A recent Wall Street Journal article nicely illustrates the risks and benefits that come from the use of computer networks to create distributed labor markets … We might be looking at a future in which everyone on the planet is competing with everyone else in real time. Is this a happy planet? Is it really an efficient planet despite its ceaseless upheaval, given that people will still be trying to raise kids?
Predictor: Agre, Phil
Prediction, in context:The August 1994 issue of The Network Observer, an online newsletter, carries an article titled “Outsourcing and You” by Phil Agre, TNO editor, who was, at the time, working in the Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Agre writes:ÒA recent Wall Street Journal article nicely illustrates the risks and benefits that come from the use of computer networks to create distributed labor markets (Amy Stevens, A lean network of researchers poses a threat to law firm fat, Wall Street Journal, 8 July 1994, pages B1, B6). It’s about a new company called Legal Research Network that contracts with law firms case-by-case to conduct customized legal research. Structures like this are arising for many reasons in addition to technology. The specific role of computer networks is to make a nation-wide network of researchers all effectively equidistant from headquarters. These researchers are all working part-time, being paid by the job … A system like LRN’s is thus genuinely a good deal for many people. Moreover, by making legal work cheaper, it may increase ordinary people’s access to the courts and decrease the burden of litigation costs on the economy. The problem arises when such systems become entrenched in the structure of the industry … Many things can change the economic balance in favor of temporary labor, including changes in the structure of work tasks that make them more detachable than before. Computer networks make legal research tasks more detachable by decreasing the costs of communicating those tasks to an outside contractor É The shift toward temporary labor has profound consequences for people’s lives É Temp work is convenient when it’s what you want, but it’s a terrible life when it isn’t É The creation of efficient labor markets pushes down wages É The situation is even worse in information-work, since the temporary employer can keep a library of work products to decrease the amount of work required next time. LRN does this, and promises to pay ÔresidualsÕ when the work is reused. But there’s nothing written in stone about this arrangement, which may or may not be demanded by the structure of the market. Another potential difficulty is the effect of piecework-based outsourcing on career ladders É This snapping of the middle links in the vocational hierarchy is found virtually anywhere high technology is used to differentiate and specialize work tasks, and it is probably one important contributor to the growing divergence (at least in the United States) between the prosperous and the left-behind É We might be looking at a future in which everyone on the planet is competing with everyone else in real time. Is this a happy planet? Is it really an efficient planet despite its ceaseless upheaval, given that people will still be trying to raise kids?”
Biography:Phillip E. Agre was an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been the author of research studies on the Internet. He edited The Network Observer, an online newsletter on Internet issues. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: Employment
Name of publication: The Network Observer
Title, headline, chapter name: Outsourcing and You
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/tno/april-1994.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne