The Warehouse by Rob Hart

THE WAREHOUSE by Rob Hart is a new work of dystopian science fiction which is a LibraryReads selection for August. Set in the near future at a MotherCloud facility where employees live, eat, play and work for credits, there is some corporate espionage underway. Zinnia has been secretly recruited to find the source of the complex’s power and Paxton is a prison security guard and inventor whom she meets on the first day. Much of their orientation is delivered through videos and everyone wears a shirt that reflects their job – red for pickers (order processors), blue for security, green for maintenance, white for managers and so forth.  Work shifts and timing are all controlled centrally – communicated through smart watches called CloudBands which are activated with a fingerprint and track their wearer’s movements, making Zinnia’s task very challenging. Despite the opportunities - cool air, fresh water, a job and place to live - available through Cloud, the atmosphere is menacing; an associate of Paxton’s remarks, “you’ll see there’s the Cloud way of doing things and the right way of doing things. Sometimes those are the same, sometimes they aren’t.” Gibson Wells is the industrialist who heads the company, the monopolist who has overtaken tons of small businesses (including Paxton’s), and corporate lobbyist who has helped push through legislation like the Red Tape Elimination Act and FAA takeover. As Hart indicates in his acknowledgements, this is a thriller with a message about opportunity and about income inequality, essentially an attempt, he hopes, that “nudges us in the right [future] direction.” THE WAREHOUSE received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Watch also for the forthcoming movie from Ron Howard and Imagine Entertainment.

Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri

GHOST WORK is written by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, senior researchers at Microsoft Research. Mary L. Gray is also a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and a faculty member at Indiana University.  Their book’s subtitle is “How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass” and deals with largely invisible human labor force who work to “make the internet seem smart.” These gig-economy workers complete tasks like tagging images, adding video captions, answering a web-based chat query, or editing a product review, essentially providing employment on demand in a “fusion of code and human smarts.” In this text, Gray and Suri explain the nature of ghost work and profile a number of individual workers, both in the US and India. They refer to a study by PEW Research showing that in 2015 roughly twenty million US adults earned money completing tasks distributed on demand. Thus, Gray and Suri’s work highlights a surprisingly big subset of the workforce that is being transformed due to automation and artificial intelligence advances. However, once this situation is described and it seems pretty clear what is involved, Gray and Suri go on at length with background (including historical context on piecework) which distracts from the book’s overall value. They do argue that the opportunity for exploitation exists, especially when a worker’s goal is twenty dollars (or five dollars per hour) without any kind of benefits and added cost of the time looking for work. This is also further explored in Mary Gray’s opinion piece published in early May by the Washington Post where she notes, “workers in the gig-driven ghost economy have no shared workplace, professional identity or voice to call for change.” Subsequent sections of their new book discuss the power of collaboration and the importance of paying attention to employee welfare and the “double bottom line.” Their conclusion offers a brief outline of several technical and social fixes (e.g., universal healthcare, paid family leave). Well-researched and documented, roughly twenty percent of GHOST WORK’s content is bibliography, notes, appendix and index.

Business and civics classes may find discussion prompts here, particularly in conjunction with more recent studies from PEW about concerns related to automation (2018) or contrasting views on the future economy and democracy (2019). Or, perhaps students could investigate some of the platforms for freelancing, like UpWork. Gray and Suri also write about the creation of “MTurk so that Amazon could not just offer a marketplace of books and other durable goods but make labor itself a service that anyone could find and pay for through the Amazon website.”  That seems highly relevant given yesterday’s announcement by Amazon of a $700 million investment in upskilling for its employees.