Editorial: Organising the modern workplace: are unions and labour law keeping pace with change?

Abstract

Editorial:Organising the modern workplace: are unions and labour law keeping pace with change? Daniel Blackburn, Editor The title of this edition of IUR is of course a provocation, and invites an old question, are we organising workplaces, or are we organising workers? Before we try to answer an old question in a new era, we ought to reflect; are there even such things as 'workplaces' anymore? On the one hand, obviously, there are: many workers around the world remain in the familiar old environments of factories, mines, farms, hospitals and schools, and for them the workplace remains an implacably solid reality. But in the brave new world of platform work, even the mention of a workplace makes less sense. So much of the work done on behalf of digital platforms is carried out by bicycle courier, by van or private hire drivers, or by an army of online 'micro-taskers', that there is often no obvious workplace in the traditional sense at all. With millions of others required to 'work from home' during the pandemic, and many of them remaining (voluntarily or otherwise) in the new home / office environment, there is a real and widespread transformation taking place. But if many are done with workplaces altogether, and so surely it is workers we must be organising, then we are at once faced with an even more unsettling question: are there even such things as workers any more? The question seems almost idiotic to ask in a journal that reports on the struggle to organise workers and to fight against the gruelling conditions of labour around the world (and we are fortunate, in this edition, to hear from Kemal Özkan and his views not only on these themes of digitalisation and Industry 4.0 but on the wider questions of what international organised labour ought to demand in the modern era). But it is actually the logical outcome of an argument that is being pushed in the platform sector. Companies have fiercely argued that the millions of people delivering food and chauffeuring passengers are not workers at all, but are rather just a huge number of autonomous, self-employed service-providers. Far from idiotic, the claim that hundreds of thousands of food delivery riders in the UK might not be workers at all has been promoted by platforms, endorsed by courts, and, in some cases, ultimately legitimised (it may be more fair to say 'grudgingly accepted') by unions. But if there are no workplaces, and no workers, how on earth (or rather, what, or whom) are trade unions supposed to organise? IUR's contributors walk us through some of these complex questions. Aidan Chau reports on 'the world's largest platform economy' in China, where early self-organising labour initiatives have veered between success and harsh repression, but seem to have prompted both the authorities and the ACFTU to make efforts to improve representation of platform workers and to strengthen workers' rights in the sector. Becky Wright observes that traditional public sector areas such as health and social care, but also hospitality are expected to be the fastest growing sectors of employment in the UK, and that these are areas with high trade union density. That might sound encouraging for union growth, but with most work now in the private sector, Wright warns that even so overall density will fall unless new inroads are made into less well organised industries. Unions may have made early errors in viewing digital as 'not real organising' but merely part of their communications strategy, argues Nicole McPherson, but this has changed, and there is a real sense of potential emerging from the realisation that members can now 'engage with their union after hours, while feeding children dinner, or on the train'. Unions, then are finding ways to embrace the new realities. So too, are some States. Nunzia Castelli walks us through the period of crisis and deregulation in Spain up to a lauded new law reform which brings 'significant expansion' to both 'individual and collective rights'. Linked with this are initiatives discussed elsewhere in this edition, such as the 'Riders' Law', creating a presumption of employment status for delivery riders, though at least one...