Book excerpt: Labor resides at the center of all media and communication production, from the workers who create the information technologies that form the dynamic core of the global capitalist system and the designers who create media content to the salvage workers who dismantle the industry’s high-tech trash. The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media is the first book to bring together representative research from the diverse body of scholarly work surrounding this often fragmentary field, and seeks to provide a comprehensive resource for the study and teaching of media and labor. Essays examine work on the mostly unglamorous side of media and cultural production, technology manufacture, and every occupation in between. Specifically, this book features: -wide-ranging international case studies spanning the major global hubs of media labor; -interdisciplinary approaches for thinking about and analyzing class and labor in information communication technology (ICT), consumer electronics (CE), and media/cultural production; -an overview of global political economic conditions affecting media workers; -reports on chemical environments and their effect on the health of media workers and consumers; -activist scholarship on media and labor, and inspiring stories of resistance and solidarity.