Class formation and relations among Filipino cloudworkers

This chapter examines emerging class formation and relations among cloudworkers as well as its underlying institutional structures. As empirical anchor, the chapter focuses on the Philippines, which has actively embraced platform labor with millions of Filipino workers obtaining gigs from cloudwork platforms. I explore emerging class relations among Filipino cloudworkers given the mutually-intersecting layers of technological, state discourses, social, and inter-racial relations that shape worker subjectivity. The tighter interconnectedness of the global economy and of class practices notwithstanding, cloudwork, like labor migration where the State plays an instrumental role in promoting, reinforces the view of class structures still as national formations, although enacted in dialectical tension with workers’ “techno-entrepreneurial spirit”. In this techno-global workplace, friendships arise, but in the same breath national and local attachments are deepened as Filipino workers find relational spaces of solidarity amid competitors and clients from other countries. Yet, class hierarchies also emerge among cloudworkers and these hierarchies are shaped by the workers’ capacity to negotiate the technological, national, social, and inter-racial dimensions of cloudwork and which influences their sense of control and agency over their work. I discuss the inter-relationships between and across class hierarchies, highlighting how the experiences and narratives of influencers, worker-agencies, and highly-specialized workers are cascaded to shape the imaginaries of the majority of new entrants and precarious Filipino platform workers.