What training do data workers need? What do they get instead? Data workers and community researchers Fasica Gebrekidan and Yasser Alrayes explore this question with Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli, and moderator Laurenz Sachenbacher.

The Data Workers' Inquiry

The rise of neoliberalism as a dominant political paradigm in the 1970s and the emergence of platform capitalism in the 21st century resulted in new areas of employment and a decrease in the relative numbers of workers employed in traditional working-class jobs. Data work, that is, the labor that goes into producing data for so-called “intelligent” systems (Miceli et al., 2021), not only brings with it unprecedented forms of exploitation but, crucially, possibilities for organization and resistance in globally networked economies.

The Data Workers’ Inquiry is a community-based project in which data workers join us as community researchers (DAIR, 2022) to lead their own inquiry in their respective workplaces. The inquiry aims to deepen the tradition of community-based participatory research (Stoeker 2013; Jason & Glenwick, 2016) by empowering data workers to guide the direction of the research, such that it is oriented towards their needs and goals of building workplace power but supported by formally trained qualitative researchers.

Learn more on our website.