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Laboring under the digital divide

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MICHELLE RODINO-COLOCINO University of Cincinnati, USA

Abstract First and second wave digital divide research underemphasizes the digital labor force divide and overestimates the impact of access to and skill in digital technology. Such emphasis deprives digital divide scholarship of its democratizing potential by muting structural critique and recasting the divide as a problem of diffusion. To the extent that it promotes diffusion over equality, the digital divide debate serves marketing rather than socially constructive ends. This article argues that improved technical training and access cannot overcome the digital labor force divide, because gaps in pay, security, and dignity cleave the high-tech job market. Examination of the high-tech labor force in Seattle demonstrates the need to foreground the digital labor force divide. Eliminating economic and political disparities requires us to work through the digital workforce divide rather than labor underneath it.

Key words digital divide • history of digital divide research • labor • WashTech

For all the quality assurance engineers reading this, your jobs are gone . . . Make sure on Monday you welcome your replacements with open arms, because your company has chosen them over you. – ‘Saddam Hussein’

This quote provides the elusive and certainly illusive evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In this case,

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however, the weapons are pink slips, the war is on high-tech workers, and the ‘Saddam’ in question foretells dismissals. Further illustrating that the new millennium is marked by what Paul Smith calls the ‘Saddamization of all conflict’ (1997: 8), one yahoo group poster nicknamed ‘Saddam Hussein’ leaked news that WatchMark, a software firm in Bellevue, Washington, was planning to layoff workers, offshore their work, and withhold full severance packages for those who refused to train their replacements. For Myra Bronstein, one of the laid off software testers forced to train her offshore replacement, the posting elicited a ‘feeling of horror and panic because there’s nothing to be done’ (Reingold, 2004). According to the logic of digital divide discourse, Bronstein’s story was not supposed to turn out this way. Bronstein was a highly educated and paid software engineer, a ‘symbolic analyst’ who, as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich argued, was well-positioned to reap the windfall of ‘information age’ work (Reich, 1992).1 For a while she did. Capping off a 14-year career, her three years at WatchMark demanded 12 to 18-hour days in exchange for a $76,500 salary plus bonus. But if the electronic posting from ‘Saddam Hussein’ foretold the humiliation that Bronstein and 16 co-workers would endure in the coming weeks, it also told a larger story. Her plight is indicative of the structural barriers IT workers face in today’s economy. Further training in and wider access to information technology cannot eliminate these obstacles. Myra Bronstein, after all, trained her replacement. Bronstein’s story illustrates what debate around the digital divide has overlooked: the digital labor force divide.

Early and late digital divide research underemphasizes the digital labor force divide as it overestimates the impact of access to and skill in digital technology. Such emphasis deprives digital divide scholarship of its democratizing potential by muting structural critique and recasting the divide as a problem of diffusion. To the extent that it promotes diffusion over equality, the digital divide debate serves marketing rather than socially constructive ends.

Although first wave digital divide scholars in the mid–late 1990s disagreed about how to operationalize the gap, consensus gathered around the assumption that disparities in access to information technology exacerbate inequalities constituted by class, race, gender, and geographical location. Coined by Lloyd Morrisett, former president of the Markle Foundation, the ‘digital divide’ posed a problem and solution for the untrained, unwired, and unWAPed (Hoffman et al., 2001).2 As one early study put it, since the ‘internet holds the keys to the vault of the riches of the Information Age’ (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995), closing the gap would eradicate wider economic and social disparities.

Second wave digital divide research critiques the literature for its technological determinism, specifically, for overemphasizing technological

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access (i.e., the physical presence of a computer or internet connection). Second wavists call for projects that expand notions of the divide beyond the point of access. Titles of second wave research underscore authors’ desire to ‘rethink’ (Light, 2001; Warschauer, 2003), ‘redefine’ (Gumpert and Drucker, 2002), and go ‘beyond’ the digital divide (Jung et al., 2001; Mossberger et al., 2003). Typical are studies that foreground different types of ‘literacy’ (i.e., technical, verbal, and mathematical knowledge), qualitative differences in the use of technologies, and the relationship between such use and wider economic and social tendencies and trends (Mossberger et al., 2003; Sevron, 2002; Warschauer, 2003). Second wave scholarship, however, does not entirely eschew the technological determinism it critiques. Consequently, the second wave’s emphasis on improving technological skills is not much of an improvement over the first wave’s focus on access: both fail to guide policies that redress disparities in the IT workforce.

This article argues for a third perspective, one that backgrounds instead of foregrounds technology. Light (2001) begins such work in her treatment of digital divide research as ‘discourse’ that promotes technology as a solution to social problems. I join with Light and other critics of technological determinism in arguing that technology too easily appears as the solution to the structural problems that surround the digital divide. The following analysis contributes to the ‘critical turn’ in divide scholarship, following similar moves in communication research in communication and cyberculture studies (McChesney, 1997; Silver, 2000).3 More specifically, this critique taps the democratizing potential of digital divide research by focusing on wider socio-economic disparities that the divide, as previously constructed, overlooks and at times metonymizes. This article provides a critical overview of the digital divide by analyzing key moments in the debate, outlining the contours of the digital labor force divide, and considering the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for digital divide scholars.

Given the debate’s recent turn to skill, the present study investigates this development more extensively than it examines first wave scholarship. However, an overview of first wave research is fruitful for our purposes, because it illustrates the debate’s evolution. The second wave’s focus on skill articulates a soft technological determinism that springs from the first wave’s preoccupation with access to technology. In addition, despite emphasizing skill, digital divide research has not abandoned concerns about access. Commenting on a study of access by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Education Secretary Roderick Page recently argued, ‘We need to address the limited access to technology that many students have outside of school . . . Closing the digital divide will also help close the achievement gap that exist[s] within our schools’ (Roach, 2003). Rather

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than supplant concern for access, then, the second wave’s turn to skill presupposes it.

DIGITAL DIVIDE I: THE FIRST WAVE Early digital divide analyses illustrate what we might call a ‘hard’ technological determinism. Before analyzing these texts, let us unpack this concept and its sibling, ‘soft’ technological determinism. Both hard and soft technological determinism privilege technology as an agent of social, political, and economic change (Slack, 1984; Williams, 1992[1974]). Borrowing from Raymond Williams (1974), hard or ‘pure’ technological determinism views technology as ‘a self-acting force which creates new ways of life’, whereas the softer view deems technology ‘a self-acting force which provides materials for new ways of life’ (p. 8). Hard technological determinists view technology as directly effecting social change; soft determinists consider technology either as influencing social phenomena or as symptomatic of them. Social theories that consider the effects of technology do not necessarily commit the error of technological determinism. What distinguishes a theory as technologically determinist is its filtering out of relevant nontechnological variables to explain a particular phenomenon. The technologically determinist tendencies of digital divide research constitute an intellectual and political problem for new media scholars, because the discourse drives policies and limits debate in ways that foreclose discussion of underlying inequities.4

The National Telecommunication and Information Administration’s (NTIA) first investigation of the digital divide constructs a hard technologically determinist logic that views information technology as a social motor and, more specifically, as a means to attain wealth (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995). The NTIA bases its study of ‘information haves’ and ‘have-nots’ on the assumption that the USA has become ‘a society where individuals’ economic and social well being increasingly depend[s] on their ability to access, accumulate, and assimilate information’ and that ‘while a standard telephone line can be an individual’s pathway to the riches of the Information Age, a personal computer and modem are rapidly becoming the keys to the vault’ (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995).5 Accessing information technologies, in other words, unlocks the new economy’s coffers.

From this hard determinist view of computer technologies as vehicles for social mobility, the NTIA fashions a new demographic category of oppressed individuals, ‘the information disadvantaged’, whom the report seeks to ‘empower’. Policy interventions, NTIA asserts, require ‘identifying those who are truly in need [so that] policy makers can prudently and efficiently target support to these information disadvantaged . . .’ The notion of information have nots is innovative for serving as a euphemistic

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synecdoche for what causes and constitutes poverty. While filtering out questions of race, class, and gender as explanations for economic disadvantage, ‘information disadvantaged’ constructs lack of access to information technology as a deficit in social resources. Expanding diffusion of telecommunication media, then, promises to eliminate such disparity. However, boosting computer consumption not equality is the telos of NTIA’s study.6 Therefore, whatever connection to a civil rights movement the study means to invoke by calling for empowerment of ‘the information disadvantaged’ collapses when we recognize that consumption serves as the criterion for judging equality. Such vocabulary, moreover, serves marketing ends rather than the public interest.

As the ‘new economy’ wore on and its outlook brightened, the NTIA maintained its hard dividist position by crediting computer technology with creating wealth. According to the NTIA’s 1999 report: ‘The Internet is a nascent, rapidly diffusing technology that promises to become the economic underpinning for all successful countries in the new global economy’ (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1999). Under George W. Bush, the NTIA again underscores information technologies’ contribution to economic growth: ‘The expanding use of new technologies continues to strengthen our economy . . . As [new electronic] connections open new economic opportunities for more Americans, it is important that all segments of our Nation are included in this ongoing information revolution’ (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2002). Despite the onset of a national recession in 2001 and a ‘jobless recovery’ the following year, extending internet access promises prosperity on a global and individual level.

Like the NTIA studies, academic analyses of the first wave of digital divide research assume a hard technologically determinist view that information technologies enable economic advancement. One widely referenced study, Hoffman et al.’s (2001) ‘The Evolution of the Digital Divide: Examining the Relationship of Race to Internet Access and Usage over Time’, operationalizes the digital divide as the extent to which individuals access and use the internet.7 Hoffman et al. analyze the ‘evolution’ of internet access and use among African Americans, whites, and Hispanics in the USA from 1997 to 1998 and further break down use patterns according to income, gender, student status, level of education, presence of children in the home, and home computer ownership. Operationalizing the digital divide in this way evinces a hard technological determinism, as it implies an overarching concern with the physical presence of computers, net connections, and the frequency of access to such technologies.

Furthermore, the authors suggest that technological access brings economic and political rewards: ‘the Internet may provide for equal economic opportunity and democratic communication, but only for those

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with access’ (2001: 50). Hoffman et al. intend their study to ‘stimulate discussion among scholars and policy makers interested in how differences in Internet access and use among different segments in our society [affect] their ability to participate and reap the rewards of that participation in the emerging digital economy’ (p. 50). Closing the gap in access and use between whites and African Americans requires support for community, school, and other public access terminals, content that entices African Americans, and policy changes that encourage cable and satellite internet delivery, because African Americans’ consumption of cable and satellite services is increasing. Since internet access and use are correlated with education, the authors also advise: ‘To ensure the participation of all Americans in the information revolution, it is critical to improve the educational opportunities for African Americans’ (p. 94). Education, in other words, is a vehicle for, rather than an effect of, more widely diffusing internet technology.

If the goal is improved living standards, however, scholars and political officials should advocate expanding job opportunities so that education and technological access can benefit have nots. Since workers are forced to train their foreign replacements, it is misleading to argue that ‘the United States economy may also be at risk if a significant segment of our society, lacking equal access to the Internet, wants for the technological skills to keep American firms competitive’ (Hoffman et al., 2001: 50). Even with adequate training and access, without secure jobs, the US economy seems destined to remain ‘at risk’. But what does it mean to put the US economy ‘at risk’? Whose fortunes are at risk if we lack an ever-expanding pool of trained labor? Hoffman et al.’s work reveals a rhetorical legerdemain in digital divide research that we will see again in Sevron’s (2002) study: acceptance of euphemistic language that benefits the computer industry or more specifically, computer industry executives. For what is really at stake or ‘at risk’ is computer industry executives’ ability to stay ‘competitive’. A large, domestic labor pool extends executives the option of employing inexpensive labor at home or abroad, and thus, helps them ‘compete’ with companies employing cheap labor. Workers, in turn, ‘compete’ against each other when companies threaten to move jobs to the lowest bidder. Hoffman et al.’s warning implies concern with labor discipline and bottom lines rather than rising living standards for workers.

DIGITAL DIVIDE II: THE SECOND WAVE Later digital divide scholarship takes a softer turn. An article appearing in Communication Research, ‘Internet Connectedness and Inequality: Beyond the “Divide”’ (Jung et al., 2001), objects to the technological determinism of first wave research. Jung et al. critique early divide work for too narrowly

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defining the digital divide as one that can be captured through access and time measures:

When exclusive emphasis is placed on owning or having access by using these dichotomous have/have-not comparisons, the assumption is that either all haves will incorporate the technology into their everyday lives in the same manner and to the same degree or that the difference in the quality of Internet connection among the haves is unimportant. In other words, these measures introduce an element of technological determinism that ignores the social context in which the technology is incorporated. (p. 509)

By operationalizing ‘connectedness’ rather than ‘access’ and considering the digital divide less as ‘a problem of ownership of the technology’ than as ‘a problem of developing a relationship with the technology,’ Jung et al. seek to avoid descending into technological determinism. The study measures quality of internet use by developing the ‘Internet Connectedness Index (ICI)’. Among the nine items that constitute the ICI are years of home computer ownership, number of tasks for which a person connects to the internet, and number of places where a person connects to the internet. In contrast to ‘access’, which first wave research operationalized as a technological binary, Jung et al. use a continuum to measure ‘connectedness’ to the internet. By evaluating ‘connectedness’ the authors aim to avoid ‘such dichotomous comparisons . . . [which] are not sufficient when discussing the social consequences of the technology’s diffusion’ (p. 509). Thus, Jung et al. distinguish their work from hard digital dividist studies that measure access (Hoffman et al., 2001; U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995, 1999) and amount of time online (Hoffman et al., 2001; Nie and Erbring, 2001). By investigating ‘the social context in which the technology is incorporated’ (Jung et al., 2001: 509), and approaching the divide as ‘a problem of developing a relationship with the technology’ (p. 514) Jung et al. hoped to evade the technological determinism of first wave research.

However, Jung et al.’s (2001) study does not entirely jettison technologically determinist assumptions. Measuring the more nuanced divide of internet connection screens out other variables, like the coercive employment strategies of the high-tech industry. Such factors form an important part of the terrain Jung et al.’s study wants to problematize, namely, ‘whether there is an ability to maximize the utility of [internet] technology for pursuit of various goals’. Focusing on individuals’ ‘relationship’ with the internet to the exclusion of structural trends in employment seems inspired by the belief, shared by the NTIA, that internet technologies are keys to the vault of Info-Age riches. As Jung et al. put it, ‘When a technology becomes a resource for attaining or maintaining higher status in society, as computer-based technologies have increasingly become, unequal access to such technology becomes more than a question of ownership’ (p. 508). Articulating a soft technological determinism, where

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technology is a ‘self-acting force which provides materials for new ways of life’, Jung et al. imply that latent productivity and freedom enhancing abilities of internet technologies is ready for users ‘to maximize’. Underscoring this point, the authors add that the digital divide is not comparable to a ‘Mercedes divide’ (as Bush’s former FCC chair Michael Powell famously quipped), because ‘even when compared with other resource-rich media, such as television, radio, or newspapers, computer technologies and the Internet vastly expand the available resources that are central to career development’. In other words, diffusing internet access and more importantly, diffusing internet skills are ‘central to career development’ because digital technologies and skills provide means to employment.

Like Jung et al., Sevron’s (2002) Bridging the Digital Divide seeks to push the definition of digital divide beyond the problem of access. Arguing that ‘access is one dimension of the issue’, Sevron contends that two interrelated yet neglected aspects of the divide include training or ‘IT literacy’ and content that ‘disenfranchised groups’ create and utilize (2002: 7). With this expanded notion of the divide in mind, Sevron critiques past research, the ‘evolution of government rhetoric’, public policies, programs aimed at closing the divide, and the role of community technology centers (CTC) in diffusing access, skill, and content.

Of the digital divide research reviewed here, Sevron’s comes closest to foregrounding the job market IT workers face. Her chapter, ‘Training Disadvantaged Workers for IT Jobs’ considers broad economic shifts and their impact on the IT job market. Moreover, in place of the more narrow notion of ‘information disadvantaged’ that reflects the NTIA’s brand of technological determinism, Sevron uses ‘disadvantaged’ to describe workers ‘who have been largely detached from the labor force, who lack requisite skills, who may face discrimination in the labor market and/or who are currently unemployed or employed in jobs that fail to pay a living wage’ (2002: 141). Such vocabulary attends to the ways in which workers are materially disadvantaged (lacking jobs or are paid sub-living wages) and considers information skills they need.

Sevron’s take on the IT job market, however, reflects the business community’s point of view. Without much critique, Sevron cites industry association data pointing to a labor shortage in IT industries during the boom. Sources for such information include industry group Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), who represents tech giants like Microsoft and IBM, outsourcing firms like WIPRO and Satyam, and the industry-heavy Council on Competitiveness that polls CEOs. According to these sources, ‘disadvantaged’ workers need IT skills to improve their chances of finding living waged work. As Sevron puts it, ‘Workers who do not have IT skills have access to much less opportunity in the labor market than those who do’ (2002: 141). Those without such competencies might

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become victims of a ‘skills mismatch’ who cede ‘opportunity’ to more highly trained workers. The tricky words here are ‘access’ and ‘opportunity’. Certainly, individuals with less technical skill qualify for fewer jobs. And since ‘access’ to ‘opportunity’ implies possibility or perhaps, the possibility of possibility, Sevron is quite right to say that possessing requisite technical skills makes winning a job possible. But as critique of the IT labor market demonstrates, technological proficiency and even mastery do not ensure stable, living waged work.

At times Sevron appears poised for such a critique. After describing the skills mismatch, Sevron discusses the ‘spatial mismatch’ wrought by info- tech’s growth in a society segregated along race and class lines:

Advances in IT have lessened locational constraints enabling firms offering low-skill jobs, particularly in manufacturing and routine services, to leave the inner city for the suburbs and, in some cases, overseas locations where production costs are lower. Meanwhile, segregation and discrimination have prohibited the poor and minority populations from following these jobs to the periphery, creating a spatial mismatch between low-income urban residents and employment opportunities. (2002: 143)

By Sevron’s account, skill cannot overcome the lure of cheap labor markets. Poverty and racial discrimination conspire to prevent inner city residents from moving to employment centers. Sevron also acknowledges that education does not necessarily expand job prospects: ‘many jobs experiencing high growth do not require a four-year college education . . . [as few as] one of eight higher than average growth occupations will require a college degree’ (2002: 144). Such revelations imply that certain structural factors outweigh the significance of IT education and skills in today’s job market.

Having discussed limited job opportunities for skilled and educated IT workers, Sevron contends, nevertheless, that tech training is necessary if workers are to ‘lift themselves into living waged work’. On the one hand, ‘new technologies have made it easier for corporations to move many of their operations to the suburbs’ but on the other, ‘addressing the digital divide is essential to ensuring that the entire range of workers can benefit from the opportunities the new economy provides’ (2002: 14). The following paragraph best illustrates Sevron’s glide from structural critique of the job market to embracing IT training. With only a grammatical transition between arguments, Sevron moves from acknowledging that high growth jobs do not necessarily demand education and training nor pay well to defending the claim that individuals need IT training to land decent jobs:

Although not all of these high growth jobs are in IT or in well-paying sectors, many entry-level IT jobs also require less than a four-year college degree. At the same time, entry-level IT jobs do require specific skills, and the rapidly changing nature of the IT economy requires that IT workers continually upgrade their skills. (2002: 144, emphasis added)

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In other words, high growth entry level IT jobs demand skills not four- year college degrees.

Sevron’s position is significant not because it is contradictory (it is not) but because it distinguishes between training and education. ‘Furthermore,’ Sevron adds, ‘if we look at other occupational sectors we see that technology literacy is now viewed as part of the bundle of skills a worker must bring to the workforce’ (2002: 144). In other words, today’s employers want trained but not necessarily educated workers. As Noble (2001) argues in his work on the automation of higher education, the distinction between education and training is important. Education, Noble argues, is an intensely interpersonal process in which individuals analyze, synthesize, criticize, and integrate knowledge into their being, for their use. Education, furthermore, demands the ‘utter integration of knowledge and the self, in a word-self knowledge’ (p. 2). ‘Training,’ in contrast, ‘involves the honing of a person’s mind so that his or her mind can be used for the purposes of someone other than that person.’ Rather than advocating worker’s self-growth and ability to participate in a democratic society, Sevron’s embrace of training represents employers’ interests in developing a work-ready labor force.8

Perhaps Sevron’s position in the field of management explains her uncritical support of business interests.9

Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide (Mossberger et al., 2003) does an impressive job of expanding the definition of the digital divide beyond access. Like Sevron (2002), Mossberger et al. make the soft dividist argument that access is an essential element of the digital divide. Mossberger et al. extend this argument by considering how gaps in technical skills and literacy interact with the access divide and demographic differences to produce an ‘economic opportunity divide’ and a ‘democratic divide’. The authors define ‘economic opportunity’ as ‘the ability to subsist above the poverty level, to enjoy some choice and mobility in the labor market, and to realize higher returns for additional experience, skills, and training’ (2003: 79). This basic level of subsistence and mobility, the authors note, is hardly guaranteed. The ‘democratic divide’ refers to discrepancies in participation in internet-mediated elections, accessing government documents and services electronically, and attitudes about using the internet for voting, gathering government information, and participating in town meetings. Mossberger et al. find that income, education, age, race, and ethnicity affect access to and skill in using computers and the internet. The authors conclude that lack of computer skills and literacy in reading and math impede one’s ability to use digital technology to become economically and politically empowered.

Although it expands the notion of digital divide, Virtual Inequality does not fully examine the structural changes necessary to extend ‘economic opportunity.’ Illustrating soft digital dividism’s advocacy of skill over access, Mossberger et al. (2003: 67) argue that ‘computer skills are best viewed as

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part of a package of basic skills, along with literacy and numeracy, which can enhance an individual’s employability for a broader range of occupations’. Computer skills, furthermore, help workers complete job training and educational programs. More specifically, computer skills assist adult ‘lifelong learners’ to acquire basic literacy skills. Such programs seem educational, since individuals appear to put such skills to their own use (Noble, 2001). This ‘education’, however, is intended for exchange on the labor market. Through different language, Mossberger et al. (2003) follow Sevron (2002) in emphasizing the value of work-ready skills. In addition, by affirming Lester Thurow’s characterization of ‘knowledge as “the new basis for wealth” in the information age’ (2003: 82), Mossberger et al. support the NTIA’s position that such preparation extends economic benefits. It is not clear, however, that workers gain as much as do employers. Virtual Inequality’s focus on worker training expands the notion of access but does not discern problems workers encounter once in the labor market, problems that constitute and reproduce significant economic and political divides.

Finally, although Mossberger et al. cite Light’s argument that ‘Americans have a tendency to seek technological fixes for complex social problems’ (2003: 136), Virtual Inequality does not think far enough outside the box. Mossberger et al. articulate a technologically determinist explanation of economic change by attributing it to IT. The authors credit information technology with boosting productivity in the late 1990s, enabling ‘broader innovations in production processes and products that will continue to affect the economy’, bringing about ‘rising skills requirements in the labor force and changes in the opportunity structure for American workers’ (p. 62). In the closing sentences of the book, the authors vacillate between hard and soft technological determinism:

As computers, databases, and the Internet have transformed processes of production and the dissemination of information, they have replicated – and, in some cases, exacerbated – long-standing inequalities. Computers and Internet access will not remedy problems of racism, segregation, unequal education, unequal political participation, and economic inequality, but they represent one dimension of the problem of providing equal opportunity in a democratic society. Public policy that promotes access, skills, and the empowering potential of technology should represent one dimension of the solution as well. (2003: 138)

After establishing the magnitude of computers’ impact on our economy, the authors acknowledge other variables that account for socio-economic inequalities. While computers have ‘transformed’ production, they cannot solve the problems of racism, segregation and unequal education, political participation, and distribution of resources alone. ‘The role of technology,’ the authors conclude, ‘should not be viewed in isolation from other challenges to full participation in society’ (2003: 138). To this I would add

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that we should not privilege the promise of technology above other challenges.

Doing so, however, proves difficult even for the softest digital divide investigation. Warschauer’s (2003) Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide argues against the hard digital dividism of first wave government studies and academic research. Like Mossberger et al. (2003), Sevron (2002), Jung et al. (2001), and Light (2001), Warschauer urges communication scholars to rethink the digital divide by focusing on non- technological variables that interact with technological, social, economic, and political problems. Warschauer doubts ‘digital divide’ can capture the nuances of the problem, because ‘the original sense of digital divide . . . attached overriding importance to the physical availability of computers and connectivity . . .’ (2003: 6). Facility with technology trumps its possession: ‘What is most important about ICT is not so much the availability of the computing device or the internet line, but rather people’s ability to make use of that device and line to engage in meaningful social practices’ (p. 38). The argument that the ‘essence of meaningful access to information and communication technologies’ boils down to competency with rather than availability of ICTs distinguishes Technology and Social Inclusion as a second wave divide research.

Instead of examining the ‘digital divide,’ then, Warschauer investigates ‘the intersection of ICT and social inclusion’ (2003: 8). For Warschauer, ‘social inclusion’ gets at problems that define the relationship between society and technology by signifying ‘the extent that individuals, families, and communities are able to fully participate in society and control their own destinies, taking into account a variety of factors related to economic resources, employment, health, education, housing, recreation, culture, and civic engagement’ (Warschauer, 2003: 8). Investigating the relationship between social inclusion and technology is more fruitful than researching the presence of computers and network connections since ‘social inclusion is a matter not only of an adequate share of resources’ but also, borrowing from Stewart (2000), of the ‘“participation in the determination of both individual and collective life chances”’ (p. 8). Reconceptualizing the problem as one between ‘technology’ and ‘social inclusion’ enables analysis of technology’s role in empowering individuals and social groups. Warschauer evaluates the extent to which programs in first and third world countries stimulate inclusion and argues that the point of policies and programs is not to overcome the digital divide, but to use technology to foster self-actualization and civic action around the world. His case studies are sensitive to the ways in which social forces affect a program’s success in achieving inclusion. An analysis of Irish towns with technology grants demonstrates that the infusion of technology does not necessarily improve inclusion: the winning town, flush with a $22 million (USD) technology

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grant, failed to make meaningful social improvements, while three runners up awarded one-fifteenth of the winnings succeeded in doing so.

Despite attending to important social variables, Technology and Social Inclusion articulates a soft technological determinism typical of second wave digital divide research. Warschauer constructs technology as an engine of history. In ‘Economy, Society, and Technology: Analyzing the Shifting Terrains’, a chapter that depends heavily on Manuel Castells’ work (Castells, 2001), Warschauer argues that transistor-based technology has transformed production: ‘The third [industrial] revolution came to fruition in the 1970s with the diffusion of the transistor, the personal computer and telecommunications’ (2003: 12). Since the internet is becoming ‘the electricity of the informational era’, ICT ‘can be a multiplying factor for social inclusion’ (2003: 29–30). As a result, Warschauer argues, ‘the overall policy challenge is not to overcome a digital divide but rather to expand access to and use of ICT for promoting social inclusion’ (2003: 211). Despite supporting Jarboe’s (2001: 8) call to ‘focus on the transformation, not the technology’, Technology and Social Inclusion abstracts technology from society, a hallmark of hard and soft determinism (Williams, 1992: 7). Describing ICTs’ effects as indirect and symptomatic of other social phenomena softens Warschauer’s determinism, but does not compensate for failing to consider how a lack of secure, living-waged jobs impacts inclusivity. As the next section suggests, making societies more inclusive demands more than intervention in development issues around technology. Building a truly equitable society requires the expansion of economic security and equality.

Although keen to push the debate beyond the digital divide, second wave scholarship does not adequately estimate the significance of the labor force divide. The following section examines the digital labor force divide around the exuberant close of the 20th century. Analysis focuses on discrepancies in pay, benefits, job security, and dignity workers experience in Seattle and other high-tech regions. Closing these gaps would promote the goals of second wave digital divide research by helping individuals ‘attain or maintain higher status in society’ (Jung et al., 2001: 508), ‘access economic opportunity’ (Mossberger et al., 2003), move into ‘good jobs’ (Sevron, 2002: 141), and increase ‘social inclusion’ (Warschauer, 2003).

LABORING UNDER THE DIGITAL DIVIDE The persistence of a divide in the sector promoted as boosting productivity and wealth, in a metropolitan area that epitomized the possibilities of the new economy, suggests that computer technologies are neither ‘keys to the vault’ of riches nor means to an ‘Information Age Commonwealth’. This digital divide is expansive and has grown wider since the tech bust. Workers living in the Seattle metro area, near Myra Bronstein’s hometown, suffered

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heavy job losses during the recession. From February 2001 to April 2002, the high-tech sector shed an average of 640 jobs per month, for a total loss of 9600 jobs over the 14-month period (Doussard and Mastracci, 2003). Consequently, Washington state technical workers have experienced a double-digit unemployment rate of 10.6 percent, nearly twice that of other employees in the state. The high-tech workforce in Seattle and the rest of the USA is further divided into permanent and temporary, full and part time, and living and sub-living wage fractions (Doussard and Mastracci, 2003; Henwood, 2003; Worker Center, 2001).

These gaps predate the tech bust. During the boom Seattle-area techies worked in a bifurcated market of well-paying, permanent jobs and low- wage, insecure positions. In 1999 the top 1 percent of Seattle-area software workers (about 260 people) earned $12,000 an hour, while the bottom 5 percent (about 1300 workers), earned $15.00 an hour.10 Additionally, the top 10 percent of all 66,000 area IT workers earned $79.00 an hour or more, while the bottom 10 percent earned less than one-fifth of that; the median wage was approximately $31.00 an hour (Worker Center, 2001).11

With the living wage in 1999 ranging between $17.00 and $20.00 per hour in the Seattle area (for a family of two children and one adult), a significant portion of IT workers earned incomes at or below living wage levels. The bottom 15 percent (about 7200 people) earned less than a living wage, while another 5 percent made less than $19.00 an hour. Since the high-tech bubble burst, prospects for wage growth for IT workers have further soured. Nationwide payroll cuts (10%) between 2001 and 2002 were greater than net employment losses (4%), suggesting that remaining IT jobs pay less post- boom (Doussard and Mastracci, 2003: 8).12

Official wage estimates, however, are likely to be too generous because of gaps between accounting methods and labor practices. Washington State calculates hourly wages from payroll reports for 40-hour workweeks, but IT workers widely report working longer hours ‘off the clock’ and, therefore, off calculation sheets. Official data also excludes contingent workers like agency and independent contractors, who are classified as ‘help supply service’ along with non-IT contract workers from various industries. This move is significant because of the prevalence of contingent workers and their average wage. In 2000 agency temporaries accounted for more than 10 percent of Puget Sound’s entire IT workforce and 11 percent of Microsoft’s workforce.13 Agency temps’ hourly pay is less than permanent workers.’ The mean quarterly wage for IT agency workers for the second quarter of 2000 was $12,772. Amounting to an annual wage of $51,088, this figure is less than 79 percent of the permanent worker’s annual median wage of $65,000 (Worker Center, 2001).

Yet this estimate is still inflated, because it disregards temps’ downtime. Agency temps do not enjoy steady work, although ‘permatemping’, the

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practice of contracting long-term temporary workers, has been banned. For IT workers, however, the ban is more revanchist than helpful. In reaction to a class action lawsuit that Microsoft permatemps brought against the company (Vizcaino v. Microsoft), IT firms instituted mandatory layoffs of up to three months.14 Further complicating calculations of temps’ income are ‘non-compete’ clauses included in signing contracts. These agreements prohibit workers from easily changing agencies when unemployed between assignments. The same practice that frustrates contingents’ search for steady work complicates the calculation of their annual income.

In addition to disparities in pay, Seattle-area tech workers also experience benefit gaps. Like other contract workers, IT contractors are routinely denied benefits like health insurance, pensions, and family and sick leave. Including individuals who make exorbitant co-payments, less than 11 percent of Seattle’s contingent IT workers received health insurance through their employer (Doussard and Mastracci, 2003).15 Vacation benefits are also difficult for temporaries to access. During the mid 1990s, when vacation benefits were more common, agencies required at least 1500 hours of work to qualify for one week’s bonus pay. Temporaries have also been excluded from employee stock option plans (ESOPs), a discrepancy named in the permatemps’ suit against Microsoft.

Benefit and income estimates, however, cannot render the full spectrum of disparities that divide digital workers. Contingent high-tech workers suffer the double injury of low pay and a high work discipline. Some describe pressure to show appreciation for having a job. One IT call center worker earning $13.00 an hour claims coworkers routinely decline lunch breaks to prove they ‘deserve’ or feel ‘grateful’ for having jobs. The worker explains: ‘People are grateful to work [at the call center] to get the experience, and then expect to move . . . and make $90,000 a year . . . Their attitude is . . . they’re unhappy because of low pay, but they’ll get theirs in a year or so’ (Worker Center, 2001). Doing unpaid work, in other words, performs thankfulness; it demonstrates that workers feel deserving of employment, and perhaps, promotion.16

Temporaries are also marked in ways that alienate them from full timers. Microsoft temps wear orange instead of the blue identity badges that signify permanent work status; temps’ emails bear agency markings; they are denied access to softball fields and are prohibited from attending family barbecues. Not surprisingly, Microsoft temporaries complain about being treated as second-class workers:

People don’t talk to me. Blue badges don’t talk to orange badges. They went skiing, I didn’t get to go; they went to the movies, I didn’t get to go . . . you say ‘hi’ and they don’t say hi back. It may sound silly, but it hurts my feelings – they don’t let me join in any of the reindeer games. (Worker Center, 2001)

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Other Microsoft temps agree: ‘Temps are treated like lawn furniture to be allocated among offices’ (Shapiro, 1999). One contractor puts it more bluntly, ‘As a group they [Microsoft managers] think “we have to treat you like shit because you’re a temporary employee”’ (Worker Center, 2001).

The digital workforce is also increasingly divided by the exploitation of foreign labor, a trend that escalated during the boom and shows little sign of abating in its wake. Cheaper foreign workers are displacing US workers through the H1B visa program and offshore outsourcing. Ostensibly designed to grant temporary work permits to technically skilled workers who fill jobs left vacant by a shortage of skilled US workers, the H1B program provides employers access to uniquely skilled foreign workers on a temporary basis. Employers, however, have used the program during downturns in employment, often while laying off skilled workers. Abuse of the program is depressing wages in the US and will likely contribute to a global ‘race to the bottom’ (Tonelson, 2000). Estimates of visa holders’ under-compensation vary. Immigrant programmers and engineers at UC Davis are paid 15–20 percent less than are permanent residents (Matloff, 2002). Nationally, the INS reports that H1B visa holders in the computer industry are paid 20 percent less than the average prevailing wage; UCLA calculates guest engineers are paid 33 percent less, and the Department of Labor finds nearly one-fifth of H1B holders are paid less than the salaries promised on visa application forms.17 The appetite for guest workers has persisted after the boom. In response to industry lobbying, Congress raised the annual H1B limit from 65,000 to 195,000 in legislation, covering FY 2000-FY 2002 and again in 2003. After the 65,000 visa limit for 2004 had been reached, corporations unsuccessfully lobbied for another extension (Matloff, 2002). The cap was extended for graduate students in 2005.18

If reduced labor costs make H1B holders attractive to employers, so do the labor disciplining effects of the program. Specifically, the program enables contracting workers who are less likely to complain about long hours and underpayment than those who have established permanent residency in the USA. Since expulsion from the USA is a punishment workers want to avoid, H1B visa holders appear more ‘willing’ than their permanent counterparts to work longer hours, for less pay, without complaint. This tacit rule, that guest workers must accept longer, perhaps even unpaid hours, also screens out older workers who are less able to work extended hours because of family demands. As one H1B visa worker puts it, ‘the younger guys, they’ll work 15-hour days easily’ (Bjorhus, 2002).

Another cost-cutting strategy, offshore outsourcing, also pits workers against each other. Offshore outsourcing sends work ‘offshore’, overseas to contractors who employ locals typically at a fraction of US workers’ pay. The practice contributes to job flight and wage depression for entry-level and more senior, skilled positions. Amazon.com illustrated the benefits and

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costs of offshoring low-skill work when it sent customer service work to India. Striving to impress Wall Street by achieving profitability (or by achieving the appearance of striving for profitability) Amazon.com laid off 150 workers with one hour’s notice weeks before the tech stock bust. Seven months later, amidst a union campaign, Amazon disclosed plans to outsource the same number of workers to India where it would send up to 80 percent of its customer service work. Amazon intended to pay workers less than one-tenth of Seattle workers’ wages. Earning less than unionized customer service employees nationwide, a Seattle Amazonian earned $11 an hour or $1900 per month of 40-hour workweeks. The same worker in India, however, cost between $109 and $179 per month. Seeking to drive down wages and head off a workers’ union, Amazon announced dismissals of nearly all of its 400 Seattle-based customer service workers in January 2001 (‘Amazon.com to Begin Outsourcing . . .’, 2000; Cohn, 2001; ‘Layoffs: One Click Away’, 2000).

Offshoring highly skilled work like software development also helps employers reduce labor costs and expand work hours. Claiming ‘times are changing’ at a July 2002 meeting, Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine told other managers: ‘You CAN do it outside of Redmond . . . outsourcing is not just for non-critical work . . . Redmond is not the center of the universe.’19 The global labor force has numerous advantages, or as Valentine put it, ‘Going global gets you development leverage . . . [to] . . . extend the effective workday to about 16–18 hours.’ Offshoring enables a virtually endless shift, since code can be input in one time zone and checked in another. Valentine singles out India, where Microsoft can ‘leverage the Indian economy’s lower cost structure. . . [and] . . . virtually any technical resource can be had’. Moreover, India boasts a ‘large and technically qualified talent pool of 450,000 software engineers’, a cheap, exploitable labor market that grows by 70,000 workers a year. In rather dehumanizing terms, Valentine concludes that Microsoft can get ‘quality work at 50–60% of the cost . . . that’s 2 heads for the price of 1’. It appears that Valentine’s plans are coming to fruition. Seattle-based labor union WashTech, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, has disclosed that Microsoft is sending work on its next operating system to India, and is doing so at more than twice the rate than the company publicly admits (Bishop, 2004).

Washington state agencies are also sending highly skilled IT work offshore. The Washington Healthcare Authority, which provides over one half million residents with access to health insurance, awarded a $3 million contract to update its eligibility and accounting programs to Healthaxis, a contractor that outsources a significant portion of the project to Satyam Computer Services in India. Meanwhile, the Washington Department of Corrections has signed a $25 million contract with IBM for a new offender

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management system. IBM is sending the work to its Indian facility (Beckman, 2003; Cook, 2003). Washington is not alone, as most state governments offshore work to some degree (Mattera, 2004).

National statistics also point to a ‘great job exodus’ in the IT industry (Beckman, 2003). From 15 August 2003 to 15 August 2004, US corporations offshored 214,022 jobs. Consequently, the US economy lost 120,521 jobs (Offshore Tracker, 2006). Gartner forecasts that 25 percent of all IT jobs will be offshored by 2008 (Reingold, 2004), and Forrester Research predicts that over the next 15 years US companies will offshore 3.3 million service jobs, 1 million of them in IT, totaling $136 billion in lost wages (Frauenheim, 2004; Gaudin, 2002; Geary, 2004). Although such estimates might prove overly pessimistic, nearly one-fourth of those responding to a high-tech worker survey claimed their employer had already offshored work, and one-fifth had either trained their foreign replacement post layoff or knew someone who had (‘A Survey of Information Technology Workers’, 2004; Beckman, 2004).

While offshoring’s contribution to job loss has attracted substantial media coverage, an equally disastrous though under-reported effect of offshoring is its impact on the wages and spirits of US workers. Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute attributes 15–25 percent of wage declines in the USA to globalization (Doussard and Mastracci, 2003). The psychological effects are also significant. Myra Bronstein, the Seattle-area software engineer forced to train her offshore replacement under threat of being denied severance, testified before the Washington State Legislature in early 2004 that she experienced such demands as demeaning, especially after working so hard for the company (Bronstein, 2004).

WORKING THROUGH THE DIGITAL DIVIDE Our analysis of the digital workforce divide suggests that first and second wave digital divide scholars remain overly optimistic that access to the newest technology and acquisition of technical skills provide passage out of low-wage, temporary work. Technical skills and access cannot guarantee such rewards, because the digital divide is structural; it exists in the labor market, in the hiring practices of IT and contract employers, not in the wires, chips, or ether. Nor does it exist in the minds and hands of those accessing them. When workers like Myra Bronstein train their offshore replacements, it is not lack of IT skill that costs jobs; it is the employer who embraces offshoring to keep costs low and discipline high. Although digital divide programs promise to help some improve their lot, first and second wave digital divide research implies that it is the individual’s responsibility to do so. This message contributes to the ‘politics of the self ’ (Cloud, 2001) that spotlights individual improvement over broader social change. Focus on the self frustrates the wider structural critique in which we need to engage

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to close gaping socio-economic divides and avoid contributing to management and marketing agendas.

In shifting the focus of the debate, however, critics of the digital divide should consider the strategic challenges we will encounter. Perhaps the most significant of these is the need to critique the terms of the debate without further instigating social welfare funding cuts. Recent years have not been kind to digital divide remediation funding. The FY 2004 budget slashed two programs designed to close the access and skills divide. The CTC (community technology) budget shrank from over $32 million to $9.9 million, and the $62 million PT3 (‘preparing tomorrow’s teachers to use technology’) was eliminated (Legislative Update, 2004). We should not read these cuts, however, as a lack of commitment to closing the digital divide or as a vulgar brand of Luddism. Rather than signifying flagging enthusiasm for diffusing digital technology, such reductions signal a broader retreat from publicly supported education. George W. Bush’s 2005 budget eliminated 38 federal education programs totaling $1.4 billion, in addition to the $9.4 billion in cuts to his own ‘No Child Left Behind’, and $247 million to a program that teaches parents and children in poor households to read (Gilson, 2004). We must also recognize that the decrease in commitment to public education is not new to the post-boom, post-Bush moment. During Washington state’s technology boom, increases in undergraduate tuition exceeded growth in the state’s per capita personal income by 50 percent and grew twice as fast as inflation. Also during this period, the state’s contribution to higher education funding shrank from more than five times that generated by tuition and fees to less than three times the amount (Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board, 2002).

Widespread retreat from publicly funded education and reductions in programs aimed at closing the digital divide suggest that we engage in constructive criticism of the divide debate. What I mean by this is that in addition to analyzing the debate (i.e., doing ‘criticism’), we should create an alternative plan to eliminate underlying social disparities (i.e., being ‘constructive’). We should begin by including current and prospective IT workers whose voices have been left out of the debate. A conversation between IT workers and those on the losing end of recent budget cuts, including instructors and CTC and PT3 administrators, would allow interested parties to draft funding proposals for programs that directly serve IT workers’ needs. Freed from the constraints of earlier conceptions of the divide as a problem of access and skill, participants can consider alternatives beyond those that use digital technology to redress inequities.

Constructively critiquing the digital divide debate also promises a fruitful project for the field of communication in general and new media scholarship in particular. Like so many disciplines in the age of dwindling public funds for education, communication needs to differentiate itself from

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other fields to avoid the appearance of duplicating research and course offerings. Robert McChesney argues that our unique critical abilities boost the prestige of our discipline. Not mincing words, McChesney warns, ‘If we accept the turn to purely market-driven communication as legitimate, we almost certainly undermine any justification for the field’s existence’ (1997: 572). That public support for education has dwindled during the seven years since McChesney’s admonition should provide more not less grist for our critical mill.

Thus, as I have been arguing throughout this article, we need to expand the debate to focus on the digital labor force divide. New media scholars in communication departments are well positioned to engage in a more thoroughgoing critique than are others who have called for broader thinking. Working outside management and marketing departments, we can explore the ways in which past digital divide research has served management ends by supporting production of a large labor pool with work-ready skills. We are free to investigate how expanding the H1B visa program, offshoring, and a US labor market with IT skills, creates a global labor pool for employers to exploit. We can examine how employers use cheaper segments of this large labor pool against each other to drive down wages. In this instance ‘competition’ is not between the best products or most talented companies, but between the cheapest workers. New media scholars can also consider how debates like the digital divide serve marketing ends by promoting the diffusion of technology instead of the expansion of democracy. Without intervention, the debate will continue to operate as a discourse that fuels consumption rather than fosters equality.

Studies that combine textual critique of the rhetoric that promotes digital technologies with structural critique of the labor market both advance new media research and support the underlying principles of digital divide scholarship. Summing up these ideals, Jorge Reina Schement argues that closing the digital divide is the key to a vibrant democracy, ‘As we breathe life into the Republic, we will demand access so that all citizens may participate in the economic, political, and social life of a democratic society that is also a good society’ (Schement, 2001: 307). Contributing to this project means closing the wider gaps that the digital divide, as previously constructed, metonymizes.

Our teaching and service can also serve democratizing ends. After all, many of us train tomorrow’s and today’s IT employees. By including critical explorations of IT work in our courses, we alert students to challenges they face; by providing opportunities for them to take action, we encourage their political participation. Critical analysis of the digital divide promises to strengthen our work as teachers and scholars. Thus, closing the divides that cleave the IT labor force into haves and have-nots is an important

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intellectual and political project. Eliminating such disparities requires us to work through the digital divide rather than labor underneath it.

Acknowledgement The author thanks members of WashTech for sharing their experiences as IT workers and activists and thanks Carol Stabile, Marcus Courtney, Todd Colocino, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes 1 According to Reich’s taxonomy, symbolic analysts engage in ‘problem-solving,’

‘problem-identifying,’ and ‘strategic-brokering.’ They manipulate symbols (‘data, words, oral and visual representations’) and hold jobs that require conceptualization, analysis, and communication. They include engineers, scientists, lawyers, and ‘even university professors’ (Reich, 1992: 177). When not working with their teammates, ‘symbolic analysts sit before computer terminals,’ manipulating symbols (p. 179). Reich later revised his argument. In The Future of Success: Work and Living in the New Economy (2000), Reich dispels the notion that tech-related jobs necessarily employ symbolic analysts (p. 100).

2 Morrisett acknowledges using the term ‘digital divide’ but has expressed doubts that he coined it (Compaine, 2001, p. xiv).

3 Silver considers digital divide research, including early NTIA studies, as constitutive of the critical turn in cyberculture studies. However, I find that the hard technological determinism of divide scholarship precludes the kind of structural critique (i.e., of employment trends under late capitalism) necessary for eradicating the gap between the haves and have-nots.

4 See Noble (1984) for further discussion of technological determinism’s political import, especially, its use in the defense of capitalism.

5 The Commerce Department uses ‘information haves and have-nots’ to describe what it later calls the ‘digital divide’.

6 In a similar vein, Apple Computer has promoted its strategy to reach black urban youths in public schools as a philanthropic rather than marketing campaign (Sterne, 2000).

7 Use is measured by asking respondents when they first used the web, last used the web, how frequently they used the web, and where they used the web. The number of responses for categories like ‘in past two years’ and ‘at home’ are presented in tables (Hoffman et al., 2001: 62–3).

8 The distinction between education and training constitutes a division of labor, like that between head and handwork, which preoccupied an earlier phase of industrial capitalist managers (Braverman, 1974; Head, 2003; Noble, 1984).

9 When her book was published, Lisa Sevron was Associate Professor of Management and Urban Policy and Associate Director, Community Development Research Center, Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University.

10 These figures exclude Bill Gates and other chief executives. 11 The category ‘IT workers’ includes programmers, indexers, and data entry clerks in

sectors ranging from aircraft manufacturing to government. 12 Doussard and Mastracci (2003) argue that since wage data does not include the

withered value of stock options that direct-hire IT workers received during the boom, total compensation has further declined. Doussard and Mastracci (2003) and the Worker Center (2001) use Washington State Employment Security Department

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wage data reported for Computer Industries (Standard Industrial Codes 737), wage data for the sub-industry of Prepackaged Software (SIC 7372), and wage data for Help Supply Services (SIC 7363) for 1999. The 2003 study also analyzes data from the US Current Population Survey (CPS) to describe trends, demographic and structural, in Seattle’s high-tech workforce. The 2001 study supplements analysis of statistical data with interviews of IT workers in Seattle’s King County. The Worker Center’s study and the present analysis use ‘Seattle area’ and ‘Puget Sound region’ interchangeably to signify the three counties surrounding Seattle: King, Pierce, and Snohomish.

13 (M. Courtney, personal communication, 3 July 2002; Worker Center, 2001). 14 After working more than 364 days Microsoft temps must take a minimum one

hundred day ‘leave’ before being rehired. Other companies have one hundred day ‘leave’ policies. WashTech President Marcus Courtney describes the policy as retaliation against temps for the lawsuit (M. Courtney, personal communication, 3 July 2002: Worker Center, 2001: 16).

15 One agency that provides health insurance requires prohibitively expensive monthly contributions of $150 (Worker Center, 2001).

16 Showing appreciation for having a job seems to have become a commonplace feature of the labor discipline for workers in insecure positions. One Lehman Brothers worker reports that, after surviving several rounds of layoffs, management asked her to smile more often so she appeared grateful for having a job (Fraser, 2001: 15).

17 For further discussion of the INS study, see Bjorhus (2002). 18 M. Courtney (personal communication, 28 March 2005). 19 WashTech obtained these slides from an anonymous Microsoft worker. For news

coverage of Valentine’s offshoring presentation, see Gongloff (2003) and Heim (2003). Contact author for slides.

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MICHELLE RODINO-COLOCINO is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches classes on gender, work, culture and new media. She recently earned her PhD in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research explores the relationship between new media, gender, advertising, and labor discipline. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Address: Department of Communication, University of Cincinnati, 601 B Teacher’s College, PO Box 210184, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0184, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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