Automation and working time: How to reward digital labour

Article

The time we spend online is political. We may not think it so, but our engagement with the digital world is increasingly resembling a product that is stored, studied and sold. Our digital presences make up a mass that has come to be so valuable it is forcing entire political and economic structures to rewrite themselves. At the root of these changes are the major digital platform companies.

Our extraordinary generosity needs to be set against the profitability of the work we do for the platform giants. Alphabet and Facebook alone reported £9 billion in UK sales in 2017, revenues on which they paid a total of £65 million in tax. Our first proposal, therefore, is to treat digital companies, for tax purposes, in the same way as conventional ones.

Secondly, we seek to make an explicit connection between a reduced working week and our collective digital labour. By reframing the time we spend online as labour, we intend to overcome the conceptual and cultural resistance to a 30-hour week. In simple terms, the working week would not be reduced, but merely altered to account for unrecognised labour, which would be rewarded to the benefit of millions of UK citizens.

Related items

  1. An older man with a walking stick is sitting on a sofa having his temperature taken with a thermometer in his ear by a female nurse in uniform

    This time must be different: Overcoming barriers to social care reform

    Adult social care services across England are struggling to keep up with increased demand, let alone improve. But failure is not an option.
  2. Queen Square Bus Station on Hood Street in Liverpool city centre

    En route to renewal: Delivering better, greener buses

    Good buses drive a strong economy, healthy environment and thriving society. 
  3. Townhouses beside the railway on the viaduct with a running train in Durham, UK

    On track to prosperity: Great Northern Rail

    It’s time the North saw real change for better transport, delivering prosperity and better lives: a long-term plan for Great Northern Rail