ABSTRACT

The rise of the platform economy has been hailed as a new phase of capitalist development, based upon the principles of freedom, flexibility, collaboration, community, egalitarianism and sharing. However, the realities of work in this hyper-flexible environment generate important concerns about the quality of work and its impact upon platform workers, posing important questions regarding their regulation and the role unions can have in this environment. In employment terms, platform work remains largely an uncharted and unregulated territory, which is further accentuated by the resistance of platforms to be regarded as something other than a neutral space that facilitates transactions between two independent economic agents. This chapter examines the challenges unions face to respond to the changing organizational terrain of capitalism.

Keywords: Platform capitalism; platform workers; cyber-work; labour organizing

INTRODUCTION “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.”

William Gibson, National Public Radio interview, 1999

Platform-mediated work may be a recent phenomenon, but it certainly is not a novel one. Using intermediaries to find a job is a practice as old as capitalism. Yet platforms are different from traditional, high-street employment agencies, in that their role as an intermediary party is much more liquid (Bauman 2000) than the latter; contrary to an employment agency, where roles, identities and expectations are clearly defined where the agency receives a commission to match employers and employees in the labour market, within a platform environment these roles and identities become somewhat blurred. This is not only due to the ambivalent way “work” is conceptualized by the participants in the platform, where in most cases platform workers are defined as “self-employed”, but primarily because of the social dynamics that characterize the platform environment and that resemble those of a market rather than of an employment agency.

In that sense, the seller and the purchaser of labour power appear to enter the platform as independent and free agents, who treat the platform as a “neutral” digital ground to conclude their transactions (see also Chapter 7). Freedom and independence, in this case, resemble the Hayekian vision of the free market and, in most cases, this is indeed so: platform-mediated work is subjected to minimum – if any – regulation by the state, which is usually confined to the tax department.