“Organisational responses of platform workers: unpacking the tensions between subjection and freedom”

HAIDAR JULIETA; KEUNE MAARTEN

Congreso; 19th ILERA World Congress, ?Making and Breaking Boundaries in Work and Employment Relations?; 2021

ILERA

To understand the extent to which and the way in which platform workers organize collectively, we develop an approach which gives an account of the tensions between two dimensions, subjection and freedom, that characterize the way workers experience and evaluate platform work. On the one hand, platform work leads to feelings of injustice, discontent and recognition of the existence of relations of subordination and dependence. On the other hand it comes with feelings of satisfaction, acceptance and the defence of the entrepreneurial and autonomist ideal. In this paper we argue that organisational responses (forms of organisation, repertoires of collective action, along with the demands and political projections that the workers construct) depend on the various combinations these two dimensions take. We develop a typology of four ideal-typical organisational responses based on these two dimensions, ranging from accepting the present situation of platform workers and their relationships with the platforms and clients, to challenging the very model of platform work as it exists today. We illustrate these four types of responses with a range of really-existing examples of organizational responses.