Abstract
While there are heated debates about how digitalization affects production, management and consumption in the context of global value chains, less attention is paid to how workers use digital technologies to organize and formulate demands and hence exercise power. This paper explores how workers in supplier factories in global value chains use different digital tools to exercise and enhance their power resources to improve working conditions. Combining the global value chain framework and concepts from labour sociology on worker power, the paper uses examples from the garment industry in Honduras and the footwear industry in China to show how workers used old and new digital tools to create and enhance associational and networked powers. Digital tools were used by workers and their allies in the global value chain to lower costs of communication, increase information exchange and participate in transnational campaigns during labour struggles vis-à-vis firms and governments in structurally and politically repressive environments. The paper contributes to our understanding of how workers use of digital technologies to exercise and combine different resources of power in online and offline actions in global value chains, as well as how they are confronted by new dimensions of constrains which include digital surveillance and control by the state.
Highlights
When we think about digitalization in global value chains (GVCs), discussion and debates tend to focus on how digital technologies transform production processes, firm relationships and work (Foster et al, 2018; UNCTAD, 2017)
Combining the GVC framework and power concepts from labour sociology, we focus our analysis on two power sources held by workers collectively in GVCs: networked power and associational power
Through these illustrative case studies, we show that, in parallel to ‘revolutionising’ progress in the digitalization of production systems in GVCs, there is a quieter ‘revolution’ emerging, where workers experiment with digital tools to exercise collective worker agency to improve their working conditions
Summary
When we think about digitalization in global value chains (GVCs), discussion and debates tend to focus on how digital technologies transform production processes, firm relationships and work (Foster et al, 2018; UNCTAD, 2017). Associational power manifests itself through workers’ capacity to organize a strike (disruption) (Wright, 2000) or collectively bargaining for higher wages and/or improved working conditions (Leap and Grigsby, 1986) This traditional and narrow definition of associational power by Schmalz and Do€rre (2014) draws on the national scale and settings of trade unions in industrialized countries and falls short of recognizing the specific characteristics of developing country production locations in GVCs. From a GVC perspective, associational power can entail workers’ actions and workers’ organizing at various loci along the chain of a single company or in a specific sector by multiple trade unions or informal worker groups. While the first case study on a garments factory in Honduras exemplifies a network of labour activism, the case of a footwear factory in China involves a narrower set of actors and at the local scale These differences illustrate that worker power, and power generally, in GVCs is specific to the GVC, industry, production location, national setting, buyer–supplier relationship, worker composition and workers’ ties or connections to other actors. This suggests that research into worker power in GVCs must be granular and specific to case-studies in order to understand the complex and messiness of how different types of power operate and function for particular outcomes for workers
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