Social movement and industrial relations studies: concluding reflections

Labour mobilizations have been springing up and spreading all over the world in recent years, marking a new era of worker resistance and labour unrest that have specific characteristics depending on their location and function in the world economy. This has even been the case in the so-called Global North, where labour conflicts had been considered to be pacified (Arrighi, 1996). The new geographical expansion of world economy and the rise of the new phenomena of capital accumulation in semi-peripheral and peripheral areas of the world triggered new forms of conflict and labour unrest (Silver, 2003).

In the recent processes of digitalization, some of these mobilizations have exhibited a new profile with regard to two crucial aspects: the sectors where they have taken place and the characteristics of the collective actors:

• • They have arisen in innovative technological sectors of so-called ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2017), meaning in new sectors created (or revitalized) by the introduction of platforms. These are a techno-productive infrastructure that intermediate between producers and consumers, whose value-creation is based on the extraction and analysis of data.

• • These mobilizations have been characterized by the adoption of innovative forms of action and organizing, involving atypical workers who developed collective solidarity through their online and offline mobilizations, which mostly occur outside of the traditional channels of trade union organizations.

The worker mobilizations addressed in this volume, which took place in the specific sectors of work on-demand via apps, developing then some comparison with crowdwork, fulfil such criteria. Our study contributes to shed light on the peculiar forms of organizing and action as well as the identity formation processes of these workers. In particular, we have considered the mobilizations of AMT workers in the global context, and those of Amazon drivers and food-delivery couriers in the Italian context. Combining insights from social movement studies and industrial relations we have addressed three main areas of reflections: the structural transformations that trigger labour protests; their organizational forms, and the production of solidarity during collective action.

First of all, we looked at the changing forms of labour introduced by digitalization.