Media 6 – Work Reading

Media 6 Blog Post Week 3

 

Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas – Work

 

‘Work’ by Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas covers a lot of topics regarding workplaces and creative industries. The main issues that I got out of the readings are the exploitation of workers, especially young people working as interns and women. The line fine between flexibility and exploitation is discussed, the rhetoric of flexible workplaces and jobs sounds great, however, this is encouraging staff to work many more hours because the physical boundaries of the workplace are not there. Due to digital technology, people can now work anywhere because they can always be connected which makes turning off and finishing work for the day extremely hard when your phone keeps buzzing with emails or text messages.

 

The ability to employ people as freelancers is also increasing, people can now post jobs online with a pay rate and anyone can do it. However, in developed countries, these pay rates are very low and not worth the effort. Yet for someone in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India or Kenya, this money will go really far. So as much as it might seem exploitative to us, it is a fantastic opportunity for them to earn a decent amount of money. This is also opening up opportunities for both employers and employees worldwide to work together. The other side of this is that if all Australian media companies started doing this then there would be no work left for anyone in the country, causing media professionals to start losing their jobs.

 

This globalization of the workplace is going to continue and as creative workers we are going to have to learn to adapt to these conditions.

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