Our New Year's resolution for 2026 is to read more books about platform work. The first of those was 'Work without the worker: Labour in the age of platform capitalism' by Phil Jones, a labour researcher at the Autonomy work think-tank in the UK. We weren't disappointed.
'Work without the worker' turns out to be a title with many meanings. This is a book about microwork, also known as 'clickwork' or 'crowdwork', where workers complete a variety of short digital tasks, from annotating an image to filling out an online survey to moderating potentially harmful social media content. These are the workers behind artificial intelligence, testing, fixing and training AI systems for pennies per task. Sitting at their computer or phone anywhere in the world with an internet connection and with no guarantee of work from one task to the next, microworkers are invisibilised by the massive platforms like Youtube or Facebook that ultimately rely on their labour to operate.
That's the first meaning of 'work without the worker': that platform capitalism appears on the surface to function without a workforce, but in fact is dependent on a 'sub-employed' section of the global population typically living in slums or refugee camps with nowhere else to turn as they have no prospect of a job with a steady income. Jones finds that this "relative surplus" population, existing on the margins between employed and unemployed, has grown because "the system is no longer creating enough new jobs for the growing numbers brought into the sphere of capital". It's this crisis of industrial capitalism since the 1970s, along with many billions more human beings brought out of subsistence living and 'proletarianised', which has created the economic basis for the revival of 19th century piecework in 21st century digital form.
That brings us to the second meaning of 'work without the worker', which is that microwork cannot really be considered a job in any sense of the term. This, Jones finds, is likely to be the true effect of automation: not to eliminate work entirely, but to forge a new "machine-human hybridity" where work as an occupation is replaced by what Jeff Bezos has dubbed "humans-as-a-service", whereby we work on and with the algorithm to do odd bits and bobs of what was once a whole series of different jobs done by different people. In this brave new world, work is cheap and easily disposed with.
Finally, microwork is a form of work which undermines its own purpose for existence. By annotating an image of cats and dogs or labelling a video as a case of sexual violence, microworkers are preparing the AI to replace them. In Jones' words, microwork is "the surplus humanity compelled to make more of humanity surplus". This is the final meaning of 'work without the worker'. What is not totally clear yet is the extent to which this is true: will AI ever get good enough to render content moderators and data annotators futile, or will the microwork industry simply continue to grow as AI expands to more sectors and becomes more complex, even as it destroys work as a profession?
'Work without the worker' was written in 2021, just before the generative AI boom began. It's clear that the microwork industry not only has grown hugely with this boom, but it has also changed: the need for more complex data annotation, what is known in the industry as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has increased the propensity of firms like Scale AI and Surge AI to hire from the global north. As we identified in a recently published study for the ETUC on Uberisation, there is significant potential for wide sections of workers in steady, well-paid occupations in the global north to be dragged into the vortex of the highly insecure and precarious world of microwork.
What can be done about this? Microworkers are dispersed all around the world, with very limited bargaining power and alienated from one another. Jones finds that in this context, the chances of a "renewal of a labour-movement resembling that of the twentieth-century now seems impossible". Instead, he envisages a form of resistance more befitting of microworkers' "sub-employment" status: a struggle of the "wageless". Drawing inspiration from Brazil's Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST) and the UK's National Unemployed Workers' Movement in the 1930s, microworkers could enter into broader alliances with other precarious workers and the unemployed, organising via associations and social centres to demand "universal basic services".
'Work without the worker' is a beautifully written meditation on microwork that carries a clear analysis of its causes and consequences. If you want to get to grips with this rapidly growing section of the gig economy, this book is a great place to start.
Ben Wray, Gig Economy Project co-ordinator
