With or without U(nions)? Understanding the diversity of gig workers’ organizing practices in Italy and the UK

What is it about?

Since 2016, mobilizations of gig workers across European countries have become increasingly common within location-based services, such as food delivery. Despite remarkable similarities in workers’ mobilization dynamics, their organizational forms have varied considerably, ranging from self-organization, to work councils, to unionization through rank-and-file or longstanding unions. To start making sense of this diversity in organizing practices, we compare two cases of mobilization in the food delivery sector: in Italy, where workers have initially opted for self-organization, and in the UK, where they have organized through rank-and-file unions. Drawing on interview and observational data gathered between 2016 and 2018, we find that the diversity of organizational forms across the two cases derives from the interaction between agential and contextual factors, namely: the capabilities of rank-and-file unions and the political tradition of militant organizing of the environment within which gig workers are embedded. These findings contribute to the emerging debate on labour relations in the gig economy by showing the central role that factors external to the labour process and to the institutional context play in shaping the structuring of labour antagonism in a still lowly institutionalized sector characterized by transnationally homogenous challenges

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Why is it important?

By accounting for the diversity in the organizational forms chosen by gig workers in Italy and the UK, our findings advance the emerging debate on IR in the gig economy, so far predominantly focused on the processes underpinning the emergence of gig workers mobilization at the workplace level. In this respect, our study shows that these mobilizations are heavily influenced by the socio-political context in which they are located. In other words, if the challenges arising from food delivery platforms are sector-specific and homogenous at the labour process level, they are mediated by specific socio-political dynamics of interaction, resulting in a variegated picture in terms of organizational practices of mobilization across contexts. By placing workers and the political context in which they are embedded at the centre of analysis, we showed how these factors shaped the dynamics of labour conflict in a sector characterized by low institutionalization of IR.