Author: Veena Dubal (University of California, Hastings College of the Law)

Technology platforms may be understood as the symbolic “cotton mill” in today’s rapidly growing digital economy. Just as the capital-intensive nature of unregulated factory production amidst the industrial revolution expropriated and exploited human labor, today’s platforms—with their venture capital-facilitated business models, monopoly and monopsony-guided ideologies, and resistance to regulation—create and rely upon profoundly immoral economies of work. In this article, I argue that firm fissuring practices across the tech economy have created a two-tier system of workers. This two-tiered system has undermined possibilities of labor intervention in the broader, racialized injustices produced through and with digital capitalism. In the face of this, the most vulnerable, racial minority, and immigrant workers—often relegated to temporary labor or independent contracting—have organized to claim both labor power and to produce friction in the production of racially unjust automation technologies.