From Luddites to Silicon Valley: The Politics of Tech and Work

Catalog description

This course is a survey of theories and politics of the labor process exploring how employers organize work, how workers respond to these efforts, and how this shapes industrial labor relations. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution scholars from Marx to Taylor considered how the design of the labor process impacted not only profit but workers' subjective experience of their work and their resistance. The last two decades have again seen significant changes and upheaval in the nature of work-gigification, digital surveillance, and the disruptive specter of generative AI-raising the importance of these questions yet again. Exploring the politics of how work is organized this course seeks to interrogate the historical context of these contemporary debates.