Sublime

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted.

But every modern business model is depending on the same old industrial age premise of making money by getting rid of people, or at least people with skills. That’s what the assembly line was for: get rid of skilled craftspeople, and create a factory system where unskilled, low-paid workers can be trained in minutes and replaced just as fast if the... See more

While a return to what is essentially piecework in the place of waged labor seems to promise a salve against white-collar malaise, it opens up another set of problems. Work Without the Worker, a new book by labor researcher Phil Jones, tries to make sense of the rise of “microwork,” best exemplified by platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk... See more