Collective Resistance and Organizational Creativity Amongst Europe's Platform Workers: A New Power in the Labour Movement?

Abstract

This chapter makes the argument that labour agency in the platform economy in Europe has given rise to a plethora of new informal and formal organisations for mutual aid and worker representation. This organisational experimentation is commonly initially based on digital online communities. Their further offline development is rather uneven, however, as it is informed by the type of platform work the workers engage in and the power resources available to them (or simply because the current structure is efficient enough for fulfilling the platform workers’ purposes). Nevertheless, these bottom-up initiatives point to recurrent patterns in labour-capital dynamics. Some new organisations, in terms of scale, structure or development, recall the kinds of worker organisations that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Most but not all of these new organisations have oriented themselves towards a logic-of-membership approach. In many instances, this approach might be complementary with the logic-of-influence approach favoured by today’s mainstream trade unions. Building alliances between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ could reinforce the countervailing power of platform workers and their struggle for regulatory change in the platform economy.