Thursday, April 11, 2013

In Palestine, 'death' by a thousand micro jobs


Microwork centred on the internet can allow Palestinians to work from their jail cells, offering them subsistence wages.

By Mark LeVine
Al-Jazeera


"......Welcome to "m2Work", the latest bright idea pyramid scheme to help Palestinians build a viable economy to ensure Palestinians remain safely in their cages while the occupation continues unabated and the space of Israel/Palestine continues its march towards a neoliberal dystopia..........


Virtual jobs for a virtual Palestine.......


Embracing occupation

Whether or not the microwork programme actually produces actual jobs with sustainable incomes or enables the exploitation of more Palestinian sweatshop labour for the internet age is an open question...............


Desperate Palestinians might take up microwork just as they have been compelled to do the macrowork of building the very settlements, cobbling the boots of the very soldiers and farming the stolen agricultural land that dispossesses them. But the World Bank's call for Palestinian "youth and women [to] embrace microwork for jobs and income" is little more than the latest morally bankrupt idea from an international community that has for generations used the rhetoric of jobs, progress and development to mask a reality of ever-greater exploitation of the world's poor, in Palestine and across the developing world. It would be nice if the World Bank supported the development of an m2Work app, or even just a comic, to expose this reality."


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