Digital atomization or new labour disputes? An ethnography of resistant solidarity cultures in platform-mediated courier work

Abstract

Platform-based courier work is the avant-garde and test field for new forms of digital work coordination and control and thus also the subject of new forms of labour dispute. As the article shows, the organizational and technical infrastructures of these platforms can be used both for control purposes and as a means of resisting workers' organization. The thesis of the article is that digitalization is not only used to control and atomize the workers, but is used by the latter both to create cultures of solidarity and to actively resist. The findings show empirically new forms of solidarization and organization of employees, which are also transnational in character. The argumentation is based on two long-term ethnographic studies, 46 qualitative interviews with various actors in the digitalized delivery industry and a quantitative online survey of the couriers.