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Research

Unpaid labour and territorial extraction in digital value networks

Cloudwork is absorbing an increasing proportion of the world’s labour and has been significantly boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic (ILO, 2021). We use cloudwork to refer to remotely performed labour mediated by digital labour platforms – companies that connect workers with clients through a digital interface, exert control over and extract value through the labour process […]

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Wage Theft and the Struggle over the Working Day in Hospitality Work: A Typology of Unpaid Labour Time

On the Trade Union Congress’ (TUC, 2019) 15th annual ‘Work Your Proper Hours Day’, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady asserted, ‘It’s not okay for bosses to steal their workers’ time’, pointing to the chronic theft of workers’ time and money in the United Kingdom (UK). Over five million UK workers laboured a total of two […]

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Research

The Wage Theft Epidemic

Originally published for Tribune. Every society with a concept of property also has a concept of theft. They are mutually constitutive, as Proudhon argued in 1840. To privatise public land is a form of theft; to alienate an object from its rightful owner is a form of theft; to plagiarise another person’s idea is a […]