Digital labour in the Philippines: emerging forms of brokerage

Abstract

This article examines and theorises the relationships across three distinct forms of labour brokerage emerging in the digital platform labour economy: platform intermediation, ‘skill-making’, and ‘re-outsourcing’. Drawing from a 4-year digital ethnography on online freelancing and platform labour in the Philippines, one of the largest labour supplying countries globally, I pay special attention to how platform labour control emerges as a process that is constituted in the brokerage relationships at multiple scales between global capital, local capital, community, and family units, and emerging organised networks of workers and influencers on social media. The article examines the materiality of platform labour and the local informal economy that give rise to these forms of brokerage. I also describe how brokerage processes set norms and standards in this largely unregulated sector, thereby playing a role in how labour mobility or precarity are made possible and organised. The article seeks to contribute to the knowledge about the digital work system involving a significant number of Filipinos by capturing the situated dialectical power relations of the global spread of platform-mediated labour management.

Performing “digital labor bayanihan”: strategies of influence and survival in the platform economy

“…Marketed as a flexible and competitive source of income, platform labor has also been attracting workers who experience difficulty in coping with the conditions surrounding older employment models such as business process outsourcing or call center work, or in supplementing casual and unstable employment elsewhere. Yet while workers are able to gain substantial benefits from platform labor, research on digital worker experiences spotlighted its problematic realities, which include increasing levels of anxiety over financial and career instability, limited bargaining capacity, physical stress, and isolation -all of which challenge the overoptimism accorded to digital labor by government and platform promotions (Graham et al, 2017;Lehdonvirta, 2016;Soriano;Cabanes, 2020).…”

“…Workers who manage to acquire large projects become whom freelancers more popularly call "agencies" (or "freelance start-ups") that outsource projects or segments of their projects to other workers, including family members or neighbors (Soriano, 2021). Idealized and accorded high esteem by many of the workers interviewed for this study, these agencies are not only able to command high rates and larger projects, but also generate significant social and financial capital from the clout that they build around their local community of recruits, as well as from the trust gained from clients for running larger projects.…”

“…Workeragencies who have managed to retain a stable pool of "loyal" clients and large projects also receive some sort of protection from the blows of labor seasonality. As workers take on larger projects with long-term clients, not only does their overall rate increase; the percentage rate of what they pay the platform can be lower (Soriano, 2021). This also puts them in a better capacity at negotiating additional cash and non-cash benefits with clients.…”

Digital microwork as a livelihood strategy in a Namibian informal settlement

“…There have been initiatives by governments in several countries in the Global South, including Nigeria (Graham et al, 2017), Pakistan (Malik et al, 2021), and the Philippines (Soriano, 2021), to adopt microwork and other forms of the digital gig economy as a part of citizen livelihood initiatives. The driving thought has been the promise of microwork platforms to separate labor from location (Graham et al, 2017).…”

“…However, many of the concerns presented in Section 2.1 still remain relevant for government initiatives with microwork. These workers still face a power imbalance that is not in their favor (Malik et al, 2021;Soriano, 2021). Although different aspects of these initiatives might appear to be there to support the workers, they actually reinforce the current state (Soriano, 2021).…”