Hello and welcome to the World to Win, the podcast from Tribute magazine. I'm Grace Blake

Liebering, your weekly dose of socialist news, theory and action around the world. This

week I speak to Phil Jones, researcher at Autonomy and author of Work Without the Worker,

Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism. We discuss whether what we refer to as automation

actually relies on the proliferation of poorly paid micro-work around the world, who does

this work under what conditions, and how workers can start to organise to resist their

exploitation at the hands of some of the most powerful companies in the world.

Thank you so much as always to our amazing patrons who make the show possible. If you

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in the charts and show your favourite episodes on social media, tagging at a world to win

pod on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Another big thank you to Reverend and the Makers

who have let us use their track Heavyweight Champion of the world as they're in Drow and Outro

music. And now here is Phil Jones on whether automation really is automated.

Hello Phil Jones and thank you for joining me on a world to win, how are you doing today?

I'm doing very well, thank you, very nice to be here and thanks for having me on.

No thanks, thanks for coming on the show. So we're going to be talking today about your

book, Work Without the Worker. The first question I want to ask you is why is automation

not really automation? So part of what I'm trying to do in my book

is intervene in current debates around automation. So much of the recent discussion tends to

have a kind of fairly sort of absolutist tenor. We tend to think about the destruction

of kind of whole sectors. One example might be Amazon's automated convenience stores sort

of spelling the end of retail jobs. Or we talk about the sort of destruction of whole

...