Surveillance

'Managing and Monitoring Mobile Service Workers via Smartphone App: A case study on worker monitoring, algorithmic management and software for "field service management"' by Wolfie Christl comments 

Mobile service workers, whether they are technicians, homecare workers or cleaning personnel, are increasingly being managed and monitored through smartphone apps. Data that was previously unavailable to employers is now being recorded and evaluated. As these apps give workers instructions about which client to visit next, how to get there and which tasks to perform at the client site, they become algorithmic managers. In the background, powerful software systems for “field service management” help employers organize, coordinate and schedule client visits, work orders and tasks. They promise to optimize, streamline and automate task allocation and help dispatchers and managers supervise workers, monitor their location, assess work performance and identify undesired behavior. 

This case study explores how employers can use software and smartphone apps to manage and monitor mobile service workers. It focuses on the potential implications for employees in Europe and makes two contributions. First, it summarizes survey-based research on how employers actually use these technologies and how workers are affected. Second, it examines software that is available on the market. To illustrate wider practices, it investigates Microsoft software for “field service management”, which is part of the company’s comprehensive “Dynamics 365” system. The investigation aims to identify, examine and document data practices that affect workers, based on a detailed analysis of technical documentation and other publicly available sources. 

Microsoft’s “field service management” system provides extensive functionality for algorithmic management, performance control and behavioral monitoring:

Via mobile app, workers receive instructions about work orders, client destinations, travel routes and a list of predefined tasks to be performed at client sites. The required arrival times and expected durations of work orders and tasks serve as target times. Workers confirm via app when they travel to clients, complete tasks or take breaks. Tasks can include sub-tasks with step-by-step instructions. Consequently, the app structures, directs and micromanages work, aligning it with rigidly defined processes. As it constantly reminds workers of time constraints and deviations, it includes implicit mechanisms for performance and behavior control. 

Employers can utilize behavioral monitoring and performance control to supervise and pressure workers. Dispatchers can see their real-time location and travel routes on a map. They can monitor the current degree of completion of work orders and tasks. For completed work, they can see how much time a worker actually spent on it in relation to the target time. The system can remind both dispatchers and workers of cost limits associated with the time spent on work orders. To keep contractually agreed response times low, it can show a timer to dispatchers that counts the minutes and seconds that have elapsed since the creation of a work order. 

New work orders can result from client inquiries or machines sending error codes, or they are automatically generated on a recurring basis, for example, based on service agreements. Organizations can define standardized work orders that include specific service tasks, instructions and estimated durations. The specified durations serve as target times and are used to distribute and schedule actual work orders to workers. The system can automatically schedule and dispatch work orders, and, as such, automatically assign tasks to workers. It can generate schedules for all workers for entire days or calculate a new schedule every 30 minutes. To match work orders to workers, it considers workers’ availability, location, predicted travel times and skill profiles. Automated scheduling is based on customizable optimization goals. The “maximize productivity” goal leads to schedules with minimized travel and idle times. The system can optionally create schedules that require workers to travel to or from client sites outside their working hours. Besides fully automated scheduling, it can also semi-automatically recommend workers for particular work orders. 

Microsoft offers to predict how long it will take to complete particular work based on past data on work activities and “AI” models. It outlines possible reasons for deviations between predicted and previously specified durations by suggesting, for example, that a particular client, region, weekday, task or worker will likely increase the time required to carry out the work. As such, it may accuse workers of being slower than expected. This functionality can help dispatchers “enhance their team’s performance”, according to Microsoft. 

The system is designed to rate and rank workers according to a wide range of performance and behavior metrics over the previous year, including by the number of completed work orders, the time spent on them in relation to target times and the time spent travelling, on break and in an “idle” state, i.e. without an assignment. Managers can identify undesirable behavior by evaluating how often workers missed the target time or arrived late to a client. They can assess workers by how much revenue they generate and by how satisfied the customers are with their work, based on surveys sent to clients after work was completed. Group-level metrics, for example, on the average time spent completing certain types of work in relation to targets, can also create pressure to speed up work. Employers can use Microsoft’s “Power BI” system to create almost any type of report. 

While GPS location tracking is optional, many features rely on it. Microsoft recommends recording a worker’s location every “60 to 300 seconds”. Clients can be offered access to the current location of the scheduled worker and their estimated arrival time. The system systematically exposes personal data on worker behavior to employers, who can, for example, view records about workers’ exact whereabouts over time. It provides access to enriched location records that indicate, based on geofencing, at which time workers have entered or exited certain client sites or other areas. The system also provides records about remote assistance calls, including their start and end times, and summarizes how much time each worker spent on those calls. 

Despite concerns about the reliability of “generative AI”, Microsoft has rushed to put its CoPilot technology into many products, including field service management. CoPilot promises to summarize information, create draft work orders based on customer emails and draft email replies. While Microsoft advertises it as a means to accelerate work, dispatchers are told to review “AI-generated content” because it can be “incorrect”. The system can be integrated with Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft software. Dispatchers and workers can handle work orders directly from within Outlook and Teams, turning them into task management systems. 

Employers can customize Microsoft’s field service technology and use it in more or less problematic ways. Some intrusive pre-built reports are not available for German customers. Employers can add custom workflows to manage and monitor different types of mobile work. Microsoft’s Home Health system extends its field service technology with functionality specific to homecare. A brief investigation of field service technology offered by the major German vendor SAP shows that its system also offers intrusive performance monitoring functionality. 

Implications for workers. The review of survey-based research on the practical use of field service technology in Austria, Norway, the UK and the US shows that these systems can have significant negative implications for workers. Digital task documentation in the name of billing, quality management or workload balancing can quickly evolve into far-reaching algorithmic management via app. Task direction and monitoring via smartphone app generally leads to increased surveillance and digital control at work. Employers may intentionally misuse the data for purposes other than it was originally collected, including for making negative decisions about workers. Standardized processes, rigid performance targets and automated scheduling can accelerate and intensify work and undermine work discretion. Knowledge that once resided with workers now increasingly lies within technical systems

Algorithmic Control

'The Invisible Cage: Workers’ Reactivity to Opaque Algorithmic Evaluations' by Hatim A. Rahman in (2021) 66(4) Administrative Science Quarterly comments 

 Existing research has shown that people experience third-party evaluations as a form of control because they try to align their behavior with evaluations’ criteria to secure more favorable resources, recognition, and opportunities from external audiences. Much of this research has focused on evaluations with transparent criteria, but increasingly, algorithmic evaluation systems are not transparent. Drawing on over three years of interviews, archival data, and observations as a registered user on a labor platform, I studied how freelance workers contend with an opaque third-party evaluation algorithm—and with what consequences. My findings show the platform implemented an opaque evaluation algorithm to meaningfully differentiate between freelancers’ rating scores. Freelancers experienced this evaluation as a form of control but could not align their actions with its criteria because they could not clearly identify those criteria. I found freelancers had divergent responses to this situation: some experimented with ways to improve their rating scores, and others constrained their activity on the platform. Their reactivity differed based not only on their general success on the platform—whether they were high or low performers—but also on how much they depended on the platform for work and whether they experienced setbacks in the form of decreased evaluation scores. These workers experienced what I call an “invisible cage”: a form of control in which the criteria for success and changes to those criteria are unpredictable. For gig workers who rely on labor platforms, this form of control increasingly determines their access to clients and projects while undermining their ability to understand and respond to factors that determine their success. 

Third-party evaluations are a central feature of today’s societal and organizational landscape (Lamont, 2012; Sharkey and Bromley, 2015; Espeland and Sauder, 2016). Studies have shown that third-party rating evaluations of actors such as doctors (RateMDs), professors (RateMyProfessors), hotels (TripAdvisor), restaurants (Yelp), corporations (Forbes), and universities (U.S. News & World Report) provide a sense of transparency and accountability for external audiences (Strathern, 2000; Power, 2010; Orlikowski and Scott, 2014). Audiences also use third-party evaluations to form their perceptions and make decisions about the evaluated actor (Karpik, 2010). As a result, these evaluations influence the resources, recognition, and opportunities actors receive from external audiences (Pope, 2009; Brandtner, 2017). As the prevalence and influence of third-party evaluation systems have increased, researchers have examined how actors subject to such systems react to them (Jin and Leslie, 2003; Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Chatterji and Toffel, 2010). For example, because university admissions, funding, and recognition are influenced by third-party evaluations (e.g., U.S. News & World Report), university administrators and faculty pay close attention to the criteria these evaluations use, such as career placement statistics, and change their behavior to better align with them (Sauder and Espeland, 2009; Espeland and Sauder, 2016). 

Consequently, while prior work has shown that third-party evaluations often provide transparency and accountability for external audiences, it has also suggested that actors subject to third-party evaluations experience them as a form of control (Espeland and Sauder, 2016; Brandtner, 2017; Kornberger, Pflueger, and Mouritsen, 2017). Because third-party evaluations can influence actors’ ability to secure resources and recognition from their primary audiences, actors will likely internalize evaluations’ criteria and change their behavior to conform to those standards (Sauder and Espeland, 2009; Masum and Tovey, 2011). Scholars label the phenomenon of people changing their perceptions and behavior in response to being evaluated as “reactivity” (Espeland and Sauder, 2007). 

Technological advancements have expanded the use of third-party evaluations to new areas of work and organizing, raising new questions in this domain (Fourcade and Healy, 2016; Kuhn and Maleki, 2017; Cameron, 2021). Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of labor platforms and their use of third-party evaluations to assess workers. While several types of platforms exist (Davis, 2016; Sundararajan, 2016), those most relevant to this study are labor platforms facilitating gig work, such as Upwork, TopCoder, and TaskRabbit. They provide a digital infrastructure to connect clients with freelance job seekers for relatively short-term projects. Labor platforms have attracted increased attention from work and organizational scholars because they differ from intermediaries and exchange systems previously studied (Vallas and Schor, 2020; Rahman and Valentine, 2021; Stark and Pais, 2021), particularly in their use of evaluations (Kornberger, Pflueger, and Mouritsen, 2017). 

Unlike previously studied settings, in which third-party evaluation criteria are relatively transparent to those being evaluated, in labor platforms these criteria are often opaque to workers. This opacity makes it easier for platforms and clients to differentiate among workers by using their evaluation scores, because it is more difficult for workers to game and inflate the evaluation system than in traditional settings (Filippas, Horton, and Golden, 2019; Garg and Johari, 2020). Platforms’ use of opacity in worker evaluations raises an underexplored question: how do opaque third-party evaluations influence workers’ reactivity, and what mechanisms contribute to this form of reactivity? While existing organizational research (Proctor, 2008; Briscoe and Murphy, 2012; Burrell, 2016) has broadly suggested that opacity will make it more difficult for workers to understand evaluation criteria, we lack grounded theory examining how workers contend with such opacity—and with what consequences. 

To address this gap, I studied one of the largest labor platforms focused on higher-level project work, such as software engineering, design, and data analytics. The platform implemented an opaque algorithmic rating evaluation to better differentiate which freelancers should be visible to clients and to prevent freelancers from gaming their scores. Freelancers tried but generally failed to understand the evaluation’s inputs, processing, and output, which led them to experience the opaque evaluation as a system of control characterized by unpredictable updates, fluctuating criteria, and lack of opportunities to improve their scores. These experiences were especially frustrating because the opacity contrasted with workers’ expectations of employee-evaluation systems based on previous experiences in traditional organizations, where such systems’ main purpose is to help workers improve (Cappelli and Conyon, 2018). 

I observed that freelancers responded to evaluation opacity with two types of reactivity: they either tested different tactics to increase their scores, such as working on various types of projects and with different contract lengths, or they tried to preserve their scores by limiting their engagement with the platform, such as by working with platform-based clients outside of the platform and not working with new clients. This was the case both for workers with higher and lower scores on the platform. Two mechanisms determined their type of reactivity: the extent to which freelancers depended on the platform for work and income and whether they experienced decreases in their evaluation scores (regardless of whether those scores started out higher or lower). My findings support the argument that opaque third-party evaluations can create an “invisible cage” for workers, because they experience such evaluations as a form of control and yet cannot decipher or learn from the criteria for success and changes to those criteria.

Professionals

'Three Decades of Change in Australia’s University Workforce' by Gwilym Croucher - a Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education Occasional Paper - comments 

The Australian higher education workforce has been reshaped in recent decades. Changes to management practices and rules around industrial relations, the creation of new universities in the 1990s and the growth of international education markets have all influenced the academic and professional workforce in Australia. This paper examines national level data on university workforce changes from 1989 to 2021. It highlights that despite the relative stability, there have been sector-wide shifts with clear implications for the future of Australian universities. 

Between 1989 and 2021 the total growth in the number of academic employees largely followed student enrolments, especially in high growth areas such as medical, health and allied health related disciplines. As the academic workforce expanded during this period it became more polarised. The professoriate increased in number to become a quarter of all academics at the same time as the middle ranks diminished in number. Part of this ‘hollowing out’ of the workforce followed the merger during the 1990s of Colleges of Advanced Education (CAE) that created new universities. The CAEs had a smaller proportion of senior academic staff, many of whom were steadily promoted to the professoriate after the creation of new universities. 

The polarisation of the academy has also been driven by the growth in the number of the junior academics, many in teaching focused roles, and largely employed on a casual basis. This trend has been associated with ongoing inequalities for women in the academic ranks. In 2021 there were many more men in the professoriate than women: women constituted 37 per cent of the professoriate despite making up half of the total academic workforce in Australian universities. While the majority of senior academic staff continued to be employed on an ongoing basis (those with a form of ‘tenure’), their proportion steadily reduced from the 1990s. Two decades later few junior staff were employed in ongoing roles and many (if not most) early career academics were employed on either short term or casual contracts. These changes are linked to universities rewarding and promoting ongoing academics, as well as deliberately seeking flexibility and cost reductions. 

From 1989 to 2021 there was an ongoing transformation of the professional staff workforce, which is classified as those university employees with a wide variety of roles, including but not limited to administrative functions. Professional and academic staff numbers have grown roughly in proportion to each other, with professional staff remaining the majority. There has been significant shift in the composition of professional staff workforce. After 1989 women came to make up nearly two-thirds of professional staff, marking a departure from academic staffing patterns. 

During the same time period professional staff cohorts became more ‘top heavy’. The most junior classifications of Higher Education Worker (or HEW, a classification used to capture cross-university data for employee level) all but disappeared between 1994 and 2020. The proportion of HEW 1 to 3 reduced from a third of workforce to one-thirtieth in this period. Across the sector an increase in the average HEW level appears to reflect the emergence of new professional staff roles, such as third space professionals (those staff whose role is part-academic and part-professional), along with the impacts of technological change reducing the need for less skilled roles and the greater use of external contractors. At the same time there was an increase in the proportion of the most senior leadership roles within universities, with the number of senior executives per staff member more than doubling. 

What is clearer is that changes to Australian higher education during the late 1980s casts a long shadow on university workforces, with most of these trends systemwide and not confined to any particular university groups or types. 

Summary of key national trends between 1989 and 2021:

 Growth in academic and professional staff numbers largely followed patterns of growth in student numbers. 

 There was a significant increase in the number of academics working in the broad Health disciplines grouping (including Allied Health), while other areas only had modest increases in staff numbers, and Education reduced its staff numbers. 

 The professoriate made up 1 in 4 academic staff in 2020, up from 1 in 7 in 1989, with the growth mainly in the number of full Professors. 

 There was a steady reduction in the proportion of academic roles employed on an ongoing basis (tenured) for all levels, with Level C, D and E reducing from around 9-in-10 academics with tenure to 7-in-10. During the period Level B went from 6-in-10 to 5-in-10 and Level A remained at 1-in-10. 

 On a full-time equivalent (FTE) basis, the proportion of academics employed on casual contracts went from 1-in-10 to 2-in-10, with the vast majority of these casual in teaching focused roles, and a majority occupied by women. On a headcount basis the number of casual staff increased significantly. 

 In 2020 women were underrepresented in senior academic roles (level D and E) despite making up half of the academic workforce (and making up roughly 60 per cent of the total higher education workforce). 

 A significant majority, nearly two-thirds, of professional staff were women in 2021 in contrast to academic staff. 

 A growing proportion of professional staff were in more senior roles in 2020 than they were in 1989, as measured by the average HEW level, with the more junior classifications disappearing. 

 While the number of deputy vice-chancellors remained consistent, there were more than twice the number of other senior executives per staff member at Australian universities in 2020 than in 1994.

Academia

The Supporting Staff Wellbeing in Higher Education report by Gail Kinman and Siobhan Wray examining working life in UK Higher Education institutions is based on a survey of 2046 academic and academic related staff regarding the psychosocial hazards they encounter, how they feel about the tasks they do and the availability and usefulness of support mechanisms to manage their wellbeing. The psychosocial safety climate of their institutions was also examined along with mental health and work-life balance. 

Key findings were 

•  Over three quarters (79%) of respondents said they need to work ‘very intensively,’ ‘often’ or ‘always.’ 
• Half (52%) said they experience unrealistic time pressures ‘often,’ or ‘always.’ 
• Many show signs of burnout, with 29% reporting feeling emotionally drained from work ‘every day.’ 
• More than two in ten academics work a further two working days per week. 
• Common barriers to obtaining support for wellbeing were lack of time due to a heavy workload and an inflexible schedule as well as lack of information about where to get it.

The authors offer a conclusion -

This study of UK HE employees has highlighted the initiatives that are currently available to support the wellbeing of employees and the type of support they find (or would find) most effective. The findings show that wellbeing related to key psychosocial hazards, i.e. job demands, support from managers and colleagues, role and relationships, in the higher education sector in the UK continues to be below minimum recommended standards. Moreover, the overall level of job control (an important resource for HE employees) has not improved over time. Reflecting the findings of the survey conducted in 2014, a high proportion of HE employees report being obliged to undertake tasks they consider to be unreasonable or unnecessary on a regular basis. Average working hours in the sector continue to be long, with more than two out of every ten respondents on academic contracts regularly working the equivalent of two extra days per week. Unsurprisingly, perceptions of the psychosocial safety climate in UK universities are typically poor – considerably more so than in studies of other organisations. The importance of improving the psychosocial safety climate in UK universities is intensified by the findings that the risk of burnout is high, and the level of self-reported mental wellbeing considerably lower than population norms. Interference between work and personal life is a common cause of stress and burnout and the findings of this study show that HE employees continue to have difficulties in achieving a healthy balance. 

 

The findings of this survey provide evidence that the psychosocial safety climate, and consequently staff wellbeing, may be improved if institutions take steps to reduce demands, increase support, control and role clarity, improve the quality of working relationships, and review tasks that might be considered unreasonable and unnecessary. Working with employees to identify opportunities for change and shape interventions will be particularly helpful. By highlighting employees’ support needs at the organisational and individual levels, the findings of this survey provide a foundation to help UK universities build a systemic and sustainable approach to wellbeing. As well as ensuring that individual support needs are met, it is crucial to promote a workplace culture where help-seeking is not stigmatised but encouraged and a range of interventions available that are fit for purpose and accessible to staff. These actions will help institutions meet the challenges of the COVID-19 outbreak and ‘build back better’ in terms of a healthy and more productive workforce. 

Key recommendations regarding support needs are - 

 Workplace culture, employee voice and communication 

• Prioritising staff wellbeing 

• Mechanisms to monitor the psychosocial safety climate 

• A culture of openness that normalises conversations about stress and mental health 

• Awareness of the risks of implementing individually focused solutions to structural problems 

• Training for all on equality, diversity and inclusion, including an awareness of neurodiversity 

• Policies and practices to identify and address bullying harassment and discrimination at an early stage 

• Opportunities to co-produce and evaluate support initiatives 

• Support initiatives that are fit for purpose, high quality and informed by evidence 

• Information on the available support initiatives that is centralised and accessible 

• Wellbeing and support policies that are put into action 

• A commitment to communicate and address the findings of staff wellbeing surveys and risk assessments 

• Mechanisms to formally assess the impact of change initiatives on staff wellbeing 

• A regular review of support initiatives to inform continuous improvement 

• Mechanisms to identify barriers to accessing support and how they can be minimised 

Managing workload 

• Mechanisms to identify the causes of workload pressure and manage this at source 

• Workload management initiatives that accurately reflect workload and working hours 

• Awareness of the risks of long working hours for staff wellbeing, work-life balance and performance 

• More autonomy and flexibility to enable staff to manage workload 

• More administrative support for routine tasks 

• Institution-wide policies for managing emails, including clear guidance on expectations for response 

• Support for early career staff to help them manage expectations regarding workload and wellbeing 

Psychological support and counselling 

• A counselling service for staff where the number of sessions is not capped, and counsellors have an understanding of the sector 

• Psychological support and counselling that can be accessed via different modes, such as face-to-face, telephone and online 

• A wide range of coaching and mentoring programmes 

• Improved support for staff with significant caring responsibilities and personal difficulties, such as bereavement 

• Psychological support for staff who feel socially isolated when working remotely 

• Guidance and support for staff to support students with mental health problems 

Support from managers 

• Awareness of the pressures of the job and how the responsibilities and requirements of the various roles can lead to overload 

• Training for managers to support staff wellbeing and how to access support, with regular opportunities for updating 

• Appraisal and supervision procedures that include questions about well-being, clear mechanisms for referral opportunities to revisit and monitor 

• Procedures to identify signs of struggle in remote workers and training on how to provide support • Initiatives to ensure staff feel appreciated, valued and respected 

• Support for line managers to protect their own wellbeing 

Wellbeing and work-life balance 

• A ‘tool-box’ of individual support initiatives to facilitate physical, mental and working health 

• Mechanisms to ensure that support initiatives are accessible to all staff 

• Guidance on work-life balance and healthy remote working, with particular focus on setting boundaries • Access to flexible working options (above the legal requirement) 

• A requirement for employees to take their full quota of annual leave 

• An awareness of the risks of presenteeism and provision of cover for staff who are on sick leave 

• Encouragement to take regular breaks from work during the day 

• A requirement to implement recommendations for reasonable accommodations from occupational health 

Social support 

• Support to promote positive working relationships, including informal opportunities to meet with colleagues 

• Mechanisms to identify and manage conflict at an early stage 

National support initiatives 

• Regular audits of the sector to monitor psychosocial hazards and employee wellbeing, assess change over time and identify areas of best practice and concern 

• Commitment to monitor the psychosocial safety climate in the sector and a consideration of including this as a Key Performance Indicator 

• Access to sector schemes or peer groups outside of the employing institution to communicate information about new initiatives, share best practice and discuss support needs and potential solutions 

• An independent ‘third-party’ that can evaluate how wellbeing services operate at an institution level and deal with staff concerns without fear of reprisals 

• An anonymous national hotline for reporting bullying/harassment

Insecurity

The recommendations of the first Interim Report (on On-demand platform work in Australia) by the Senate Select Committee on Job Security are 

 R 1  The committee recommends that the Australian Bureau of Statistics expands its Labour Force Survey to capture quarterly estimates in relation to the number of workers engaged in the on-demand platform sector. These estimates could include the industries and occupations in which they work, the hours they work, their visa status, the nature of their working arrangements relative to other workers, earnings and other demographic characteristics. 

R 2  The committee recommends that the Australian Bureau of Statistics enhances its Work-Related Injuries Survey to capture specific information on the number, and types, of injuries and fatalities for workers engaged in the on‑demand platform sector. 

R 3  The committee recommends that Safe Work Australia enhances its national data collection process to capture specific information on the number, and types, of injuries and fatalities for workers engaged in the on‑demand platform sector. The committee further recommends that all road crashes involving on-demand workers be officially recognised as workplace incidents and are recorded and investigated as such. 

R 4  The committee recommends that, as a matter of priority, Safe Work Australia develops meaningful, high-level guidelines on the application of the model Work Health and Safety Laws to the on-demand platform (or 'gig') sector. The guidance should be aimed at addressing practices that incentivise unsafe behaviour, as well as enforcing compliance with safety rules and obligations. The guidance should not seek to unreasonably circumvent the obligations of on-demand companies through novel interpretations of workers as being a 'person conducting a business or undertaking' (PCBU), particularly when such workers in the on-demand sector are engaged in highly dependent or low-leverage work arrangements. 

R 5  The committee recommends that the Australian Government urgently clarifies, by way of regulation, which persons or entities owe a duty of care as a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) under the Model Work Health and Safety laws in relation to individual support workers engaged through on‑demand platforms like Mable. The law should dictate that: a platform that engages individual workers to provide support work under the NDIS or similar schemes, and makes money from the arrangement, is a PCBU and owes a duty of care to that worker, regardless of that worker's work status (employee or contractor), or their visa status; and that individual care recipients, such as NDIS participants, are not a PCBU in relation to that worker. 

R 6  The committee recommends that the Australian Government works with state and territory governments to lead the reform of state-based workers' compensation schemes so that they extend to platform workers, regardless of their visa or work status, and require platform companies to pay workers' compensation premiums for these workers. 

R 7  The committee recommends that the Australian Government expands the definitions of 'employment' and 'employee' in the Fair Work Act 2009 to capture new and evolving forms of work. In addition to an expanded definition of 'employment' and 'employee' under the Fair Work Act, there should be a mechanism by which the Fair Work Commission can extend coverage of those rights when necessary to workers falling outside the expanded definition of employment, including low-leveraged and highly dependent workers so they can be provided with standards and protections under the Act. 

R 8  The Committee recommends that the Australian Government investigates options for a Federal regulator to be empowered to request data from platforms that employ and contract workers, including: pay rates; hours worked; other conditions governing that work; and other relevant information needed to appropriately monitor safety, competition and labour rights. 

R 9  The committee recommends that the Australian Government gives the Fair Work Commission (FWC) broad powers to resolve disputes and make orders for minimum standards and conditions in relation to all forms of work. The expanded remit of the FWC would include: adjudicating in cases where there is a dispute in relation to the appropriate status of workers; setting binding minimum standards and conditions in relation to non‑standard forms of work, regardless of employment status; and the capacity to resolve disputes (including where necessary through binding decisions) in a low-cost and effective manner. The FWC should be empowered to make determinations and orders for groups and categories of workers, not just individuals. 

R 10  The committee recommends that the Australian Government empowers the Fair Work Commission (FWC) to provide pathways to permanency via arbitrations for casual conversion. Any disputes with regards to work status, contractual arrangements, or casual conversion should be able to be arbitrated via a low‑cost, accessible process, whether via the FWC or another body, to ensure workers are able to practically enforce their rights, and both workers and employers can have matters adjudicated quickly. 

R 11  The committee recommends that the Australian Government provide greater protections for independent contractors who are sole traders by establishing an accessible low-cost national tribunal to advise on, oversee, and make rulings relating to employment relationships involving low‑leveraged independent contractors, such as those in the rideshare and other platform sectors. 

R 12  The committee recommends that the Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme give specific consideration to the following matters related to platform-based work in the disability sector as part of its current inquiry into the NDIS Workforce and its ongoing examination of the operation and performance of the NDIS: the prevalence of platform-based work in the sector, and the growing and evolving nature of this business model; the prevalence of independent contracting through platforms; the characteristics of independent contractors providing support work through platforms like Mable; the extent to which workers rely on this income, or have other sources of income; the typical earnings, insurance coverage, superannuation and access to leave and other entitlements available to these workers; the adequacy of training and support provided to workers; issues associated with safety, risk, and liability under Work Health and Safety laws; and issues relating to the potential for NDIS recipients to be classified as persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs) under existing Work Health and Safety laws. 

R 13  Taking into account the findings of any relevant inquiries, the committee recommends that the Australian Government considers regulatory options that would ensure support workers engaged to provide services funded through the National Disability Insurance Scheme are provided with fair pay and conditions, including those engaged through on‑demand platforms. 

R 14  The committee recommends that the Australian Government considers working with states and territories to design a national scheme that connects and extends the current state and territory schemes to provide portable long service leave, sick leave and other leave entitlements, and portable training entitlements, to all workers delivering services under the National Disability Insurance Scheme. 

R 15  The committee recommends that the Australian Government works through the Council on Federal Financial Relations to achieve an intergovernmental agreement that government procurements must require companies engaged by the Federal and state and territory governments to provide minimum standards of pay, safety and insurance, workers' compensation and basic protections for workers.

A perspective is provided by the 2018 ACT Legislative Assembly report on the Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Youth Affairs inquiry regarding the Extent, Nature and Consewquences of Insecure Work in the ACT.

Gig Economy Statistics

Counting gigs: How can we measure the scale of online platform work? by Agnieszka Piasna (European Trade Union Institute Working Paper 6/2020) comments 

The potential transformation of labour markets by the emergence of online labour platforms has triggered an intense academic, media and policy debate, but its true scale remains speculation. Nevertheless, adequate policy responses hinge on a good understanding of dynamics – something that will only grow in importance with the labour market crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic. With technologically enabled remote work, growing demand for services such as food delivery or care, as well as rising unemployment and the financial strain on many workers, platform work may resume its rapid growth. Therefore, there is a need for good quality data on the prevalence of platform and other forms of precarious work in society. 

This working paper provides a critical assessment of different approaches to counting gigs; that is, estimating the scale of engagement in platform work in the general population. The aim is to examine the main obstacles encountered in previous studies, the reasons for surprising or contradictory results and possible sources of error, but also the lessons that can be learned for future research. This is illustrated with key research in this area, ranging from large projects conducted by national statistical offices to smaller scale independent research, from national to (nearly) global scale.  

Piasna notes 

 Over recent years, the emergence of online labour platforms that use digital technologies to match workers with clients on a per-task basis has sparked an intense debate about their economic and social implications. Research in this area has exploded equally rapidly, primarily in the form of qualitative or case study investigations, on the issues that are most captivating of the imagination, such as algorithmic management, extremely flexible work models, the dismantling of long fought-for worker protections, legal cases or worker struggles (for example, Berg and De Stefano 2017; Drahokoupil and Piasna 2019; Graham et al. 2017; Vandaele et al. 2019; Wood et al. 2019). However, little is still known about the true scale of the phenomenon of platform work which is especially puzzling given that, as opposed to the traditional informal sector, all transactions mediated by online platforms are digitally recorded. Thus, questions on the proportion of workers engaged in platform work, whether they differ from the general workforce and the countries in which they are more common, remain largely unanswered (Codagnone and Martens 2016; Healy et al. 2017). Existing official labour market statistics are not well- suited to measuring the online platform economy as they are generally not sufficiently sensitive to capture sporadic or secondary employment, while they also fail to distinguish it from other economic activities. Ad hoc modules added to national employment surveys tend to use very different questions and are thus difficult to compare, while rare cross-national surveys provide such divergent results that they raise even more questions than they set out to answer (see discussion in Piasna and Drahokoupil 2019). 

This paper provides a critical assessment of the different approaches to counting gigs, seeking to come to an estimation of the scale of engagement in platform work within the general population (see also Piasna 2021). The aim is to examine the main obstacles which have previously been encountered, the factors which explain surprising or contradictory results, and the potential errors involved, but also to explore the lessons learned for future research. This is illustrated with key research studies in this area, conducted by national statistical offices and independent researchers, and on a national and (nearly) global scale. The analysis ranges from various examples of the use of secondary data, produced in abundance by simple virtue of the operations of the platforms, to the collection of primary data through dedicated surveys. It is not an exhaustive review of all the studies carried out to date, but rather an analytical review of various approaches illustrated with a selection of examples. 

The paradox in measuring the platform economy is that, although its opera- tions generate a wealth of data, with all transactions being digitally recorded, one of the biggest unknowns is still the scale of platform work (Codagnone et al. 2016). Every gig mediated by online labour platforms leaves a digital trace containing information such as the nature of the task, the compensation pro- vided, the number of hours worked or tasks completed, and the identity both of the requester or client and of the worker. A good starting point for a review of methods for measuring the platform economy are thus initiatives that have attempted to access such data, either directly from the platforms themselves or by tapping into other sources of big data generated by their operations. 

In general, platforms are highly protective of their proprietary databases on work and compensation flows and thus research that uses such data is scarce. One of the early examples is a study by Hall and Krueger (2018), who used anonymised administrative data from Uber on the number of drivers and their work histories, schedules and earnings covering the period 2012–2014 in the US market. Its strength undoubtedly lies in charting in great detail the extent of work for one of the largest platforms. However, as the study was carried out at Uber’s request and one of the authors worked for Uber Technologies at the time, it remains unattainable for independent researchers to replicate such an analysis over time or in other countries. Another example of the use of administrative data is a study of Deliveroo riders in Belgium carried out by Dra- hokoupil and Piasna (2019). In this case, a rare opportunity to access comprehensive administrative records containing information on hours worked and the pay, age, gender and student status of workers was based on co-operation with SMart, an additional intermediary that hired Deliveroo riders and billed the platform on their behalf. However, Deliveroo ended its agreement with SMart soon after the research was carried out, so such data collection cannot now be repeated. 

Insofar as access to the administrative records of one platform provides the precise number of workers on that particular platform, and usually allows the separation of registered users from active ones, it can serve as a basis for estimates of the size of the platform economy at national level. Nevertheless, such estimates are extremely rough. A complete picture of the platform workforce would require information from all platforms and some indication on the scale of overlap; that is, how many workers are registered on more than one platform (for example, Aleksynska et al. 2019 showed that, among platform workers in Ukraine, only about one-quarter of those registered were in fact active while many were registered on several platforms). As this is currently unattainable, other sources of data can be used to impute missing information. Kuek et al. (2015) complemented the publicly available data disclosed by online labour platforms with expert interviews; while Harris and Krueger (2015) supplemented data from Uber on the number of workers with the fre- quency of Google searches for the names of selected labour platforms. Their approach rested on the assumption that the number of workers providing services through a platform is proportionate to the frequency of its Google searches, even though the latter may be driven by a variety of factors, includ- ing media interest, litigation or academic research, and are likely to be skewed in favour of the most recognised platforms. Nonetheless, Harris and Krueger’s (2015) conclusion that labour platforms accounted for 0.4 per cent of total employment in the US was very close to the results from other studies of that period. 

Digitally mediated transactions also leave records outside the platform, such as in financial institutions or, at least in theory, in tax records. A rare example of the use of tax returns data is a study by Collins et al. (2019), tracing independent work mediated by the 50 biggest online labour platforms in the US between 2010 and 2016. It revealed that, by 2016, about one per cent of the US workforce registered income from platform work, even though it could not, by design, include informal revenues and those falling below a certain threshold. An interesting illustration of the use of financial records is a report by Farrell and Greig (2016) from JPMorgan Chase Institute. Having access to a full database of the clients of a major bank in the US, they counted how many accounts received any payments from one of 30 online platforms (ex- panded to include 128 platforms in a follow-up study by Farrell et al. (2018)). Their analysis revealed that, by 2015, one per cent of adults earned income from online platforms in the current month (0.4 per cent on labour platforms) and 4.2 per cent had done so in the past three years. The clear advantage of such approaches lies in the large number of platforms that can be included in the analysis and the possibility of replicating and repeating measurements over time. However, such studies will miss payments not coming directly from platforms’ accounts (i.e. through PayPal or Amazon vouchers) and, in the case of bank records, produce data not strictly at an individual level as families may have joint bank accounts, also raising ethical concerns where data are used without clients’ explicit consent. 

Another approach to gathering the data produced by platforms, which in principle is not contingent on access to exclusive sources such as banks and does not raise ethical concerns, is web ‘scraping’ – automatically accessing and downloading publicly available data from the platform’s web user inter- face. The most comprehensive initiative of this sort to date is probably the Online Labour Index (OLI) produced by the Oxford Internet Institute (Kässi and Lehdonvirta 2018). The index tracks in near-real time the number of new vacancies (i.e. projects or tasks) posted on five major English-speaking online labour platforms. It is possible to determine from which country the vacancy was posted and in which occupational category it falls, while continuous up-dating of the figures provides a consistent time series. However, as the OLI and other similar projects (see, for example, Ipeirotis 2010) count posted job offers and not the number of workers completing them, they might confuse an increasing fragmentation of tasks for an increase in the size of the plat- form economy. It is also difficult to grasp the actual extent of platform work without information on compensation for posted tasks, as single tasks can vary greatly in the amount of labour input required and pay levels, while some tasks might also be completed by multiple workers. Finally, the authors of the OLI acknowledge that this measure of online labour utilisation is incomplete as it fails to capture all new vacancies, and thus they choose to present it as an indexed trend rather than in terms of the absolute numbers of vacancies. Consequently, while valuable in mapping trends in online gig work and its occupational heterogeneity, the OLI does not provide answers to the scale of platform work. 

Therefore, the use of secondary data generated by platforms’ operations seems a good way to sketch the contours of the platform economy, although it is not best suited for mapping the prevalence of platform work at an individual (worker) level. To investigate how widespread are experiences with platforms, how often and to what extent individuals engage in platform work and the role of this type of work in supporting their livelihoods, a collection of primary data is necessary. ....

Neurosurveillance

'Neuro-Surveillance and the Right to be Human at Work' by Valerio De Stefano in On Labor comments

In 2018, the news reported that some assembly line workers had been asked to wear caps that monitor brain waves in order for managers to adjust the pace of production and workflows. Some observers raised doubts on the reliability of these tools, and even cast doubts on their actual functioning, but it is undeniable that forms of mental surveillance are increasingly coming to our workplaces. “Sociometric badges”, wearable tools tracking emotions and stress by collecting data on heartbeats and the tone of voice, for instance, are spreading in the United States. 

In 2018, the news reported that some assembly line workers had been asked to wear caps that monitor brain waves in order for managers to adjust the pace of production and workflows. Some observers raised doubts on the reliability of these tools, and even cast doubts on their actual functioning, […] 

Most of these practices should be urgently restricted. Losing one’s mental privacy arguably threatens one of the core elements of being human. If this occurs at the workplace, where workers are already subject to quasi-dictatorial managerial prerogatives, the consequences could be disastrous. Yet, no significant attention has been devoted to how neurotechnologies, and other forms of mental surveillance, may impact on workplaces. 

Besides brain waves monitoring and emotional tracking, facial scans are also widely used in recruitment, with artificial intelligence analyzing “how a person’s face moves” to detect ”how excited someone seems about a certain work task or how they would behave around angry customers”. Research projects exploring how to connect brains to technological devices are underway that could have detrimental consequences for workers. 

The more these practices progress, the more labour scholars should raise concerns about them. Experimentations and implementation of these practices need data, and workplaces are perfect data mines. If regulation is not brought up-to-speed, the future world of work risks being one where employers require employees to use tools that collect data on their brain activity to engage in a unrestrained quest for productivity, to predict their behavior and even to monetize on their data by making them accessible to third parties. 

Given the imbalance between employers and workers, there is limited possibility for workers to refuse such surveillance without risking to lose their jobs. This is why European countries have promoted governance of these practices through collective bargaining and workers’ representatives’ involvement. The EU General Data Protection Regulation provides that EU Member States may introduce, by law or by collective agreements, “specific rules to ensure the protection of the rights and freedoms in respect of the processing of employees’ personal data in the employment context”. 

Much more heed, however, needs to be paid to “neuro-surveillance at work”. Neuroscientist Marcello Ienca, for instance, called for the recognition of new human rights to face the rise of neurotechnology, including rights to mental privacy and integrity.

Uber

Subsidising Billionaires: Simulating the Net Incomes of UberX Drivers in Australia by Jim Stanford for the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute comments 

This report estimates the net incomes of UberX drivers in six Australian cities, on the basis of public information regarding Uber’s pricing structure, a representative benchmark urban trip, and other parameters (including vehicle expense guidelines in Australia’s tax system). 

The main findings of these simulations include:

• UberX services are provided at significantly lower prices than traditional taxi services in all major Australian cities; on average, traditional taxis are about 40 percent more expensive than UberX, based on a representative benchmark trip. 

• Under normal pricing schedules, it is very unlikely that UberX drivers earn net income (after all expenses) equivalent to Australia’s statutory minimum wages for workers in this industry. 

• We estimate the net income of Uber drivers (on average across the six cities considered in the report) under plausible assumptions to be $14.62 per hour. The highest simulated net incomes are generated in Canberra and Sydney (over $18 per hour); the lowest are in Perth (under $11 per hour). 

• The simulated average hourly net income for Uber drivers is well below Australia’s basic statutory minimum wage, of $18.29 per hour. And it equals less than half the statutory minimum payments required under the relevant Modern Award that would apply to waged workers in this sector (taking into account casual loading increments and penalty rates for evening and weekend work).

The implicit wage subsidy paid to Uber by its drivers, in the form of below-minimumwage labour, is large relative to the overall fares and margins generated in this business. It is equivalent to a subsidy paid to Uber (and ultimately its owners) by its Australian drivers, that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year. And if UberX prices were increased enough to pay minimum statutory wages to its drivers, almost all of UberX’s price advantage relative to traditional taxis would disappear. 

The report concludes that Australian lawmakers and regulators should urgently investigate the low net incomes received by UberX drivers (and other workers in the so-called “gig economy”), consider their relationship to normal minimum labour standards, and then develop effective regulatory responses to ensure these workers are afforded the same protections as other workers in Australia. In particular, regulators need to modernise and strengthen the definition of who constitutes an “employee” in Australian workplaces, to take account of the growth of irregular labour practices associated with digital business models.

Precariat

'Academic critique of neoliberal academia' by Andrew Whelan in (2015) 12(1) Sites: a journal of social anthropology and cultural studies comments

Academic critiques of neoliberalism do work: positioning their authors and their readers as subjects invested in the moral logic the critique establishes, and thereby moralising the collaborative accomplishment of the reader-writer relation. This relation and its constitution is a feature of contemporary leftist academic culture, and of the mechanics of critique as a social or ‘solidarising’ form of writing/reading. The academic critique of neoliberal academia warrants scrutiny particularly, given the casualisation of academic work and the emergence of a majority precarious academic labour force. Attending closely to it highlights some vulnerabilities of the academic critique of neoliberal forms, and illuminates the extent to which it constitutes its object in problematic ways: in terms of the political consequences or otherwise of critique as intellectual practice, of the model of subjectivity posited by the critique, and of the historical relations between academic practices and neoliberalism itself.

Whelan argues

If academic labour is going to be conceptualised, conducted, and described as a kind of critical struggle against the logics of ‘neoliberalism’ (or at least, as a presumably meaningful and consequential element to such struggle), there are a variety of specifics which need to be very clearly delineated, lest the endeavour remain at a somewhat general and unfocussed level. The costs of remaining at this level are high, intellectually and politically, and I aim to show how these costs are borne by some confusion as to the political and affective implication of academic work and academic writing and reading as social practices, and, when it comes to the critique of neoliberalism inside the university, a muddled and inconsistent account of academic subjectivity.

Better delineating these specifics would also go some way to clarifying the is sue as to whether this is what academic labour-as-critique is, does, or should be – that is, as to what it would mean to say that academic work can be described as a critical struggle against the logics of neoliberalism. By extension, this involves calling for greater reflection on the contemporary politics of intellectual work in the institution that is the university, an institution not separate from, but thoroughly and intimately bound up in fantastic variants of the processes marshalled under the sign of neoliberal optimisation.

The site of the critique, the institution variously colonised by and to be defended from neoliberalism, has been ‘ruined’ for some time now (Readings 1996). The challenges are complex: diminishing budgets, multiplying audit mechanisms ensuring ‘accountability’, technological developments that appear to throw traditional teaching practices into question, closed publishing models, spiralling student-staff ratios, student loan debt crises, increasingly rigid and competitive research funding mechanisms, and perceived threats to academic freedom and independence. There is, consequently, a burgeoning literature in ‘critical university studies’ (zombieacademy 2010).

For the purposes of this article, the most salient issue in this context is the sustainability of the academic profession: the casualisation of academic work and the emergence of a majority academic ‘precariat’. It is not easy to come by robust quantitative measures of the scale of this issue, but in Australia, for example, over half of all university teaching is provided by casual staff (Rea 2012). By head count, over sixty per cent of academic staff are casual (Hil 2013). There are an estimated 67,000 casuals employed in the sector in Australia; the majority of these are women (May 2011, 6). Almost half of all university staff are employed on fixed term contracts, and on average seven out of any ten new roles are casual positions (Lane and Hare 2014). Effectively, ‘“the full-time, permanent, centrally-located teaching/research academic” is no longer the norm around which policy and practice can be formed’ (Percy et al. 2008, 7).

Casual or sessional academic staff – ‘para-academics’ – are normally paid on an hourly rate under fixed term contracts, commonly of a semester’s duration, though they are commonly re-hired every semester, often for a number of years (these are ‘YIYOs’ – ‘year in, year outs’). They work with limited resources and no access to professional development, no job security, no entitlements t eave or sick pay, and no say in decision-making regarding how their work is structured, conducted, or assessed. Their pay ceases when the semester comes to an end. The summer recess in Australia is ordinarily of four months duration. It is common for sessional teaching staff to work at more than one university in order to make up sufficient income to survive, as there are limits to how many hours can be offered at an institution before the employer is obliged to provide benefits. Working hours routinely balloon beyond the nominal rate, particularly where there is an impression that student surveys and a good reputation with continuing staff impact on hiring decisions in the following semester. A significant component of core university work is thus conducted unpaid, on ‘volunteer’ labour. This presumably has some bearing on teaching ‘quality’ and ‘standards’, although this is not something senior university representatives are often noted drawing attention to. One interesting implication of this situation is how it articulates into the standardisation of assessment tasks, which now often requires setting particular word counts. The word count is a proxy for the piece rates the sessional staff receive to mark the student work. The tail of a ‘flexible’ workforce, a consequence of quite rapacious cost- efficiency logic, thus wags the pedagogical dog.

What follows is broken up into four sections. An account of academic culture as a culture of practice, which valorises intellectualism of specific kinds and in specific forms, is followed by a summary of the common themes and approaches in the academic critique of neoliberalism. The third section synthesises these accounts by way of a discussion of how academic critiques of neoliberalism in the university express the relationship between the reader and the writer, and thereby, how an under-articulated and contradictory model of subjectivity can be shown at the textual level in these critiques. The final section describes and problematises the neoliberal subject posited by the critique, before suggesting some alternative strategies to think through and with.

Precarity in the UK

'The Contract of Employment and the Paradoxes of Precarity' (Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 37/2016) by Mark Freedland comments

In recent decades, and with increasing acceleration in the last ten years, the law and practice of the contract of employment in the United Kingdom have been dissolving themselves from a state in which a stable contract of employment represented the essential norm into a complex of precarious types of employment relation. This descent into precarity presents us with several legal and practical paradoxes. Perhaps the deepest of these is the emergence into a centrally prominent position of the so-called ‘zero-hours contract’ - a paradoxical development in the sense that, in many of its forms, this kind of employment relation should not be regarded as an employment contract at all. Another one consists of the abolition of mandatory retirement age in the name of control of age discrimination; ostensibly increasing the security of employment of the older worker, this measure, it will be argued, in fact makes employment more precarious than ever, effectively undermining the notion of ‘permanent employment’. This paper examines the legal bases, but also the profound social and economic consequences, of these ironical developments.

Human Capital

'The New Cognitive Property: Human Capital Law and the Reach of Intellectual Property' by Orly Lobel in (2015) Texas Law Review (Forthcoming) comments -

 Contemporary law has become grounded in the conviction that not only the outputs of innovation – artistic expressions, scientific methods, and technological advances – but also the inputs of innovation – skills, experience, know-how, professional relationships, creativity and entrepreneurial energies – are subject to control and propertization. In other words, we now face a reality of not only the expansion of intellectual property but also cognitive property. The new cognitive property has emerged under the radar, commodifying intellectual intangibles which have traditionally been kept outside of the scope of intellectual property law. Regulatory and contractual controls on human capital – post-employment restrictions including non-competition contracts, non-solicitation, non-poaching, and anti-dealing agreements; collusive do-not-hire talent cartels; pre-invention assignment agreements of patents, copyright, as well as non-patentable and non-copyrightable ideas; and non-disclosure agreements, expansion of trade secret laws, and economic espionage prosecution against former insiders – are among the fastest growing frontiers of market battles. This article introduces the growing field of human capital law, at the intersections of IP, contract and employment law, and antitrust law, and cautions against the devastating effects of the growing enclosure of cognitive capacities in contemporary markets.

Silly

Academics say the strangest things.

'What if we refuse to be citizens? A Manifesto for Vacating Civic Order' by Santiago López Petit in 10(3) Borderlands (2011) comments that

Today’s citizen is no longer a free person. Citizens are no longer free people who want to live in a free community. A political consciousness that is not taught, but rather conquered, has gradually disappeared. It could not have happened another way. Public space has become a street full of shops that never close, an ongoing television show in which an idiot tells us in detail why he separated from his wife. School, in turn, is not asked to promote a critical consciousness but to merely impart learning of ‘correct’ civic behaviors, variations of a pretense ‘education for citizenship’. Political struggles seem likewise to have disappeared from a world in which there are only diverse types of catastrophes (economic, environmental, natural, etc.). However, when politicians address us, when they pay lip service to calls of participation, they keep calling us citizens. Why? Why is this word, which little by little has been emptied of all political force, still in use? 

Perhaps because there's value in working within the liberal democratic state, contrary to the author's vision that we should just walk off in a huff with a copy of Foucault For Dummies under our arms.

López Petit goes on conclude

What if we refuse to be citizens? Actually, there are not two ways of emptying the figure of the citizen. Construction and destruction are not opposite poles. In every attempt to build something there is destruction, and vice versa. Only from the standpoint of power is it possible to distinguish between who is violent and who is nonviolent. To refuse to be citizens is to set in motion the power (potencia) of emptying and to operate according to a transversal strategy. It is to refuse to be what reality forces us to be, that is, to refuse to be citizens - there is no need to recall that citizen is today the authentic name for the unit of mobilization - consists in drawing a line between what one wants to live and what one is willing to live. Transversality, on the other hand, means that there is no longer a privileged battlefront of struggle (for example: the sphere of work), but that the combat is aimed against reality itself conceived as a continuum of struggles. When life is a battlefront it is no longer useful to consider partial approaches. The aim should always be the same: to puncture reality in order to breathe. For that to happen, we must begin to open no-man’s-lands. The no man’s lands that, stuck in the war front, are the place to replenish in order to attack again this damn videogame we are in. As we empty the figure of the citizen, the force of anonymity that lives inside each of us can emerge. That force escapes because nobody knows its real force. That force is irreducible because it is the force of the desire to live. Exit. Exit everything while already building a world between us. Exiting everything but without killing each other. Exit, also, the very idea of emptying defended by this manifesto. What if we refuse to be citizens? 

What, on the other hand, if we simply stop being so silly and give the Virilio and Žižek a break.

Legal warming

I confess to being underwhelmed by the 104 page Breaking The Frozen Sea: The case for reforming legal education at the Australian National University report [PDF] regarding law teaching at the ANU, one of those documents that - as yet - seems to have been discussed more often than it has actually been read.

Melanie Poole, the lead author, comments that -

Kafka wrote that 'a book must be an axe to break the frozen sea of our soul'. I hope that this report can remind us, as a law school community, of how powerful and transformative the law can be. Even the firm hand of stare decisis cannot enclose the human minds and human souls that create, defend, contest and interpret the law. As we study the rules, we should also reflect on our own role in shaping them. As we learn how to 'think like lawyers', let's also cultivate our capacity to think like human beings. As we confront the frozen sea of legal education, let's raise our axes high.

One immediate response might be that 'thinking like a lawyer' and 'thinking like human beings' are not antithetical. Thinking like a lawyer - it's somewhat unclear what that involves - may be useful in protecting and improving the lot of human beings, and indeed of non-human beings. Another response might be to ask whether legal teaching - or 'the law' - is a frozen sea, and whether the cold is determined by the legal profession and Australian society rather than by the Law Dean, the Vice-Chancellor and the academics. The report doesn’t go very far in addressing "how powerful and transformative the law can be": students in search of a reminder about power and transformation would be better off reading Brown's recent biography of Michael Kirby.

Ms Poole argues that -

Law schools are places where many of the world's smartest, most privileged, most powerful (or about-to-be-powerful) people accumulate. But instead of focusing on the things that really matter, instead of developing our capacities as problem solvers, peacemakers, activists or great leaders, we are taught a narrow set of technical, commercially oriented skills. Instead of learning to collaborate with others - that it is amazing what can get done when it doesn't matter who gets the credit - we learn that we should compete, fiercely self-promote and reproduce hierarchy. And instead of opening the door to the wide world of opportunities that awaits us, law schools foster the misleading conception that the 'real world' of law is found only in corporate practice.

That is hardly an original lament. More importantly, it elides questions about student responsibility, about the appropriateness of student expectations and about the role of the legal profession.

The report refers to "a remarkable level of dissatisfaction and cynicism amongst law students and young lawyers across Australia and the English speaking world". Remarkable? Remarkable relative to what? More remarkable than in the past? More remarkable than other professions? Or of blue-collar trades? How much of the dissatisfaction is attributable to what the report expresses as -

While some students cite the prestige and earning capacity of a law degree, other students voiced a desire to use their knowledge and skills to change society. Importantly, students acknowledged that their motivations for pursuing a law degree were not clearly defined. Many students took up the degree to test it out, or because they understood law to be a versatile degree, or – in a remarkable number of cases – 'because they got the grade for it'.

A remarkable number? Perhaps law teaching should be at the postgrad level only, with entry after a humanities degree or several years in the workforce as an adult. A smaller cohort of self-involved, naive and and aimless princesses might reduce the collective angst.

The authors comment that -

Students felt that a lack of meaningful assessment feedback reduced their ability to learn and to improve themselves. Students said they sacrificed their personal lives to study harder, and that when this failed to produce results, they felt inadequate, insecure and frustrated. ... Students found problems with the highly individualist and often adversarial nature of law school assessment practices. While it should be acknowledged that some students 'thrive' on healthy competition, many students stated that student isolation was bolstered by a focus on individual assessment instead of collaborative forms of assessment. Students stated that the banded grading system reinforces this unhealthy competition by ensuring that a few people are 'winners' and most others are 'losers'.

Regrettably there is no acknowledgement of challenges regarding "collaborative forms of assessment". The proposed solution seems to be -

the use of 'democratic learning'. Democratic learning is student-centred and student-contextualised education in which staff and students work together to create the learning environment environment. Staff and students would be equal members in a community of shared educational purpose. ... [and] student-facilitated learning. In this method, later-year students facilitate newer students’ education, encouraging peer-to-peer learning

Fortunately the P2P reference isn't accompanied by other education 2.0 buzzwords.

The report calls on ANU Law to

1. Recognise that the purpose of legal education is as multifaceted and diverse as its stakeholders.

2. Foster this diversity within legal education by:

2.1 Embedding critical perspectives into the curriculum;
2.2 Providing students with meaningful opportunities to reflect on their reasons for attending law school;
2.3 Ensuring that staff and student deliberation on the purpose of legal education is systematically fostered.

3. Provide diverse learning opportunities by:

3.1 Increasing opportunities for clinical placements;
3.2 Encouraging opportunities for civic and workplace involvement (ie volunteer work and work experience);
3.3 Moving extra-curricular activities such as mooting, negotiations and client interviews into the core curriculum;
3.4 Including activities such as submission writing, negotiation and advocacy in assessment.

4. Foster more engaging tutorials by:

4.1 Rearranging tutorial rooms so that students are facing each other [!];
4.2 Providing tutors with guidance on facilitation techniques and methods to engage students in discussion;
4.3 Appointing tutors based on their teaching ability in addition to their expertise in substantive law;
4.4 Allocating marks for tutorial participation where it is clearly tied to learning outcomes and provides an opportunity for genuine, interactive and intellectually engaging participation.

5. Reduce lecture sizes by any means (ie through lecture streams in large compulsory courses).

6. Ensure consistent and high quality teaching through a teaching evaluation process that places increased emphasis on student feedback.

7. Enable students to assess how they have met their own learning goals rather than simply assessing the quality of 'service delivery'.

8. Restructure the curriculum to achieve a greater balance between doctrinal material, diverse learning environments and activities and the study of law in a social, political, historical and cultural context.

9. Adopt a holistic, whole of degree, approach to assessment to provide students with the full range of competencies and skills identified in the ANU College of Law's Graduate Attributes document.

10. Increase the variety of assessment that students are required to complete (ie to include group work, oral assessment and clinical placements).

11. Increase the variety of written assessment that students are required to complete (ie to include case notes, written submissions, policy documents, reports and reflections).

12. Ensure standardised and transparent assessment processes by:

12.1 Providing clear and thorough information on assessment requirements, including the criteria on which an assignment will be assessed;
12.2 Providing constructive feedback, with reference to the assessment criteria, which indicates to students how they can improve their performance.

13. Abolish banded grading and replace it with an alternative grading system (ie a pass/fail system). The ANU College of Law should conduct an additional thorough review of its grading policy.

14. Create a dedicated course to develop legal reading, writing and reasoning skills.

15. Improve student access to teaching staff and encourage increased mentoring by staff.

16. Instigate a mentor program with professionals outside the spheres of academic and corporate law.

17. Enable students to learn and improve through assessment by:

17.1 Ensuring routine and standardised transparency and feedback on assessment;
17.2 Providing model answers to assessment tasks;
17.3 Reducing emphasis on highly weighted individual exams;
17.4 Increasing use of smaller, continuous and collaborative assessment tasks.

18. Augment teaching of critical thinking, from the beginning of the law degree by:

18.1 Making critical perspectives part of assessment;
18.2 Making some critical courses mandatory;
18.3 Communicating the value of trans-disciplinary perspectives to students.

Student employment

As UC Vice Chancellor Stephen Parker commented at the Commencement Ceremony earlier this week, many university students need to work in order to support themselves during their studies.

A new 46 page report by Rezida Zakirova & Cain Polidano of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research on Outcomes from combining work and tertiary study [PDF] comments that -

Working in some capacity is almost considered de rigueur for tertiary students. The reasons for working and the impact this has on both an individual's ability to complete their studies and on their post-study labour market outcomes are only recently receiving attention.

This is the first study in Australia to use multivariate analysis to examine motivations and education and employment outcomes from working while studying for both vocational education and training (VET) students (excluding apprentices and trainees) and higher education students aged 25 years and under. It is important to try and eliminate the effects of confounding factors — factors that are related to both working and outcomes—that distort the relationship between outcomes and work while studying. In contrast to descriptive statistics, the use of multivariate analysis allows us to determine whether any observed relationship between hours of work and course completion, for example, is due to hours of work or a third variable, such as socioeconomic background.

Using the 1995 and 1998 cohorts of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY), this study investigates the motivations for and the education and employment outcomes from working while studying for both vocational education and training (VET) and higher education students.

The authors conclude that income is "an important motivating factor" -

those in receipt of income support are less likely to work while studying, although this is dependent on whether the student is still living at home.

They argue that -

• For those studying full-time, working impacts on completion — the more hours worked, the greater the effect. For example, working 16–24 hours a week reduces the completion rate by eight percentage points, while more than 24 hours reduces it by 14 percentage points.

• Finding work in a job considered a 'career' job while studying has a significant and positive impact on course completion for both VET and higher education students.

• For all tertiary students, being employed in the final year of study improves the chances of finding full-time employment, even three years after completing the course.

• For both full- and part-time students, the longer they have been employed in a job, the greater the likelihood of course completion, while past work experience also increases the likelihood of completion for full-time students (2.5 percentage points per year of employment). Perhaps this reflects that these students have better time management skills.

More specifically -

After controlling for differences between VET and higher education students, including academic ability, we find that full- and part-time VET students aged 25 and under in their first tertiary course are around ten percentage points more likely to complete than their higher education counterparts. The higher completion rates among this group of VET students may be due to a number of reasons, including the shorter duration of the courses, differences in the academic demands of the courses and differences in the flexibility and modes of course delivery. In general, the modularised nature of VET means that courses can be better tailored to individual training needs and are delivered in a greater range of modes, especially off-campus delivery modes.

After controlling for differences between those who choose different work and study combinations, including academic ability, course load, courses types and field of study, we find that for those aged 25 and under in their first tertiary course, working while studying can reduce the chances of completing, but it depends on the hours worked. For full-time students, we find that compared with those who do not work while studying, those who work up to eight hours (roughly a day) a week on average while studying are just as likely to complete, while those who work more than eight hours are less likely to complete; that is, those working 8.1 to 16 hours (roughly two days) a week, 16.1 to 24 hours (roughly three days) a week and those working more than 24 hours a week are five percentage points, eight percentage points and 14 percentage points less likely to complete, respectively. For part-time students, due to the small number of observations, the only comparison is between those who work fewer than 32 hours per week (part-time workers) and those who work more than 32 hours (full-time workers). We estimate that part-time students who work full-time are around 12 percentage points less likely to complete than those who work fewer than 32 hours per week. From tests performed, we find no evidence that these results are affected by self-selection bias — the presence of unobserved factors that affect both the choice of average hours worked and course completion.

We find that, generally speaking, there are no differences in the ability of full-time VET students and full-time higher education students to manage work and study. However, we find that part-time VET students who work full-time (work more than 32 hours per week on average over their course) are around 15 percentage points more likely to complete than part-time higher education students who work full-time. To complete a qualification part-time while working full-time requires considerable effort and application and the longer duration of higher education courses may make the required commitment more taxing. The relatively long commitment required to obtain a higher education qualification part-time may also mean that employers are less likely to support full-time employees who choose this education pathway.

Importantly, we find that, for both VET and higher education students, the type of work performed while studying has a significant bearing on completion. Full-time students who find a job they would like as a career while studying (around 12% of both VET and higher education students) are estimated to be around four percentage points more likely to complete study than those who work in a job that is not a career job, while the same effect for part-time students is around ten percentage points. A possible explanation is that most of those who find a career job while studying find work in professional jobs, especially in the areas of information technology, engineering, and architecture and building, which tend to require the attainment of a qualification for post-study employment. Therefore, the prospect of converting their jobs to ongoing employment after study may give them an added incentive to complete over those who work in non-career jobs. If this interpretation is correct, this result underlines the importance of creating more opportunities for students to gain experience working in jobs that they would like as a career.

Their modest assessment?

combining study and work does have significant effects on completion and future employment prospects. Too much work negatively impacts on study completion, but on the other hand work experience does benefit future job prospects. The ideal combination would be modest hours of work in a job relevant to a future career — but this will be difficult to achieve for many students.