Labour/data justice: a new framework for labour/regulatory datafication

Abstract

Labour datafication – the accelerating quantification of working life, encompassing data use that extracts additional value from workers – is increasingly recognized as a dimension of the future of work. This article proposes a notion of ‘labour/data justice’ to capture both the deterioration of working life at the labour/data nexus and datafied strategies for effective regulation. We examine ‘labour/regulatory datafication’, focusing on conduits to unacceptable work, and argue that data justice scholarship provides interlinked contributions that are vital to a labour/data justice framework. We identify key components of this framework: a global perspective, the centring of human agency, an interest in the datafied pursuit of labour rights, and methodologies that value the agency of research participants and support collaboration and the co-production of knowledge.