Recent global mobilizations against big tech players and platforms highlight how digital capitalism is reviving industrial conflict at the center of the public and research agenda. Digitalization acts in multiple directionsFootnote 1…: as a tool that risks jeopardizing workers’ collective voice and workers’ unionization; in terms of the subjectivization and individualization of risk; or as a trigger of worker aggregation and mobilization, enabling creativity and the experimentation of new labour activism. The book Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age: A Comparative Perspective by Donatella della Porta, Riccardo Emilio Chesta, and Lorenzo Cini (published by Bristol University Press), starts from this premise, identifying the resurgence of the relationship between industrial conflict and social class as a significant and compelling research topic.
A deep understanding of new labour movements and collective voice in the digital age requires more than ever an integrated approach between two main streams of the literature, on social movements and on industrial relations. As the authors show well in the introduction, these two streams have evolved separately and have increasingly distanced themselves from the concept of class and labour conflict. On one hand, the social movement literature has moved away from its Marxist traditions to focus on new middle classes and their post-materialist claims, de-emphasizing mobilization dynamics in the world of work. On the other hand, the industrial relations literature has adopted a narrower institutionalist agenda, focusing on collective bargaining and more established forms of worker representation and voice; or exploring the regulatory aspects rather than the material and social dimensions of labour conflict. Usefully, this book represents a valid attempt to reconnect the two streams of research within a new space of convergence, determined precisely by the digital transformation and its social challenges. In doing so, the book examines and reflects on labour mobilization over the past decade in two crucial sectors of the platform economy: food delivery workers and crowdworkers. Secondary data and documentary analysis are combined with evidence that emerged through ethnographic fieldwork during mobilizations and protests.
The rise of platform capitalism, after the Dot.com speculative bubble at the end of the 1990s, generated a new scenario for labour conflict. For this reason, building a “bridge” between social movements and industrial relations analysis became particularly necessary. The authors decided to move beyond the narrow perspective of the institutionalized sphere of capital/labour conflict because it might prove insufficient for understanding the contemporary phenomenon of workers’ mobilization and collective voice in the digital economy. This is even more true in a period of structural crisis for trade unionism, in terms of both its membership and its political-institutional legitimacyFootnote 2. Such a decline has led the traditional players of workers’ representation to belatedly recognize the risks posed by digitalization, which fosters the establishment of degrading working conditions for digital workers. The perspective adopted by the three scholars is thus a radical approach to industrial relations, focusing more on issues of power and control, and considering the role of militant and extra-institutional forces for transformative social change.
The authors start their analysis by showing how the platform economy has led to the multiple fragmentation of work (legal, technological, organizational, spatial, and social)Footnote 3 (Heiland 2020). It has contributed to the supersession of the standard paradigm of work, which was a cornerstone of Fordist industrial growth during the so-called “trente glorieuses.” That model of work emerged during the period of regulated capitalism puts workers over technology, with a system of rewards (wages) and protections (labour rights, representation rights, welfare benefits and so on) formally laid down in contracts negotiated within institutionalized arenas. In the era of platform capitalism, however, digital companies have taken advantage of long-standing processes of labour deregulation, which started in the 1980s and 1990s, and the globalization of supply chains. These two dynamics have been disrupting the standard paradigm of work and transforming it into logged work Footnote 4, which is hyper-fragmented and individualized. Accordingly, digitalization is contributing to making workers as a group highly dispersed, heterogeneous, and more difficult to activate on the basis of selective incentives. Therefore in the digital era work risks losing its collective nature. We can see this constantly in the imaginary promoted by digital tech pioneers and executive managers, who foreground the aesthetic/performative nature of work, as well as its new value metrics in the so-called reputation economy Footnote 5. These dimensions are enthusiastically evoked as a new form of meritocracy within market rules. The same aesthetic/performative narrative of work can also be seen in the contemporary debate about automation and artificial intelligence (AI), in which techno-solutionist narratives tend to “hide” the social and collective nature of workFootnote 6.
In this scenario, platforms seek to disintermediate and re-intermediate employment relationships between employers and workers, claiming a sort of “self-discipline” or “self-regulation” prerogativeFootnote 7. Platforms are thus attempting to project a new paradigm of work, configured more as micro-entrepreneurial activity based on “self-expression” and individualistic “prerogative” more than on collective identity, or on the quality of the material and regulatory conditions that govern it. For this reason, much digital work does not even have a clear contractual basis, and also evades the classic categories of distinction that have been crucial in the modern age (that is, autonomy vs. subordination). For the same reason, platforms are strongly opposed to attempts at regulation by public authorities and unionization efforts, not to mention any form of dialogue with workers’ representatives. Mobilization is a way of standing up to such an approach and can play a crucial role in creating a common identity and shared systems of values and interests in order to cope with the ongoing transformation of the world of work. Digital workers need somehow to be reassembled through alliances and new cooperative strategies. This may include several actors, inside and outside the institutionalized arenas of collective bargaining. In this struggle for recognitionFootnote 8, digital workers generate actions with high material and moral density in the Durkheimian sense. Their experimentation has the potential to give rise to a new social class, as many scholars have sought to evoke, using a variety of labels, including cybertariat Footnote 9, info-proletariat Footnote 10, and virtual classFootnote 11.
The authors correctly identify three main issues with digitalization: new industrial organizations based on lean production and Industry 4.0 automation technologies; the “servitization” economy based on platformization; and digital labour as a new link between producers and consumers.
The first issue identifies a need to go beyond the naive idea of technology as a substitute for human labour. We need rather to highlight a process of “assembly” between humans and the nonhuman in the working environment. This may generate a new model in which workers have to collaborate and interact continuously with algorithms and robots. This poses new challenges for work in relation to control and power within organizations. Therefore we must avoid mere acceptance of an inevitable imaginary of a complete replacement of human labour. This risks a substantial underestimation of the true risks of the digital revolution, which concern the quality of work much more than its quantity.
The second issue regards platformization as a peculiar way of organizing forms of subcontracting along the global value chain to increase efficiency and reduce costs with the aim of preserving the profitability of capital. The intrinsically “chaotic” nature of the platform economy is characterized by the increasingly blurred boundaries of work organization, overcoming and evolving the nature of boundaryless and networked organizations into what has been called a Mobius organization Footnote 12, without any clear distinction between insiders and outsiders, and based increasingly on co-optation and informality.
The third question is related to the exploitation of workers through valorization of the gaps between formal and informal, and the growing involvement of consumers in the production process in a tenser relationship between work and consumption. Platforms embody a new socio-economic regimeFootnote 13 in which the production of surplus value—and hence exploitation—is not limited to waged or paid labour, but touches society as a wholeFootnote 14.
These three issues bring together the two standard perspectives on social movements, expressed by Touraine and Melucci, linking both the macro processes of conflict transition from the workplace to the sphere of information control, and the micro dimension of conflict, understood as a strategy of resistance to the colonialization of everyday life by the logics of capital.
Following the analysis, the three scholars identify the main “arenas” of labour conflict within the framework of digitalization: the question of infrastructural power and algorithmic control within platforms; the spatial question; the porous boundaries between online and offline; and the difficult question of identity as a resource for mobilization.
Compared with the first arena, digital technology is an extraordinary tool for coordination, discipline, and standardization based on closed and self-referential ecosystems that define specific areas of servitude and dominance. The system appears technologically concentrated in a few infrastructures and centers, capable of exercising an autonomous power of intermediation that rivals that of statesFootnote 15 and configures processes that some have defined as digital neo-feudalism Footnote 16. The contextual conditions of regulation, welfare models, and the varying degrees of rootedness in trade union action have certainly further contributed to the pluralization of models and repertoires of collective action within the platform economyFootnote 17. However, diverse coalitions and alliance models between grassroots organizations and traditional unions have assumed a central role in the strategy of counterbalancing the platforms’ pervasive infrastructural power. Within the standardized conditions and strategies of labour exploitation on platforms, networks of solidarity and dialogue have also been established, including at the transnational level, as in the case of riders or platform cooperativismFootnote 18, as have unifying solutions and strategies (consider, for example, the Coop-Cycle case).
Among the most interesting alliances identified by the authors is the one between activism and academic research. Given the lack of transparency with regard to platform work, the work of some researchers at the edges of activism has been crucial. This collaboration has produced spaces for reflexivity and knowledge transfer among the actors. IraniFootnote 19 and her auto-ethnographic work on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an emblematic example evoked by the authors themselves. The other key actor, however, remains the union in the logic of alliances. The authors themselves admit that social movement unionism needs to structure and institutionalize itself at some point, and in this connection endorsement and collaboration with the main actor in worker representation become essential. In some ways, albeit indirectly, unionism as a social movement, after initial setbacks, has brought the role and prominence of the traditional union back into play, though in many cases more as a supporting actor than as a true leader of collective representation.
The question of organizational space and the permeability between online and offline depends on the fissural and interstitial nature of digital work, which expands the so-called grey areas of work, in which the boundaries between productive and reproductive labour, and between consumption and labour become more ambiguous. This represents perhaps one of the greatest challenges to our modern conception of what work is or how work is transforming in the digital ageFootnote 20 As Rahman and ThelenFootnote 21 already stated, a new coalition is emerging within the digital transformation between finance, business, and consumers against work. Individuals accept the expropriation of labour from the formal to the informal regime to the extent that it translates into a practice of engagement, personalization, and meeting consumer demands. Just as those who don’t care about low-cost products don’t care who “really” pays the price, consumers are incapable of taking responsibility for the risks within the platform production model (from the exploitation of gig workers or microwork to the value of their data and its implications for control or privacy). The success of post-Fordist companies such as McDonald’s and Walmart, as mentioned by the authors, already exemplifies this new centrality of the consumer as labor’s “designated” antagonist. Within the framework of digitalization, consumers agree to produce free of charge in order to accumulate symbolic, social, and cultural capital, thereby becoming complicit in an extractive system. This attitude prevails to the detriment of those who participate in production in exchange for tangible rewards. Moreover, consumers are pre-eminently uninterested in adequately compensating workers and recognizing their rights, beguiled as they are by the promise/narrative of a free (or low cost) digital economy, which may become such only by obscuring the value of labour (and personal data).
Discussing new forms of mobilization means somehow revisiting models that attempt to recreate potential coalitions also between labour and consumption. Consumers and workers are not antagonistic actors in the digital transformation, but rather overlapping entities and even potential allies. Historically, the two forms of interest representation were closely integrated in the early days of trade unionism, and the very birth of cooperativism is due to these experiences of a joint alliance between unionism and consumptionFootnote 22. The authors, while acknowledging that one of the key issues of digitalization is the relationship between consumption and labour, partially overlook this aspect in their reflections on mobilization and collective action. It is increasingly evident that today’s new forms of labour mobilization in the digital (and green) transitions also take the form of a call for coalitions with consumers. Examples of engagement with consumers are increasingly evident in experiences such as cooperative food delivery. However, it’s important to understand that it’s not just about convincing consumers, but also about making them partners in the reclamation effort, as has happened, for example, with boycotts and “buycott” strategies in the past. These strategies are far from demonstrating effective results, but they certainly forge an important path, also in terms of sociological research.
Finally, there is the question of identity and thus the rise of a new social class of digital workers. This represents the truly crucial question the book raises, but one to which, at least for now, only partial answers are possible. The variety of constituencies in terms of motivations and practices within digital work makes the construction of a new social class extremely difficult. The stratification of working conditions and engagement models multiplies across a vast array of social profiles, contexts and organizational arrangements that are difficult to pin down to unifying patterns or models of identity. Indeed, to date, the battle for the recognition of digital workers appears highly asymmetrical also among digital workers themselves. It is clear that the platform workers’ mobilization strategy in Europe has been mainly rider or driver centric. We could say it has been a success, as evidenced by the Platform Directive, which appears to have found satisfactory solutions to the conditions of workers such as Deliveroo riders or Uber drivers (who previously enjoyed more favorable objective conditions with regard to recognition). But what about all the other types of digital workers? European regulation appears not to provide a truly effective response to all other forms of mobilization, where the battle for recognition seems more arduous and where the construction of a collective consciousness is still in its preliminary stages. However, dynamics of equal interest to researchers are emerging. In the creator economy, for example, various approaches are being taken to achieve recognition, often through strategies of professionalization, closure, and professional codifications of skills. Crowdworking remains, however, the most undervalued and mainly a form of ghost-work Footnote 23, even though interesting and significant efforts to guarantee its protection are emerging all around the world, such as the attempts to establish an ombudsman in Germany.
To conclude, are we in a position to say that a new social class of digital workers is possible? While some results, even similarities in material and working conditions, might suggest this, other evidence seems less convincing, especially given the heterogeneity of cultural capital, lifestyle, and motives of digital workers or even their concrete results. The initial question remains of great importance. However, the book does not really provide sufficient evidence to answer it, because it does not sufficiently examine the effort to design and build up a common identity. We need to explore more deeply the heterogeneity and intersectional nature of the different social profiles within the digital work phenomenon. The question is even more challenging if posed comparatively (across different sectors and areas of digital platform work, but also across countries and different labour regulation and welfare regimes). However, the book has the merit of posing the question effectively, outlining possible and fertile research paths that can be nourished by the exchange and intertwining of different streams of sociological literature.
