Making of a Cybertariat

THE MAKING OF A CYBERTARIAT
Virtual Work in a Real World

Ursula Huws

“These essays chart the transformation of work and technology with an acute theoretical originality. Huws has the rare ability to cut through existing abstract models with a clarity based on an immense practical understanding. The implications of 'The Making of a Cybertariat' are far reaching in rethinking a radical strategy for the future.” Sheila Rowbotham

A new global labour force is being created working in call centres, homes and electronic sweatshops. New technologies are also transforming daily life. This book presents a coherent conceptual framework within which these developments can be understood.

Explains the impact of technology on the workplace, and relates its arguments and analyses to the work-situations of real people, showing how larger trends influence daily activities and shape the possibilities of collective action.

A portrait of working conditions experienced by both men and women, but focuses especially on the double impact on women both as workers and as consumers.

Foreword by Colin Leys - a well-known figure in Marxist political analysis - describing the unique contribution of Huws's work in the development of a new feminist-influenced political economy.

Huws has been engaged with the social meaning of the new digital technologies from their first introduction into the workplace in the 1970s. Avoiding technological determinism, Huws locates developments in a long economic and political trajectory, so that their significance for understanding globalisation processes stands out clearly.

Contents: Foreword by Colin Leys, Introduction, Chapter One — New Technology and Domestic Labor Chapter Two — Domestic Technology: Liberation or Enslavement? Chapter Three — Chips on the Cheap: How South East Asian Women Pay the Price, Chapter Four — Terminal Isolation: The Atomization of Work and Leisure in the Wired Society, Chapter Five — The Global Office: Information technology and the Relocation of White Collar Work, Chapter Six — Challenging Commodification: Producing What’s Useful Outside the Factory, Chapter Seven — Women, Health, and Work, Chapter Eight — Telework: Projections, Chapter Nine — Material World: The Myth of the Weightless Economy, Chapter Ten — The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World, Notes, Index.

URSULA HUWS has been a researcher, activist and a commentator on labour and technology issues since the 1970s. Her writings have appeared in the Socialist Register, the New Statesman, Das Argument and many other journals. COLIN LEYS is Emeritus Professor at Queen's University in Ontario, and is the author of Politics in Britain.