Entrepreneurial Solidarities: Social Media Collectives and Filipino Digital Platform Workers

Cheryll Ruth R. Soriano,Jason Vincent A. Cabañes

doi:10.1177/2056305120926484

Abstract

The article examines the role of social media groups for online freelance workers in the Philippines—digital workers obtaining “gigs” from online labor platforms such as Upwork and Onlinejobs.ph—for social facilitation and collective organizing. The article first problematizes labor marginality in the context of online freelance platform workers situated in the middle of competing narratives of precarity and opportunity. We then examine unique forms of solidarity emerging from social media groups formed by these geographically spread digital workers. Drawing from participant observation in online freelance Facebook groups, as well as interviews and focus groups with 31 online freelance workers located in the cities of Manila, Cebu, and Davao, we found that online Filipino freelancers maintain active social interaction and exchange that can be construed as “entrepreneurial solidarities.” These solidarities are characterized by competing discourses of ambiguity, precarity, opportunity, and adaptation that are articulated and visualized through ambient socialities. While we argue that these entrepreneurial solidarities do not reflect a passive and simplistic acceptance of neoliberal discourses about digital labor by digital workers, the solidarities forged in these groups also work to undermine their resistive potential such that these tend to reinforce rather than impose pressure toward critical structural changes that can improve the viability of digital labor conditions.

Highlights

Contrasting Western scholarship’s generally pessimistic approach, government-funded literature from labor-supplying countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines has verged toward being overly optimistic about the new digital economy
We focus on the Facebook groups of Filipino platform laborers as a concrete instantiation of the social media spaces that constitute a central element of the “work world” of such workers
The online freelance Facebook groups we examined orientate around labor platform, the nature of the job (e.g., Virtual Assistants Network Philippines), regional/geographic location (e.g., Cebu City freelancers), client nationality (e.g., Freelancers with Australian clients), and those organized around more experienced workers or whom they call as coaches or trainers (e.g., Online Filipino Freelancers; Freelancers in the Philippines)

Summary

Introduction

Contrasting Western scholarship’s generally pessimistic approach, government-funded literature from labor-supplying countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines has verged toward being overly optimistic about the new digital economy. Social Media + Society where employment conditions are fraught with financial stagnation and socioeconomic tensions (Ferraz, 2015) To be sure, their position as relatively cheap labor means that their link to the global digital economy is only “good enough” and is vastly different from their counterparts in places like Silicon Valley (Uy-Tioco, 2019). Filipino platform laborers in particular imagine themselves as a cut above other workers They see themselves as well-positioned to provide skilled global service work, develop their professional selves through the distinct challenges of their jobs, and live a flexible life that circumvents the heavy traffic, bad roads, inefficient public transport, and other infrastructural immobilities in their country (Soriano & Cabañes, 2020). We return to this insight and develop a conceptualization of a more nuanced understanding of the contradictory ways that digital workers in the global South, especially the platform laborers in the Philippines, experience precarity

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