Cleaners ofFacilities branch; the other one is called Security Guards branch. So, my job is to organise them in their workplaces and then try to see what problems today they have and see ifwe can make them members ofthe union. Depending on what is the issues, if they say collectively, maybe launching a campaign to improve the pay and conditions of work. Sometimes many… normally most of these people that we represent, they are migrant workers who are on precarious conditions ofemployment. So that’s what we do.
The experience gained in traditional areas of precarious work proved to be fundamental in defining the set of skills and practices that, to a large extent, spilled over into the context of platform work. Indeed, the difficulties and opportunities experienced returned in new forms and combinations. In the beginning, it was not simply a matter of skills and practices, but of building and maintaining a certain reputation combined with the ability to make the effectiveness of mobilisations visible. Moreover, as another unionist and rider met during the fieldwork claimed, interlocution with workers started from extremely distant perspectives. The ability to listen to their claims requires time, energy, and a significant capacity to adopt the workers’ point of view to include their perspective in a collective bargaining framework that the union can adopt.
This is something I really want to challenge as a union. I think is really fundamental: it is about personal agency. I work full-time, like, but I want the agency to not work when I want. And recently we’ve had a campaign with the cargo drivers. Some of these guys working, were working like 15 hours a day, six days a week, but they still want free log in. And you can’t like… Ifeel like to a degree, okay, it seems like a fiction. It seems like they are wrong… At some point you’ve got to be like, you’ve got to hear what they’re saying. They just want those hours per week to be their choice when they stop working. And Ifeel like, okay, we could try and… You know, you can make the argument that actually, this is ridiculous, and you should have more formalised employment. At the same time, you got to listen to…
In the words of the interviewee, therefore, the union should make constant efforts to consider workers’ voices, especially in labour contexts with a significant migrant and BAME component. The expectations, trajectories, and claims of workers may in fact be quite different from those that a traditional trade union might act for, considering the needs of its standard members. In this case, the meaning of not wanting to be hired as an employee—linked to the ambiguity of digital labour platforms in requesting documents, income maximisation, and the flexibility of having multiple jobs—needs to be analysed not only in the framework of standard employment to which a series of rights are granted, but also considering the alternative strategies of migrant and BAME workers, which may be linked to life trajectories that do not overlap with those of standard employees represented by traditional trade unions.
7 ORGANISING MIGRANT PLATFORM WORKERS IN LONDON
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