WeClock: Tackling wage theft and reclaiming infrastructure
The app at the frontier of tracking workplace mistreatment
Hi, Lucy Harley-McKeown here with the latest instalment of the New Power Review. Last time, we spoke to the people at Glassdoor about its position in relation to unions.
This time we chat to the people behind WeClock; the software tackling wage theft, data ownership and monopolised infrastructure.
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“It was about the means, as well as the ends; that rather than thinking that tech was going to be a silver bullet that would solve everything, we thought: What could we do to automate some of the work that organisers already do?”
What is WeClock?
WeClock is an app that wants to end wage theft. Its primary objective is to allow young and new workers to take control of their data and use it for good. Through it, workers can quantify how much of their time and wellbeing is spent at work, and evaluate what is going unchecked.
The team behind it say it is a service that can be adopted by all workers to track things such as skipped breaks, burnout, long commutes, mistreatment and an inability to disconnect -- issues that plague the modern workforce.
“Wage theft is a multi billion dollar crime,” says Jonnie Penn, an academic at Cambridge University and one of the app’s co-creators. “People are not paid for the amount of work they do, in all sorts of different sectors.
“Allowing people to measure their own working time, the same way they measure their step count, or gym, or sleep or anything like that is one solution to this issue.”
Penn notes that the legal community says we need the information that WeClock tracks in order to push back on wage theft. Unions have told the WeClock team that if it was more convenient to record these different things, workers would have more power.
How was it made?
The kernel of the idea was born when technologist Nathan Freitas of The Guardian Project realised that the methods he was using to help empower journalists and activists on another project could be applied to problems in the labour market. With the core principle of tracking your data for good, he, Christina J. Colclough and Penn set out to create and experiment with new methods that would help young and new workers take their data into their own hands.
Penn and Freitas had set up the young workers lab at UNI Global Union, which represents about 20 million workers around the globe, in hundreds of different organisations.
“It started with a pretty wild and big vision,” says Freitas. “Like, what if we could intercept all of the data Uber holds and copy it? We were thinking about the asymmetry in data between what the employers have, versus what the workers actually get. From the start we were not supposed to produce a polished brand and app.”
“We were thinking independently about the appropriate intervention, given where platform work is going, and given the kind of hopelessness that there is among so many young people,” says Penn.
Penn, who is a historian of technology, notes that looking at the myth of full automation, the aim was to drop that vision and start to build structures that serve people better than monopolised and privately held infrastructure.
“One vision was that we were creating an open source framework or toolkit that any union could adopt,” says Freitas.
When it came to building the product, what it boiled down to was helping people collate and track data about their workplace.
“So it was about the means, as well as the ends; that rather than thinking that tech was going to be a silver bullet that would solve everything, we thought: What could we do to automate some of the work that organisers already do?,” says Penn.
WeClock works with ACV -- a union in the Netherlands and Belgium -- which contributed a small grant to the project. They had requests for features such as manual time tracking. Before WeClock was created, the union had already looked at all the existing proprietary time tracking features and apps, but didn't want to subject their members and community to these things because they just didn't trust them.
ACV had also asked them to improve the Dutch localisation. The team is now teaching them how to work with the data.
“It's a community effort through an open source project as well,” says Freitas, noting that every time a new group looks at how they could use the app they try to develop it for that.
The project has tended to focus on quality of life; for example length and frequency of breaks or whether a worker is sitting versus standing. With the Apple Watch version, it can monitor heart rate. Another aspect the team has looked at, particularly during COVID, has been finding a use case for precise location data to chart where employees might be in a warehouse which produced heat maps.
“We're still in the stage of looking at how to put that all together into a specific kind of campaign or movement that the unions can understand,” says Freitas.
Why do we need it?
The team felt that WeClock partially addresses the need for unions to work to serve a younger demographic.
“Unions are, in our experience, designed to serve older people. So it's older people voting on behalf of their cohort, not necessarily voting for their children or people that age,” says Penn.
Alongside this, it looks to make and own infrastructure for vulnerable committees. Penn notes that it can be a dangerous precedent to set that sensitive information is held on and managed through private monopolised infrastructure.
“The transition to digital hollows out some of the integrity and sovereignty of different institutions,” says Penn. “Being on the receiving end of an API and getting your work through Uber, or another delivery platform, whatever it is, things get lost. You don’t have co-workers you see regularly or a manager you can challenge when things go wrong. In this respect, the future world of work is pretty shitty, actually.”
The team does not want to normalise the fact that many aspects of people’s working life have gone digital by saying that the way to have unions work effectively is by going digital too.
“We want to draw attention to some of these tensions and problems and remind folks that, that there are other ways of doing this, and that governments still have room to act to prevent the worst of it,” says Penn.
The evolution beyond the current project will be to figure out ways for people to join campaigns and collectivise data in new ways, says Freitas, either through people they know or people they don’t yet know. This will help people find out where you stand with other people and contribute to campaigns. The shape of these different campaigns could be different depending on what kind of worker you are.
Other interesting links:
A guide to data stewardship with the Lighthouse Project.
Data minimisation and the Clean Insights project.
Thanks for reading, see you next time.