Abstract
The ongoing digital revolution is threatening to change the world of work in more ways than one. Whether our jobs have become vulnerable to being replaced by the machine or by an online worker from another (or the same) country, whether our managers are starting to track our every physical and digital move or whether we are ‘merely’ being asked to make time in our already overfull workdays to learn yet another productivity software, the stress of the transition is palpable. Perhaps the most fundamental change, though, is the way new technologies are altering the very substance of the employment relationship, accelerating the already rising tide of precarious work. ‘Gig’ workers have become emblematic of work in the 21st century, the way steel or auto workers were in the 20th. It is not their novelty value that makes them a central focus of research on the transformation of industrial relations, but that parts of the image that they sum up – the illusion of worker-entrepreneur, with an ambiguous legal status, few rights, unorganised and unrepresented, and an employer that is distant and unaccountable, often little more than a red notification bubble on a screen – are fast becoming ubiquitous throughout our economies. Gig workers are also part of another growing group: that of the precarious workers whose numbers are increasing on the fringes of the labour market as well as in some traditional sectors. In this issue, we bring together a selection of articles from researchers that share a concern with the way gig work creates gaps in the fabric of labour protections, but that draw on different institutional and national contexts to explore how far these fissures have spread and what mechanisms may exist to close them. Most of the articles also address the broader issue of the precariat.
The first article, by Ana Diakonidze, showcases the perspectives of Uber drivers from Tbilisi, Georgia, on the conditions of their work. Gig workers are often seen to take up such jobs as the last resort, when their wages or pensions or scholarships pay too little, or when they are unable to access ‘real’ jobs in any other way. Alternatively, they are seen to act as small entrepreneurs, seeking freedom and profit in the marketplace. Diakonidze shows, however, that the Georgian Uber drivers take this kind of work not out of desperation or lack of alternatives, or because of entrepreneurial aspirations, but because they do not see other employment opportunities as being any better. They are fully aware of the precariousness and subordination of their jobs, but the poor quality of jobs in the burgeoning service sector, the underfunded and unreliable social security system and the lack of trust in public institutions make the precarity of the gig work seem ‘normal’ and not something to organise against.
This normalisation of precarity is precisely what the unions must fight, but gig workers are almost by definition difficult to reach. The article by Bellini, Betti, Gherardini and Lauria explores the efforts of trade unions in five European countries – Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, and Lithuania – to approach such workers by offering what the authors call ‘strategic servicing’. The article develops a novel typology that transcends the usual distinction between recruiting new union members and offering services to the current ones and shows that strategic services for non-members that seek to increase the union’s presence and representative role can have a ‘collectivising’ impact. For example, information and support services, legal assistance, or training, offer benefits to individual workers, but their provision can be organised in such a way as to contribute to community-building, embed unions within these budding occupational communities, and thus pave the way to future organising.
One should not underestimate, however, the difficulties that the existing legal and institutional structures place in the way of extending labour protections to precarious workers. It is only in the past few years, for example, that in Europe the prohibitions on collective bargaining for the self-employed are gradually starting to be rolled back. Even then, argues Łukasz Pisarczyk in his article on collective bargaining for the self-employed in Poland, employers’ resistance, union inertia and residual legal obstacles can ensure that such changes yield little result. The 2019 law amending the rules on the right to organising and collective bargaining extended the scope of the law to solo self-employed and workers on the so-called civil law contracts without employee status. However, flanking laws that determine procedures for representation in the workplace, such as those requiring a certain organisational structure, length of tenure for the members and representatives etc. undermine the possibility of representation of workers on temporary or incidental contracts, and it is unclear whether the right to strike applies to such workers. Existing unions find it difficult to mobilise resources and organisational flexibility that would be required to ensure such workers are covered by collective agreements, and employers generally refuse to negotiate with independent associations of atypical workers. As more countries in Europe gear up to extend collective bargaining rights to various categories of non-employees, the unions must make sure to push for institutional and legal adjustments that will make such rights truly actionable.
This will not be an easy battle. As argued by Duggan, O’Sullivan and O’Sullivan, the unions’ impact on public policy has become weakened in many economies. In their analysis of how Ireland, the UK and Canada responded to the blow that the COVID-19 pandemic had dealt to precarious workers, they find that an external catalyst, such as the crisis and sometimes EU-level legislation, can galvanise decision-makers into action and make them more receptive to the unions’ arguments, but that this impact remains very uneven. The pandemic has led to the recognition of many highly precarious occupations as ‘essential’, in some cases leading to the extension of employment status or at least some forms of social protection to these workers. It has also made governments aware, at least temporarily, of the potential social costs of there being so many workers in precarious positions. More often than not, however, these protections remain limited and unclear, and the creation of new categories of non-employees, while guaranteeing a basic minimum of rights, also helps to normalise the spread of precarity.
A big part of the problem is that companies in the gig sector continue to find loopholes that allow them to evade their responsibilities as employers. For the third year running we have awarded a Young Scholar Prize from among several strong submissions. This year’s winner of the Prize, Kristin Jesnes, looks at what is possibly the best-case scenario – the well-regulated industrial system of Norway, whose powerful unions mobilised workers and succeeded in negotiating a collective agreement with Norway’s food-delivery platform Foodora. Nevertheless, the entry of a competitor, Wolt, which eschewed cooperation with the unions and relies exclusively on self-employed riders, changed the power balance in the field and Foodora began increasing its own share of the self-employed among its workers and deploying more intrusive algorithmic management tactics. Jesnes’ analysis ends on a hopeful note: the unions have successfully lobbied for regulatory changes in Norway that introduce the presumption of employment from early 2024, and have shown themselves capable of pushing back against the abuses of algorithmic management.
Institutions and timely regulation can still rein in the spectre of precarity, but the unions must remain watchful as some of the pillars of the industrial relations system may be more fragile than we think. This is the message of this issue’s installment of our Round Table on the anticipated effects of the EU Directive on adequate minimum wages in different EU countries, in which Dennie Oude Nijhuis offers some surprising insights into the case of the Netherlands. A country with a deep tradition of social partnership and exceptionally high levels of bargaining coverage, the Netherlands is also a country where union membership stands at surprisingly low levels and where employer-sponsored enterprise unions have in some cases managed to displace traditional unions as signatories of sectoral agreements. As the Dutch unions find themselves having to tread the line between pushing for better agreements and avoiding employers’ withdrawal from the bargaining table, the EU Directive might provide useful tools to bolster unions’ abilities to reach workers, improve representation and push the employers back towards good faith bargaining.
That unions can fight their way back to victory even from significantly weakened positions is well illustrated by the good news from across the Atlantic, where the United Auto Workers managed to conclude a historic agreement with the three US carmakers. Vincenzo Maccarrone reports on the causes of this victory by analysing various power resources the UAW drew on during the negotiations, and shows how a potent combination of changing economic circumstances and political creativity helped the union to overcome some structural weaknesses that have plagued it in the past. We can only hope that the coming year brings many more such examples of success and resourcefulness.