Labour and Alienation

Black life in Vancouver continues to be shaped by the systemic erasure of Hogan’s Alley, a historic Black community demolished in the 1960s. The histories and legacies of the Black Pioneers and Black communities across Vancouver remain marginalized in mainstream historical narratives. In the 2010s and 2020s, however, a growing number of Black cultural and non-profit organizations have emerged to reclaim history, reassert presence, and imagine new communal futures for Black life in the City of Vancouver. Guided by an Afrofuturist framework, the project treats Black spatial world-building in Vancouver as a matter of cosmopolitan rights and justice. By examining how cultural and creative organizations, centering Black repair, reclamation, and futurity, challenge Vancouver’s legacy of erasure and create new spatialities grounded in place, presence, and possibility. Using qualitative methods, including content and discourse analysis of municipal policies and funding structures, semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Black cultural and creative workers, this research explores the material and mediated processes through which Black organizations do their work, create socio-cultural change, and are supported by funding structures.

Globalization and the development of information and communications technologies have resulted in the rise of outsourced, communication-based labour in the Global South – like the growing virtual assistant (VA) industry in the Philippines. VAs complete various administrative and service-based tasks for their clients at a distance, who are often located in countries in the Global North. While Filipino VAs earn relatively higher wages than those in domestic occupations, they experience increased precarity as they are not entitled to health benefits or pensions, and their work is less secure as employer-worker relationships are mediated by job-seeking platforms. While there is a lack of scholarship in the VA industry due to its recent emergence, researchers have studied the analogous business process outsourcing industry in the Global South to consider its difficult working conditions and opportunities for collective action. This study will expand scholarship in the VA industry and ask the following questions: What are the lived experiences of virtual assistants in the Philippines? How are resistance and collective action fostered and hindered within this industry? To explore these questions, existing research surrounding platform labour and labour in the Philippines will be examined. Workshops will be hosted with VAs in attendance explore their current labour conditions, as well as any changes they would like to see in the industry. This industry is important to consider as there are noticeable gaps in existing Philippine legislation that do not protect virtual and platform workers. However, these workers play an integral role in developing the nation's economy.

Research of logistics struggles and labour is more relevant now than ever: recent state interventions in Canada, such as the contemporary use of federal and provincial level back-to-work legislation like Section 107 to restrict strike activity, indicate an increasing intervention of the state in labour disputes in ways that limit workers’ ability to exercise collective power, placing them further from economic gains and bringing the political strike completely out of reach of workers. Simultaneously, developments in logistics and platform capitalism have heightened both the strategic importance of the sector and the various forms of control imposed on workers, including algorithmic management, surveillance, and speed-up. Workers in logistics have higher leverage within supply chains today, but face significant barriers to organizing that leverage into power. Understanding how workers navigate this contradiction is politically and economically urgent.

My literature-review grounded analysis asks: what are the strategies and tactics being used by logistics sector workers in BC’s lower mainland to win economic and political power within the sector, which strategies and tactics have failed, and how do national and international political-economic conditions shape these outcomes? My paper draws on Marxist insights on capitalist circulation and contemporary scholarship on algorithmic management and supply chain logics (Deborah Cowen and Charmaine Chua). I argue that logistics infrastructures function as apparatuses that discipline labour, while platform capitalism introduces new modulations of control and surveillance. Ultimately, this abstract proposes that studying circulation logistics through the lens of control and resistance reveals how capitalist modulation can be punctured by coordinated worker initiatives. The outputs of this research will concretely inform worker organizing efforts happening in Vancouver where 45% of world container shipments flow through.