Date of Event

9-14-2021

Location/Venue

via Zoom

Description

De La Salle University Department of Communication Invited the Lasallian community to the Professorial Chair Lecture of Cheryll Ruth R. Soriano, PhD, Holder of the Angel and Celerina Reyes and Br. Marcian James Professorial Chair in the Humanities entitled ‘Free(lancing) but everywhere in chains’: Technologies of control in ‘on-demand’ gig work.

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Abstract

Communication technologies have facilitated the rise of new forms of work, organizing processes, and labor arrangements in recent years. This includes the emergence of global and local gig work platforms catering to local demand for food, transportation, and general service delivery such as Grab, FoodPanda, and Angkas that are hiring Filipino workers at an increasing pace. This exponentially growing gig economy also provides work to thousands of Filipinos who lost jobs in the formal and informal economy during the pandemic. Intersecting with prevailing norms of labor informality and lack of viable employment alternatives, these platforms attract high numbers of workers and aspirants amid promises of freedom and flexibility, but often with precarious work conditions. In this ‘on-demand’ service arrangement underscoring the gig economy, workers are not employees--instead they are considered partners, service contractors, freelancers, and sometimes even as entrepreneurs. The talk will examine how this unregulated labor arrangement allows for employer-employee relationships to be circumvented while maintaining multiple forms and layers of communicative control wielded by platform companies through socio-technical processes. More broadly, I will reflect on the discursive construction of these ‘free and flexible’ labor categories and the cultural normalization of such labor management techniques as mechanisms of biopower in the digital economy.

Sponsors

Department of Communication Sep 2, 2021

Event Type

Lectures and lecturing

Information Source

Help Desk Announcement : September 2, 2021

Keywords

Cheryll Ruth R. Soriano

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