The Role of Free Labour

Free labour is still abundant ten years later and if anything has actually increased, with many of our customers and the general population continuously utilising social media and generating their content. In fact, due to our company’s efforts in facilitating the sharing of clothing to increase sustainability and reduce the amount that ends up in landfills, we have managed to create a niche community. Every single piece of clothing that our company has to offer has its own story thanks to the free labour that online platforms have facilitated.

Brands, such as ours, continue to heavily rely on social media platforms as a tool in marketing our business. Most brands no longer use their advertising budgets on traditional advertising tactics, pivoting the funds to gaining social media interaction to increase profits and brand positions . According to Faucher, online platforms created new forms of commodities that can be profited from by companies. One of them is known as “user-as-commodity”, which means that all our consumers that are active on social media become a way for us to gain profits. Their online activities, cookies, and data collected allow companies like us to target adverts and products that their data shows they would be interested in. This is considered free labour as the consumers interacting on social media platforms are providing further analytics on their interests without receiving any monetary payment. The other is known as “user-generated commodity” and as the name suggests, it includes any of the content that a consumer produces on a digital platform. This is considered free labour as consumers can post a photo of themselves wearing one of our featured products or interact with our posts through comments, which further promotes our products by giving us visibility to their audience, without them receiving a payment.

User-generated content is extremely crucial for our company, as we are trying to reinforce the sharing economy. The sharing economy is defined as the temporary sharing of under-utilised goods. Compared to ten years ago as well, the boundary between being a content creator and an audience is a lot more porous. This means that more often than not, a user that produces content is also an audience for another generator. As a company that is trying to promote the sharing of clothing, user-generated content is vital in not only marketing our products but adding value to them. As sharing is still relatively new, we hope to entice users by creating a storyline with the clothing that we provide. Each item will have its unique corresponding hashtag and when individuals borrow the item, we encourage them to share a photo of them in it describing what they did wearing the item of clothing. By adding the corresponding hashtag, we hope to create a community around the clothing. Each individual’s experience wearing the item creates a memory, making the item of clothing more than just an object. The creation of this community is heavily reliant on the free labour of consumers generating content on their social media platforms.

Therefore, in the span of ten years, free labour continues to be a necessity within the economy to facilitate the marketing and networking of brands and the community surrounding them. Social media facilitates free labour through individuals’ user-generated content and the data they create through their online interactions. Thus, it maintains its importance not only in a digital capitalist economy but through to the sharing economy too.