Representing robots as living labour in advertisements: the new discourse of worker–employer power relations

Abstract

This paper presents a critical multimodal analysis (CMDA) of the representation of robots and work in recent commercials. Commercials were selected that represented robots not as tools of industry but as workers. Robots are increasingly endowed with the ability to not only take on the work of human workers engaged in productive, material forms of labour but immaterial, affective forms of labour as well. Rather than being represented as dead capital, the robots instead function within the narratives as living labour and therefore capable of producing value. What is most notable in these commercials is how the demands and conditions of ‘employment’ for the robots echoes neoliberal transformations of work from individuated Fordist forms of production to post-Fordist team-based forms in which workers must increasingly participate in their own management and, therefore by extension, their own subordination.