The Worker Capabilities Approach: Insights from Worker Mobilizations in Italian Logistics and Food Delivery

What is it about?

Following years of declining labour activism, militant forms of worker mobilization have recently emerged in the Italian platform economy and logistics sector, exhibiting novel forms of organization and action repertoires. This article investigates two cases which have been ongoing since 2011, namely mobilizations by logistics porters and food delivery couriers. Both cases seem puzzling since workers have mobilized under circumstances normally associated with non-mobilization, meaning workplaces characterized by technological innovation and absent or ineffective trade unions. How have these mobilizations occurred? We argue that these workers successfully overcame such circumstances by relying on resources and opportunities related to their workplace and external to it, which they have been able to create and develop over several years.

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Why is it important?

Our investigation points to the capacity of these workers to self-organize in novel forms and invent new tactics by utilizing specific resources and opportunities, created and developed between their workplaces and social environments. Since a significant amount of IR studies still focus on trade unions and on their resources in the ongoing discussion on the renewal of labour mobilizations, the formulation of the ‘worker capability approach’ also represents our main contribution to this debate. In this respect, our approach demonstrates how the unfolding of relations of power and exploitation in the workplace are never foreclosed, since even in the absence of traditional union representation and under a high level of technological control, there is nevertheless space for developing worker counter-potential.