[ed. In the community I live in which skews toward older retired people, there's no shortage of volunteers for just about anything. Great right? But, the economic impact of that just dawned on me the other day when I stopped by the local hospital to check on something. While I was there I got in a conversation with a volunteer at the information desk and asked how many other people like him were currently working there (this is just a small-to-medium sized hospital). 123. One hundred and twenty three - doing all kinds of jobs, like landscaping, admitting, patient accounts, gift shop clerking, etc. Jobs that normally might have been filled by people being paid actual wages. Like this article, my first thoughts drifted toward internships and how similar the situation seemed to be, with corporations increasingly relying on a workforce of willing unpaid labor. At least at the hospital they're given a free lunch.]
Coursera’s GTC offers the clearest instance yet of an emerging labor force in digital capitalism, which I suggest we call the voluntariat.The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.
But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.
And the voluntariat is not, like the proletariat, the instrument of its own dispossession. Rather, its contribution of uncompensated work accelerates deskilling and undermines the livelihood of those who do not have the luxury of working for free — in this case, professional translators who cannot afford to give away their labor.
In recent years, companies have made enormous use of two major strategies for extracting economic value without compensating those who originate it: unpaid internships and social media. Coursera’s invention of a translation voluntariat synthesizes some of the most effective aspects of both of these strategies for the empowerment of capital and pauperization of labor.
Unpaid internships have allowed companies to command an-ever expanding labor force at no cost, but the potential of unpaid internships to devalue work further and further up the skill ladder has intrinsic limits. The very institutional existence of internships, after all, entails the (usually false) promise of essential skills acquisition that will lead to future paid work. In other words, unpaid internships will always require there to continue to be paid positions somewhere in an organization, because employers lure candidates into them in large part by dangling before them the possibility of eventual promotion to one of those positions.
The GTC presents no similar difficulties for the capitalist: it solicits the voluntariat’s labor with the sole assurance that that labor constitutes its own reward. The “Do What You Love” mantra central to unpaid internships plays a role here, but the illusion of a career-building apprenticeship that persists as the justification of internships has been removed. For the moment, Coursera is still offering salaries to some workers (mostly engineers), but there is no reason in principle why all the “careers” the company currently advertises could not be reimagined as “global communities” of volunteers.
by Geoff Shullenberger, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: via:
