Useful Apps For Low-Income Workers And Neighborhoods

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Discussion

Saskia Sassen:

"Several efforts are beginning to address some of these needs. Here are a few examples of mostly

recent applications geared to modest-to-low-income households and neighborhoods. Kinvolved is

an application for teachers and after school program leaders that makes it easy for them to

connect to parents in case of a student's lateness or absenteeism. In many of our schools in poor

neighborhoods lack or difficulty of communication between the school and a student's home has

allowed self-destructive conduct to worsen, damaging a student's chances for a job or acceptance

to college. This app is simple and straightforward: when a teacher, or a coach, or whoever is part

of the student's adult network at school, takes attendance or sees something of concern, the

family is immediately notified via text messages or email updates—whichever they prefer. The

low-income worker knows that if there is trouble s/he will be alerted.

Another app, developed by Propel, simplifies applying for government services, a notoriously

time-consuming process. Now there is the option of a simple mobile enrollment application. Yet

another such application is Neat Streak, which lets home cleaners communicate with clients in a

quick non-obtrusive way. There is also a money management app for mobiles which combines

cash and loans requests, again simplifying the lives of very low-income people who need to cash

their pay checks before pay-day, and can avoid the high interest rates charged by so called “pay- day sharks.” But as yet there are few such applications of use to modest-income workers and

households, compared with what is available in the high-end consumer sector.

A very different type of app from the aforementioned, far more complex and encompassing is

Panoply (presented by Robert Morris): an online intervention that replaces typical therapy

involving a health professional with a crowd-sourced response to individuals with anxiety and

depression. What I find significant here is that it has the added effect of mobilizing a network of

people, which may be one step in a larger trajectory of support that can also become a local

neighborhood network. Panoply coordinates support from crowd workers and unpaid volunteers,

all of whom are trained on demand, as needed. Panoply incorporates recent advances in

crowdsourcing and human computation enabling timely feedback and quality vetting. “The

therapeutic approach behind this system is inspired by research from the fields of emotion

regulation, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical psychology, and hinges primarily on the concept

of cognitive reappraisal.” Crowds are recruited to help users think more flexibly and objectively

about stressful events.

Another useful tool seeks to develop new ways of working together online (Aragon et al.). This is

something quite common among middle class users and in certain professional jobs, but far less

likely among low-income workers. And while it is not necessarily aimed at low-income workers

and families, it could be extremely useful to the latter. It can enable a sense of individual worth to

a network, and thereby solidarity and mobilization around issues of concern to low-income

neighborhoods, families, and workers. Again, it can feed into individual worth (“I matter to my

community”) and a sense of collective strength.

Then there are, of course, the fancier apps aimed at scientists or corporations, but these should

also become part of the tools (and experiences!) of low-income workers and neighborhoods. Here

is one that might well be great also for immigrants who have dear ones far away but need/want to

be part of their education broadly understood. For instance, take a Filipino mother who is

working as a nurse or a domestic worker here in the US, and has her children at home, a very

common fact. An MIT Media Lab project (The Communication Of The Future Is So Real You Can

Touch It) aims at going well beyond the currently remote communication options by mobilizing

one's sensorial response. Currently, remote communication (including that done in working

environments) is an elementary, and in that sense, incomplete experience. The app aims at

experiencing “...a faraway friend's footsteps walking alongside me as we share an afternoon stroll.

Different streams of interface broaden our meaning of a physical world," (Hiroshi Roshi) (see also

the installation Mirror Fugue).

An important long-distance option—though not as far away as the above example—is of course,

telemedicine, which for low-wage workers with constraints to their mobility given little home

support, can be a major help. Or it can be used to argue the mobility constraints of low-wage

workers, who may lack full time nannies, and may have elderly living at home, all of which

reduces their options of leaving home (Taly Sharon and Ariel Frank, Utilizing Multimedia

Technologies for Interactive Telesonography).


Apps That Can Strengthen The Collective Space

Saskia Sassen:

"A second vector that I think should become part of the experience of low-wage workers is a sense

of their worth in a general societal sense. High-end workers often are praised for adding value to

our economies, for their intelligence and capacity to do complex work, and so on—recognitions,

by the way, that are not necessarily always warranted. Low-wage workers should also be

recognized as mattering for the larger social good. This has long been one of my research

questions. Every epoch and every sector contains its own answers to this question.

There are diverse ways in which the worth of these workers as individuals can become a sort of

collective good—meaningful to the workers themselves and to a larger community. One aspect

that has long interested me is how even the poorest communities or groups of workers add to the

public good and can experience themselves as adding to the public good.

The Netherlands provides a good example of such recognition of worth. Its health system is based

on the principle of universal care. It includes a neighborhood system as a key part of the medical

apparatus. When a patient can go back home but still needs care, the immediate neighborhood is

promptly alerted and designated residents (who have time, and are not ill) organize themselves to

ensure 24-hour oversight: the patient will at all times be able to use a simple app to call on the

neighborhood care-givers, and the latter will also make regular visits. All these care givers, but

also the whole neighborhood, are recognized as being a sort of public actor contributing to the

public good.


Positive neighborhood effects are a long-standing aspiration. Much of that was eventually lost.

But it also always recurs. Thus fifteen years ago, Bailyn et al. (2001 pp. 47-48), once again

emphasized its importance. Let me quote at length:

“Communities have not been a large part of the thinking about work-family issues.

Employees are viewed as being either “at work” or “at home,” as if there were no larger

context of social relationships and institutions outside of the family to which households

and individuals belong. But it is the very “embeddedness”—or lack of embeddedness—of

families and individual family members in specific communities that may determine

whether employees can successfully negotiate the worlds of work and family. Similarly, it

may be the embeddedness, or lack of it, of businesses in the communities in which they are

located that determines their success in recruiting and retaining workers, and in selling

their services or products. Employers and members of their workforces must acknowledge

and contribute to the communities of which they are a part. The quality of community life is

important to the survival of both employers and employees, and communities need the

involvement of both to build and strengthen their capacity to offer livable environments for

all.”

This signals that the neighborhood can expand the knowledge space of one’s work life. Key

components of the neighborhood work space we can think of are, among others, the use of digital

technologies to work at home, to make what we now buy, to design for one’s use or for sale. And

it would make out of the neighborhood an interconnected space enabled by apps that are

designed with low-income neighborhoods in mind. The key image is that even modest

neighborhoods and modest-earning workers are immersed in spaces that collectivize specific

needs of neighborhood residents.

New Challenges That Call For Neighborhood Collective Action

There are a range of trends that we can discern which signal a growing importance of the

neighborhood for work along with a high risk of bi-modal income distributions—high incomes

for some workers and low-incomes for others. Online work is an example. While a good share of

online work is high-level professional, much online work is at risk of becoming a zone for

exploiting workers. It is in my view a key focus to ensure low-wage workers have a productive

workplace and living space.

Much of the writing about this is uncritical, which I find problematic. It emphasizes the

advantages for employers and overlooks workers' low wages and lack of protections. For example,

in an overview of the growth of work online, Houlne and Maxwell (2013: ch 2) write:

“Professionals who want to thrive in this new environment have to think differently. The

online virtual-work market reached more than $1 billion in 2012 alone, and it’s predicted that

a massive one-third of the global workforce could be hired online by 2020. Some reports

argue that it could be as high as 50% of the global workforce.”


In a blog article Elena Kvochko (2014) refers to data showing that:

“...employers are bullish on online freelancers. Nearly 85 percent of businesses that use

online jobs marketplaces say that hiring online gives them advantages over their

competition, and almost three-quarters report they intend to hire more online. By tapping

into online freelance pools, employers transcend geographical boundaries and bypass many

employment restrictions.”

The challenge is going to be to avoid a race to the bottom. The neighborhoods, or equivalent

spaces, need to become spaces where the fact that workers can work from home becomes a

positive both for the workers and for the neighborhoods. It will take a certain type of collective

action, with mutual support rather than falling into the horrors of competing for increasingly low

paid online work and therewith sowing mistrust in the neighborhood. The neighborhood should

function as a tool for collectivizing—in the same way that a large firm can become a ground for

collectivizing workers demands. For online workers, the neighborhood becomes the equivalent

space. But this can only happen if the neighborhood is a space for connecting, collaborating, and

mutually recognizing each other—in short a space where networking and collectivizing can

strengthen the neighborhood and hence the bargaining power of online workers. In their blog

article about the globalizing internet-based world of work, Waters and Kuchler (2014) get at this

possibility of workers collectivizing their struggle:

“The spread of mobile devices is forcing deeper changes, particularly in the way groups of

workers communicate and share information. The result has been a deeper challenge to

Microsoft’s grip on the software of working life.”


Source

  • Position Paper: Digitization And Work: Potentials and Challenges in Low-Wage Labor Markets. By Saskia Sassen.

See: Potentials and Challenges of Digitization in Low-Wage Labor Markets