Class and contention: an introduction

The structural transformations driven by the process of digitalization pose new questions regarding its effects on work and worker agency. Looking at the relationship between digital technologies and work through the lens of contentious politics allows for an understanding of class development in the new digital landscape. In particular, the emergence of a new digital working class and its relationship with other classes must be investigated throughout the whole cycle of the social transformation that gave rise to precarious work.

New forms of worker mobilization have attempted to tackle the problem of the social conditions of precariousness. Our research aims at understanding how the rise of digital technologies has reshaped the concept of work, transformed the social identities attached to it, and thus posed new challenges to social regulation. In this sense, we address the new configuration of individual and collective rights linked to the deregulation of work under neoliberalism and the related debate on the ever-growing ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011) as a potential new class of workers experiencing the social insecurity linked to neoliberal deregulation in terms of labour fragmentation and contractual instability. Nowadays, this debate on the precariat as a new potential class extends to its digital frontiers, as terms like the cybertariat (Huws, 2009), the info-proletariat (Antunes, 2012, and the virtual class (Casilli, 2020) are coined to refer to a new class of working poor in cyberspace, aware of the complex intertwining between working conditions offline and online.

The debate is thus updating classic questions regarding the centrality of work in society, and how relations between class and labour have changed with the advent of the process of digitalization. This process seems to have strengthened the dynamics of capital accumulation globally. The digitally led accumulation process has, indeed, further expanded the exploitation of labour in intension, as a result of the power of new technologies of automation and datafication over things, artefacts, and humans, as well as in extension, given the expansion of new areas of value accumulation in the virtual and physical world. Research on the effects on contemporary work of these transformations should, therefore, be twofold: examining the pressures from the top, such as the structure of the political economy, and those from the bottom, such as labour bargaining and mobilization power.

Defining digital work

Having defined the general conditions of platformization in the previous chapter, in order to understand the emergence and the various forms of these new categories of workers, it is now necessary to distinguish the specific challenges and opportunities of various types of digital labour. If the pivotal role of digital platforms as the intermediating infrastructure, able to allow a wide array of users to interact with each other with the aim of extracting data and producing various forms of value, is not questioned as an essential feature of digital labour (Srnicek, 2017; Casilli, 2020), some divergence still persists today in relation to a number of other defining features.

The main disagreement concerns the presence of an explicit economic relationship, that is, the attribution of a monetary remuneration: some scholars only identify digital labour with platform-mediated activities involving some form of remuneration (Huws et al, 2016; Wood et al, 2019; Aloisi and De Stefano, 2020), while others do not see remuneration as a fundamental feature (Fuchs, 2014; Casilli, 2020). According to the first group of scholars, digital labour is the set of paid activities, organized and controlled by online platforms (Huws et al, 2016). According to the second group, it comprises the broader set of activities whose processes of data extraction (‘datafication’) serve to develop automatic learning and train artificial intelligence (Casilli, 2020). In the latter definition, therefore, digital labour encompasses a vast array of platform-mediated activities, located on a continuum ranging from unpaid and underpaid activities to flexibly remunerated activities. For these scholars, the generated content and the generated content classification activities that users perform on social networks are, for instance, a key component of digital labour, which they define as ‘social labour on the net’ (Casilli, 2020; see also Fuchs and Sevignani, 2013 for a similar interpretation), the datafication of which generates economic value. As Casilli (2020: 80) puts it: ‘users’ creations, behaviours, and data are routed through digital technologies in value-producing activities. These activities are forms of labour inscribed in social relations, as their [economic] value derives from users’ interactions and cannot be conceived other than as a collective act’.

Digitalization of labour and global value chains

It is necessary to investigate digitalization as a global phenomenon that responds to the new logics of capital accumulation and expansion in terms of both space and time. While Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have enabled the rise of a network-based company structure, they have also triggered new forms of division of labour and a new organization of production. Technology and labour are distributed in global value chains that are based on different phases and different contents of production and take place in specific places. At the same time, far from being a linear process, technological innovation and global production chains are constantly being reshaped by economic and political processes, which take place at different specific nodes.

Structural changes triggered by the new phase of digitalization compels us to take a critical look at the relationship between work and technological innovation. The new forms of work, new production processes, and new services introduced by digitalization and platformization need to be understood as specific social phenomena that form part of a more general process of global economic competition involving both traditional industries and new companies. Temporal acceleration and constant connectivity are two of the main principles of the new world of work shaped by digitalization, which through outsourcing and offshoring is extending its networks of production into new areas of the globe. Although most of the implications of this process are global, a focus on specific sectors is essential in order to avoid the shortcuts of deterministic and unilinear hypotheses. Indeed, contradictory dynamics are at work at different levels of this process. This is especially the case in a highly fragmented, specialized, and constantly changing international division of labour in which State, transnational institutions, traditions of industrial relations, and worker power operate.

In the current networked configuration of international production and trade, the expansion of digital technologies in terms of both space and time needs to be investigated through the analysis of its ‘global value chains’ (Gereffi et al, 2005). This involves looking at the complex phases of production that are distributed across several areas of the world. One of the main emerging labour divisions implies the formation of a centre (or ‘head’) of the chain, which governs and directs knowledge work, designs productive and managerial innovation, and the articulation of ‘arms’ that organize, execute, and perform manual work and material production.

Social movement and industrial relations studies: concluding reflections

Labour mobilizations have been springing up and spreading all over the world in recent years, marking a new era of worker resistance and labour unrest that have specific characteristics depending on their location and function in the world economy. This has even been the case in the so-called Global North, where labour conflicts had been considered to be pacified (Arrighi, 1996). The new geographical expansion of world economy and the rise of the new phenomena of capital accumulation in semi-peripheral and peripheral areas of the world triggered new forms of conflict and labour unrest (Silver, 2003).

In the recent processes of digitalization, some of these mobilizations have exhibited a new profile with regard to two crucial aspects: the sectors where they have taken place and the characteristics of the collective actors:

• • They have arisen in innovative technological sectors of so-called ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2017), meaning in new sectors created (or revitalized) by the introduction of platforms. These are a techno-productive infrastructure that intermediate between producers and consumers, whose value-creation is based on the extraction and analysis of data.

• • These mobilizations have been characterized by the adoption of innovative forms of action and organizing, involving atypical workers who developed collective solidarity through their online and offline mobilizations, which mostly occur outside of the traditional channels of trade union organizations.

The worker mobilizations addressed in this volume, which took place in the specific sectors of work on-demand via apps, developing then some comparison with crowdwork, fulfil such criteria. Our study contributes to shed light on the peculiar forms of organizing and action as well as the identity formation processes of these workers. In particular, we have considered the mobilizations of AMT workers in the global context, and those of Amazon drivers and food-delivery couriers in the Italian context. Combining insights from social movement studies and industrial relations we have addressed three main areas of reflections: the structural transformations that trigger labour protests; their organizational forms, and the production of solidarity during collective action.

First of all, we looked at the changing forms of labour introduced by digitalization.

Couriers

IC1 Interview with food-delivery courier – Turin, 16 June 2018

IC2 Interview with food-delivery courier – Milan, 5 July 2018

IC3 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 17 September 2018

IC4 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 18 September 2018

IC5 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 18 September 2018

IC6 Interview with food-delivery courier – Bologna, 18 September 2018

IC7 Interview with food-delivery courier – Milan, 6 July 2018

IC8 Interview with food-delivery courier – Turin, 16 June 2018

IC9 Interview with food-delivery courier – Milan, 6 July 2018

FN1 Field notes from participant observation at the national couriers’ assembly – Bologna, 15 April 2018

Drivers

ID1 Interview with Regional Secretary – FILT-CGIL Lombardia, Milan, 13 March 2019

ID2 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18 March 2019

ID3 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18, March 2019

ID4 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18 March 2019

ID5 Interview with Amazon driver – Milan, 18 March 2019

FN1 Field notes from participant observation at the Worker Assembly Buccinasco, Milan, 10 April 2019

FN2 Field notes from participant observation at the Worker Assembly Toffetti – Milan, 9 April 2019

FN3 Field notes from participant observation at the Worker Assembly Via Lombroso – Milan, 15 April 2019

Collective identity in formation: from 1960s factory workers to digital workers

The current phase of digitalization and the rise of platform capitalism has revived old dilemmas regarding worker collective action, while digital technologies have triggered both new opportunities and challenges. Although digitalization creates new constraints, such as digital intermediation, the depersonalization of employment relations and algorithmic control, it implicitly creates new opportunities for collective action in innovative forms of communication and coordination among workers, as well as in the form of digital strikes. This chapter will investigate these forms of collective action and examine how the specific claims, frames, and repertoires of action contribute to defining the new collective identities of digital workers. Indeed, digitalization is a process shaped by the social actors involved in a specific phase of technological and organizational change that affects the nature of employment relations and processes of recognition. Depending on whether there are low or high levels of institutional regulation and worker organization, it can either trigger contradictory processes of precariousness and individualization, or help to shape new identities and solidarity in the field of labour.

The literature on social movements has investigated the various links between collective action and collective identities, exploring the necessary conditions under which pre-existing identities become relevant for the rise of new mobilization processes, or reciprocally how new collective identities are processed through action (Polletta and Jasper, 2001). These aspects have also been studied in a different manner by industrial relations research, which has shown how strikes can be conducive to specific forms of class consciousness and worker solidarity (Hyman, 1975).

The process of identity formation through collective action is usually linked to a number of specific conditions like organizational and ideational resources. Resources such as pre-existing social networks, spaces, or institutions of solidarity are as important as self-narratives that define motivations and provide the cultural repertories for collective actions (Melucci, 1996). Ideational and cultural aspects defined by collective identity also influence the choice of forms of action. Identity boundaries also vary depending on the phase and cycle of mobilization, as identities tend to be more rigid and exclusive when developed in times of disengagement, while they are more inclusive in times of collective expansion (Tarrow, 1998).

Variations in the mobilization processes of digital workers: forms of organizing

Social movement studies have often considered the importance of existing resources and organizational structures for mobilization (della Porta and Diani, 2020, Ch. 5). Mainstream IR literature has emphasized the role of trade unions in setting mobilization processes in motion (Frege and Kelly, 2004), devoting little attention to alternative forms of organization and the capacity of workers themselves to play a central role in mobilization processes (Mathers et al, 2018). Furthermore, some strands of this scholarship tend to see the implementation of technological and organizational innovations in the workplace as a means for increasing managerial control over workers and inhibiting their capacity for organization and collective action (Thompson, 2010).

Notwithstanding the previously mentioned conditions of extreme exploitation and denial of labour rights, platform workers have adopted a hugely diverse array of organizational forms and practices across different sectors, and also across different regions and countries within the same sector, when staging collective action. These multiple configurations have relied on very different networks of actors, which include political activists, traditional and rank-and-file unions, as well as movement collectives and organizations. In an attempt to make sense of such variety, Vandaele (2018) has identified three main patterns of organizational forms used by platform workers, regardless of the sector of action. Most of these workers have opted to ‘self-represent’ themselves, setting up their own self-organized collectives (especially among on-demand workers) or online forums (among crowdworkers, in particular) (Heiland, 2020). Others have been backed by ‘non-traditional’, grassroots, or rank-and-file unions (Alberti and Pero, 2018). Finally, some (albeit an ever-increasing number) have been supported by traditional and established labour unions (Stuart et al, 2020).

IR literature points to a wide range of factors – institutional, agential, and contextual – that may shape the choices available to workers for different organizing forms. Many studies in this field still consider traditional unions and their characteristics as the main explanatory factors for their more or less fruitful encounters with non-standard workers. Institutionalist approaches, such as ‘Varieties of Unionism’ (VoU) (Frege and Kelly, 2004), emphasize the role of extant, path-dependent institutional legacies in shaping the strategies that unions adopt to pursue the mobilization and inclusion of these workers.