【出版界の動き】ガンバレ! 出版振興に向けての地道な取り組み

1 week 3 days ago
◆8月期・紙の出版物630億円(前年比5.0%減) その内訳は、書籍365億7400万円(同0.1%減)、雑誌264億7900万円(同10.9%減)。雑誌では月刊誌が同8.4%減、週刊誌が同23.8%減。返品率は書籍が36.6%(同1.2%減)、雑誌は46.3%(同0.3%増)。 書店店頭での売れ行きは、書籍が5%増で、文芸6%増、文庫本8%増、ビジネス書11%増、学参5%増、児童書4%増、新書本4%増と、主要ジャンルすべてで前年を上回った。雑誌は定期誌が3%減、雑誌扱いコミ..
JCJ

[B] 西方ちひろ『ミャンマー、優しい市民はなぜ武器を手にしたのか』 アジアの隣人が問う、民主主義とは何か

1 week 4 days ago
ミャンマーで社会開発に取り組んでいた著者は、2021年2月1日早朝「スーチーさんが捕まった」という友人のスマホの連絡で目を覚まされた。国軍がクーデターで、民主化指導者アウンサンスーチーの率いる国民民主連盟(NLD)から政権を奪取したという。広範な市民が民主主義の回復をめざす「不服従運動」を展開するが、国軍の残虐な武力弾圧に追い詰められ、若者たちは軍政打倒のため武装組織を立ち上げていく。その苦渋の決断に至るミャンマーの友人、知人たちの声を拾い上げ、日本に発信した記録が本書である。(永井浩)
日刊ベリタ

【リレー時評】 なぜ日本は、対米開戦をしたのか=藤森 研(JCJ代表委員)

1 week 4 days ago
 戦後80年の夏。テレビ各局は戦争関連の番組を競作した。NHKスペシャル「シミュレーション 昭和16年夏の敗戦」も、評判になった。 日米開戦前、若い頭脳を集めた内閣の「総力戦研究所」が、鉄鋼生産、石油など彼我の国力差を机上演習した史実を、ドラマとドキュメンタリーで描いた番組だ。 計算の結果、日米の国力比は少なく見ても1対12。仮に南方の石油を確保しても運ぶ船が足りなくなる。彼らの報告は、「日本必敗」だった。 だが東条首相は、国力比、天皇の意向、陸、海軍の思惑、中国撤兵を巡る日..
JCJ

What Europe’s New Gig Work Law Means for Unions and Technology

1 week 5 days ago

At EFF, we believe that tech rights are worker’s rights. Since the pandemic, workers of all kinds have been subjected to increasingly invasive forms of bossware. These are the “algorithmic management” tools that surveil workers on and off the job, often running on devices that (nominally) belong to workers, hijacking our phones and laptops. On the job, digital technology can become both a system of ubiquitous surveillance and a means of total control.

Enter the EU’s Platform Work Directive (PWD). The PWD was finalized in 2024, and every EU member state will have to implement (“transpose”) it by 2026. The PWD contains far-reaching measures to protect workers from abuse, wage theft, and other unfair working conditions.

But the PWD isn’t self-enforcing! Over the decades that EFF has fought for user rights, we’ve proved that having a legal right on paper isn’t the same as having that right in the real world. And workers are rarely positioned to take on their bosses in court or at a regulatory body. To do that, they need advocates.

That’s where unions come in. Unions are well-positioned to defend their members – and all workers (EFF employees are proudly organized under the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers).

The European Trade Union Confederation has just published “Negotiating the Algorithm,” a visionary – but detailed and down-to-earth – manual for unions seeking to leverage the PWD to protect and advance workers’ interests in Europe.

The report notes the alarming growth of algorithmic management, with 79% of European firms employing some form of bossware. Report author Ben Wray enumerates many of the harms of algorithmic management, such as “algorithmic wage discrimination,” where each worker is offered a different payscale based on surveillance data that is used to infer how economically desperate they are.

Algorithmic management tools can also be used for wage theft, for example, by systematically undercounting the distances traveled by delivery drivers or riders. These tools can also subject workers to danger by penalizing workers who deviate from prescribed tasks (for example, when riders are downranked for taking an alternate route to avoid a traffic accident).

Gig workers live under the constant threat of being “deactivated” (kicked off the app) and feel pressure to do unpaid work for clients who can threaten their livelihoods with one-star reviews. Workers also face automated de-activation: a whole host of “anti-fraud” tripwires can see workers de-activated without appeal. These risks do not befall all workers equally: Black and brown workers face a disproportionate risk of de-activation when they fail facial recognition checks meant to prevent workers from sharing an account (facial recognition systems make more errors when dealing with darker skin tones).

Algorithmic management is typically accompanied by a raft of cost-cutting measures, and workers under algorithmic management often find that their employer’s human resources department has been replaced with chatbots, web-forms, and seemingly unattended email boxes. When algorithmic management goes wrong, workers struggle to reach a human being who can hear their appeal.

For these reasons and more, the ETUC believes that unions need to invest in technical capacity to protect workers’ interests in the age of algorithmic management.

The report sets out many technological activities that unions can get involved with. At the most basic level, unions can invest in developing analytical capabilities, so that when they request logs from algorithmic management systems as part of a labor dispute, they can independently analyze those files.

But that’s just table-stakes. Unions should also consider investing in “counter apps” that help workers. There are workers that act as an external check on employers’ automation, like the UberCheats app, which double-checked the mileage that Uber drivers were paid for. There are apps that enable gig workers to collectively refuse lowball offers, raising the prevailing wage for all the workers in a region, such as the Brazilian StopClub app. Indonesian gig riders have a wide range of “tuyul” apps that let them modify the functionality of their dispatch apps. We love this kind of “adversarial interoperability.” Any time the users of technology get to decide how it works, we celebrate. And in the US, this sort of tech-enabled collective action by workers is likely to be shielded from antitrust liability even if the workers involved are classified as independent contractors.

Developing in-house tech teams also gives unions the know-how to develop the tools for organizers and workers to coordinate their efforts to protect workers. The report acknowledges that this is a lot of tech work to ask individual unions to fund, and it moots the possibility of unions forming cooperative ventures to do this work for the unions in the co-op. At EFF, we regularly hear from skilled people who want to become public interest technologists, and we bet there’d be plenty of people who’d jump at the chance to do this work.

The new Platform Work Directive gives workers and their representatives the right to challenge automated decision-making, to peer inside the algorithms used to dispatch and pay workers, to speak to a responsible human about disputes, and to have their privacy and other fundamental rights protected on the job. It represents a big step forward for workers’ rights in the digital age.

But as the European Trade Union Confederation’s report reminds us, these rights are only as good as workers’ ability to claim them. After 35 years of standing up for people’s digital rights, we couldn’t agree more.

Cory Doctorow