The Making of a Cybertariat or Practical Production Control

The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World

Author: Ursula Huws

The workplace has been changed in recent decades by the rise of digital technologies. Parts of a single labor process can be moved around the world, with implications not only for individual workplaces, but for the working class as a whole.

Within advanced capitalist countries, the workplace has been made more flexible through cell phones, e-mail, freelancing, and outsourcing. The process often makes the situation of the workers more precarious, as they are forced to pay for the tools of their trade, are expected to be constantly accessible to workplace demands, and are isolated from their fellow workers.

Huws' The Making of a Cybertariat examines this process from a number of perspectives, including those of women in the workplace and at home. It explores changing categories of employment and modes of organization, and how new divisions of race and gender are created in the process. It questions how the virtual workforce can identify their common interests and stand together to struggle for them.

The Making of a Cybertariat is both a testament to the author's remarkable record in the politics of technology over several decades and a vital resource for grasping ongoing debates and controversies in this field.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	15
1	New Technology and Domestic Labor	24
2	Domestic Technology: Liberation or Enslavement	35
3	Terminal Isolation: The Atomization of Work and Leisure in the Wired Society	42
4	The Global Office: Information Technology and the Relocation of White Collar Work	56
5	Challenging Commodification: Producing Usefulness Outside the Factory	61
6	Women's Health at Work	77
7	Telework: Projections	86
8	The Fading of the Collective Dream: Reflections on Twenty Years of Research on Women and Technology	101
9	Material World: The Myth of the Weightless Economy	126
10	The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World	152
11	Who's Waiting: The Contestation of Time	177
	Notes	187
	Index	199

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Practical Production Control: A Survival Guide for Planners and Schedulers

Author: Kenneth N N McKay

This concise yet comprehensive "how to" reference provides practitioners the skill set required to meet the real-world daily challenges of effective production control. It explains, for example, how the scheduling task can be decomposed and organized; how the production control department can be structured; how to hire, train, and evaluate schedulers; and how software tools can augment the scheduler's skill, plus much more.