Useful Apps For Low-Income Workers And Neighborhoods
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