the intersection of labor, race, and technology.
Recent Work
Mentions and Press
All Work
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Academic Article
Journal of SociologyFebruary 2024 -
event
Data & SocietyJanuary 2024 -
event
Data & SocietyJanuary 2024 -
Explainer
Data & SocietyIn Challenging Worker Datafication, D&S Labor Futures Researcher Alexandra Mateescu provides an introduction to different recent approaches to worker data, and explores ongoing questions, critiques, and possibilities. Read moreNovember 2023 -
Primer
Data & SocietyWellness Capitalism: Employee Health, the Benefits Maze, and Worker Control explores how employee wellness has been promoted in the US through public policies and government support, and how this has led to a rapidly expanding, data-collecting industry. Read moreJune 2023 -
blog post
PointsThe rise of data-centric technologies is an opportunity for the labor and racial justice movements to build new bridges. Read on PointsJanuary 2023 -
event
video
Data & SocietyOctober 2022 -
report
Data & SocietyThe doorstep has emerged as the new physical locale of consumption — the threshold at which purchased products become personal property. In this transformation, the porch has become a contested space: it is at once private prop... Read moreOctober 2022 -
report
Data & SocietyData & Society Researcher Alexandra Mateescu's latest report outlines the drawbacks of Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), highlighting the need to fundamentally reconsider what is valued & prioritized in the design of care technologies & infrastructure. Read moreNovember 2021 -
report
Data & SocietyMay 2021