This research examines platform workers’ collective actions in China. Existing research on this topic seeks to explain how these actions are possible when the labor process is geographically dispersed. The analytical focus is on labor process arrangements, and how they may foster shared grievance and collective identity among workers, paving the way for collective actions. In this process, social media helps them overcome spatial dispersal and mediate worker solidarity through affordances of association, discourse, and mobilisation, in intersection with their gender, migratory status, work experience and critical media literacy. The state is found to be a hindering factor, through its police and cyber-survelliance apparatus. Existing literature focuses exclusively on mega cities like Shenzhen. This research shifts to smaller cities. This is important because we witness a growing number of collective actions among platform workers there; but because the relationships among the state, platforms and workers there diverge substantially from big cities. To capture it, I conduct extensive ethnographic fieldwork in four small cities in Guangdong and Jiangsu, including interviews with platform workers, local agents of platform companies and government officials.

I found that platform workers in small cities tend to be local workers with shared culture and are less dependent on platform work but better connected to each other. Interestingly, in all the four cities, worker leaders all have close ties with local state officials. In addition, in small cities, platforms tend to operate through city agents that retain internal financial, managerial and operational autonomy but are externally assessed by the platform for its revenue and growth on short contract basis. Also interesting is the role of the state. In big cities, platforms have become digital utility, with local states deeply dependent on them for economic development, job creation and social stability. But in small cities, city agents are relatively small in scale, and these platforms have so far less integrated into the fabrics of local life. The subcontractors are often small private capital who do not necessarily have  connections with local states. Local states in small cities are therefore less dependent on platforms.

In this context, while the shared culture, dense connections and connections with local officials allow workers to build and consolidate solidarity through their agential practices in the labor process, the contradictions within the specific platform-state relations in small cities actually present a political opportunity structure for collective actions to happen and for workers’ collective power to develop and accumulate, especially as the state increasingly address industrial conflict by “a careful balance between permitting expression and resolution of grievances and maintaining social stability and capitalist production”.

Conectez vous pour accéder au texte complet