Making Tech Work for Workers

“We must humanize technology before it dehumanizes us,” wrote the neurologist and historian of science Dr. Oliver Sacks. 

Nowhere is this more true than in the world of work, where technology, with its promises of flexibility, access, and democratization, has instead become both boss and big brother, supercharging precarity, surveillance, and disenfranchisement. We know the inequities that play out in the analog world, along lines of geography, gender, ethnicity, race, class, and ability, are replicated and accelerated in the digital world. And across the globe, technologies from scheduling software to keystroke monitoring applications and platform-mediated work have reduced job stability, security, and sustainability, while weakening privacy and rights to free association. Indeed, tech companies that facilitate our ability to socialize, share information, and purchase goods and services are powered by digital supply chains and shadow workforces of largely Global Majority/South subcontractors, including gig workers, content moderators, and data labelers, who face inhumane working conditions without fair compensation or protections. 

And yet, the tragic logic of digital solutionism remains the default narrative, presuming the benefits of tech far outweigh the harms, and insisting that working people adapt to new technological futures without question, much less a meaningful say in their design, deployment, and governance. 

However, worker-led movements are rising and pushing back against the harms wrought by technology, and indeed winning new protections. This growing movement is calling for a necessary new paradigm of responsible and equitable innovation—where technologies are designed with workers not as end users but as front-end experts, with the goals of making work safer and ensuring workers can more widely share in the benefits of the wealth they produce.

In this special in-depth series, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, workers, labor organizers, technologists, economists, and funders share insights on both the visible and invisible harms of the digital economy and offer lessons on how to humanize tech before it further dehumanizes working people. Across this series, writers will emphasize the importance of investing in worker-led movements for digital justice, and give examples of effective and inspiring strategies for change, from campaigning to policy advocacy to litigation. We know that when tech is developed and deployed irresponsibly, it pushes us into a future of work we don’t want. When workers are central in designing, deploying, and governing workplace tech, we can collectively build a future of work that is just, equitable, and sustainable for all.

^{(Series Illustrations by Hugo Herrera)}