Labour/Data Justice : A New Framework for Labour/Regulatory Datafication

Labour datafication – the accelerating quantification of working life encompassing data-use that extracts additional value from workers – is increasingly recognised 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 co-production of knowledge