Digital platforms and emerging forms of worker struggles

Ruth Castel-Branco, CASAS’ member, has published with Seipati Mokhema & Edward Webster a chapter in the book Digital capitalism and its limits.

Abstract: This chapter explores the transformative possibilities and limitations of emerging forms of organisation among workers on digital labour platforms. The chapter draws on an impressive collection of interdisciplinary research undertaken by the Future of Work(ers) research project at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. The research uses a range of methodologies – statistical analysis, data scraping, surveys, interviews and ethnographies of various forms of platform work – to investigate how digital technologies are reshaping the world of work(ers) and the implications for inequality in the global South. Case studies focus on agritechs, e-hailing, food delivery, beauty and care work, and e-commerce, in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, India and South Africa. This chapter argues that the very processes that exacerbate the conditions of exploitation also foster resistance. While there has been a decline in traditional trade unionism, worker organising is very much alive. However, platform worker resistance does not always fit neatly into traditional conceptions of working-class struggles. Therefore, it is critical to focus on where struggles are taking place. Whether emerging forms of worker mobilisation and organisation can transform the conditions of work and social reproduction is ultimately shaped by the sectors in which platforms are embedded, the institutional frameworks in which they operate, the terms of collective action and the nature of working-class politics.

Read the full text here: https://doi.org/10.18772/22025049407.11

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