ABSTRACT
This chapter explores different ways of thinking about the digitalization and automation of work, emphasizing how digitalization can have multiple and contradictory effects and shape work in different ways. It examines the digitalization of working life in different ways. Self-service checkouts show how the digitalization of work can include a transfer of work from the cashier to both the machine and the customer. As such, the digital stopwatch teaches us that digitalization may promise a better and simpler workday, but digital systems for registering and organizing work have the potential to be both surveilling and controlling and can force ways of working in which resistance is the only ethical solution. Given the sector's status as a preventer of unemployment linked to deindustrialization, and because of the technological disturbance and effects associated with an increase in digital middlemen, it is critically important to explore how these workers experience adapting to digitalization and automation.
