Uberworked and Underpaid How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy

This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. One of network culture's toughest critics, Trebor Scholz chronicles the work of workers in the "sharing economy," and the free labor on sites like Facebook, to take these myths apart.

In this rich, accessible, and provocative book, Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights.

The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned "platform cooperatives," rethink unions, and build a better future of work. A call to action, loud and clear, Uberworked and Underpaid shows that it is time to stop wage theft and "crowd fleecing," rethink wealth distribution, and address the urgent question of how digital labor should be regulated and how workers from Berlin, Barcelona, Seattle, and São Paulo can act in solidarity to defend their rights.

Trebor Scholz is Associate Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. He chairs the conference series The Politics of Digital Culture at The New School.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Digital Labor Now?

Chapter 1: Black Box Labor and the Creative Wrecking of Employment

Chapter 2: Play at Work

Chapter 3: Defining Digital Labor

Chapter 4: Crowd Fleecing

Chapter 5: On Motivations

Conclusion

i. Confronting the Legal Gray Zones of Digital Labor

ii. On Tactical Refusal, Defection, and Withdrawal from Data Labor

iii. Think Outside the Boss: Platform Cooperativism for the Sharing Economy

Epilogue

Notes

Index