News

Digit Co-Director Professor Mark Stuart and Dr. Vera Trappman from Leeds University Business School will deliver a plenary talk on global labour unrest on platforms, using the case of food delivery workers, at the ILERA Regional Congress, Philippines, tomorrow, 03 December 2020.

You can read the abstract from their session below:

Labour unrest by platform workers is an important phenomenon in the new world of work. This study
examines patterns of platform labour unrest on a global scale, drawing from a database of over 500
instances of labour unrest in the food delivery sector. Results show that labour unrest has been growing
in recent years and has spread across a large number of countries around the world. Research findings
show that labour unrest is driven by workers themselves, but increasingly receives support from trade
unions. Relying hitherto mainly on the ability to act collectively (associational power) and to mobile
public support for their cause (societal power), trade unions through their political and legal experiences
add a further dimension to the power resources available.
Issues driving unrest are not necessarily linked to novel characteristics of platform work. In most cases
and regions, they have their source in “classic” conflicts of distributional quality like pay and working
conditions. Employment relations and health protection under the Covid-19 pandemic add, however, to
the urgency of finding solutions to the causes of workers’ unrest.

You can find the conference programme here: https://asiailera2020.org/program/program-day1/