Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age

Abstract

This volume offers a first systematic attempt to combine social movement studies and industrial relation studies in the analysis of the new labour conflicts in the platform economy. Contributing to the increasing interest in the workers’ voice in platform labour and in worker protest in the platform economy, the book offers a comparative analysis of the mobilizing trajectories, the organizational forms, and action repertoires of different categories of platform workers. Providing an all-encompassing overview of such a heterogeneous workforce, we explain the internal differences as related to distinct resources and opportunities for collective action. We first explore the mobilization capacities and forms of contention of a vast array of digital workers. We then analyze several episodes of labour mobilization that have been taking place over the past decade in specific sectors of the digital-based economy, in both crowdwork (online micro workers such as Amazon Mechanical Turk) and on-demand work via apps (warehouse and last-mile logistics, and food-delivery). While our empirical investigation focuses on the important mobilization trajectories of food-delivery couriers and Amazon drivers in the Italian context, we broaden our perspective to other cases, within and beyond Europe, on the basis of a systematic secondary analysis of emerging research.