Labor Unions and Digital Democracy
About
Labor Unions have served an important role in giving workers a voice within the economy, however, this does not mean they are without critique. Central to many union critiques is the lack of meaningful democracy within unions, or what Robert Michels calls the "Iron law of oligarchy". In the 2000s researchers thought that information and communication technology might serve as a solution to these problems, however as empirical literature developed, it became clear that ICTs were not the silver bullet theorists had originally hoped. This talk reviews literature on both the theorizing and empirical work of labor scholars and HCI researchers as to why ICTs didn't provide a meaningful shift in union democracy as well as some ideas for future work.
Speaker
Freddy Reiber
Freddy is a third-year PhD student in the Computing and Data Science department at Boston University, and advised by the fantastic Allison McDonald. His work explores how power dynamics are shifted by technology with a focus on applying human-driven methods to complex issues. Currently, his projects are on 2nd order dynamics in digital spaces within labor unions and the motivations used by cryptographers for their research.