Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance

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Strategies of Resistance

PART II

Organising Migrant Platform Workers in London: The Case of IWGB

Paolo Borghi and Annalisa Murgia

1 Introduction

The landscape of trade unionism has undergone profound transformations in recent decades, driven by a growing recognition of the need to engage underrepresented categories of workers, including migrants and Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) workers. In this attempt, trade unions have increasingly embraced revitalisation strategies aimed at broadening their membership base and building coalitions with diverse collective actors. Central to these strategies are efforts to adopt an organising approach that can encourage activism among members, and to address not only class and economic exploitation but also other forms of inequality, including those related to race, ethnicity, and social inclusion.

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P. Borghi University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: paolo.borghi@unipv.it

_{A. Murgia (}B₎ University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: annalisa.murgia@unimi.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 F. Della Puppa et al. (eds.), Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy, Dynamics of Virtual Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-91262-7\_7

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This chapter critically examines the approaches adopted by traditional trade unions in representing migrant workers, highlighting the limitations that led to the failure to fully recognise the unique vulnerabilities resulting from the intersection of employment and migration status. Drawing on a growing body of literature on the collective organising of migrant and BAME workers, particularly in the field of platform work, we point out the importance of adopting more inclusive and nuanced strategies that acknowledge the socio-cultural profiles of workers and the complexities of their experiences. Moreover, we discuss the key role played by civil society and co-ethnic networks in advocating for migrant labour rights. Indeed, in our research we explored how independent unions especially have increasingly collaborated with these external actors to support migrant workers and challenge unfair labour practices, particularly in the context of digital labour platforms.

In particular, we take the case of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), shedding light on the construction of forms of mobilisation through continuous negotiation with migrant and BAME workers. Through an immersive ethnographic approach, the study— conducted in London between 2019 and 2021—illustrates how the IWGB has navigated the complexities of organising precarious migrant platform labour, both within and outside the union structure. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of building bridges with other nonunion organisations and communities to amplify the voices of migrant workers and challenge exploitative practices in the gig economy.

2 Reclaiming Migrant Workers’ Rights

The ability to engage migrant and BAME workers—along with other poorly represented categories of workers, such as women, young people, and more generally non-standard workers—has been one of the main trade union revitalisation strategies in recent decades (Alberti, 2016; Connolly et al., 2014). In particular, Ibsen and Tapia (2017) identified two main trends that, despite national differences, are currently affecting trade unions in the Global North: the convergence towards the so-called organising model, which aims to reach new worker constituencies, and the capacity to build coalitions with other collective actors, including social movements as well as migrant associations and community organisations.

More specifically, in recent years, a number of scholars have highlighted the over-emphasis by traditional trade unions on class and economic exploitation at the expense of other inequalities and a lack of attention to the socio-cultural profiles of actors, including non-union entities (see Alberti & Però, 2018). By adopting this perspective, a flourishing debate has elaborated on how trade unions are (or are not) able to recruit and organise low-paid migrant workers, and on the novel strategies they can develop to mobilise this particularly precarious category of workers (Holgate, 2005; Milkman, 2000). At first, the focus was on the two main approaches adopted by trade unions to recruit and organise migrant workers: the first, termed ‘universalistic’, which assumed a homogeneous identity of workers, and the second, labelled as ‘particularistic’, which considered migrant and BAME workers as members of specific ethnic communities or individuals with distinct social and employment needs. By showing the ‘false dichotomy’ between work and migration issues, Alberti and colleagues (2013) highlighted that for a long time, trade unions have tended to consider migrants as ‘workers’ rather than ‘migrant workers’, therefore failing to recognise the specific vulnerabilities resulting from the intertwining of employment and migration status. Moreover, in the same article, the authors pointed out the need for trade unions to broaden migrant worker mobilisations beyond the workplace to include community groups.

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Contemporary research on the representation of migrant workers agrees that trade unions—historically criticised for protecting the interests of the established workforce only, failing to adequately represent migrant and BAME workers—have in recent years focused more on issues of race, ethnicity and social inclusion, although their efforts can be inconsistent and not always transparent (Martinez Lucio & Perret, 2009; Milkman, 2011). In the current debate, there are mainly two interrelated strategies of trade unions to represent migrant workers’ rights that more broadly reflect the trade union’s renewal strategies. The first one concerns the importance of civil society and especially co-ethnic networks to provide support to migrant workers and advocate for better working conditions, both online and offline. The second is the ability of trade unions to draw on their social movement origins and adopt an organising approach to stimulate activism among their members.

The ability to leverage public relations and civil society for migrant labour rights has long been recognised as a crucial strategy for unions (Martin, 2010; Theodore & Martin, 2007). In analysing the collective representation practices of migrant workers, scholars have progressively shifted their attention to the community organising approach, which emphasises the importance for unions to build alliances beyond the workplace and the union context (McBride & Greenwood, 2009), especially with workers’ ethnic communities, which are more characterised by solidaristic bonds and reciprocal support (Cioce et al., 2023). What has been termed a ‘community-oriented’ perspective, in fact, sought to investigate the practices of collective action and, at the same time, the processes of identity construction, and how these factors influence union-community relations, as well as the overall success of organising initiatives (Jiang & Korczynski, 2024). Furthermore, this perspective emphasises the importance of the development of ‘communities of struggle’ (Hamann & Türkmen, 2020; Però, 2020) for a bottom-up construction ofcommunity organising.

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Labour organising is recognised as an effective strategy for representing migrant workers, particularly in precarious sectors, as it can empower workers by encouraging participatory democracy and substantial worker engagement (Cioce et al., 2023). This approach is indeed supposed to facilitate self-organisation and autonomy among workers, contrasting with short-term and top-down methods (Connolly et al., 2019; Holgate et al., 2018; Jiang & Korczynski, 2016, 2021). However, labour organising has often been criticised for being instrumental and depoliticised, with little room for grassroots initiatives. The approach of organising has thus been described in the debate as not always able to challenge business-oriented social partnership models and manage the complexities of social identity and interests of migrant worker members of the unions (Martinez Lucio et al., 2017; Però, 2020). This led to moving beyond a trade union-centric perspective, paying attention to grassroots efforts and the self-organisation of migrant workers, within trade unions, but especially within other collective actors, such as independent unions and grassroots groups, that proved most able to challenge the processes of racialisation and precarisation affecting migrant labour (Alberti & Però, 2018; Alberti & Sacchetto, 2024; Jiang & Korczynski, 2024).

The role of independent trade unions and grassroots groups in representing the rights of migrant and BAME workers has become even more visible with the emergence and spread of digital labour platforms. Indeed, existing studies show that in European urban economies, platform work is predominantly migrant-staffed (Piasna et al., 2022; van Doorn et al., 2023; Woodcock & Graham, 2019). From 2016 onwards, and to an even greater extent during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, Europe, as well as other countries globally, have been crossed by several campaigns and protests concerning working conditions in the platform economy, in particular among food-delivery riders and taxi drivers (Borghi et al., 2021; Dhar & Thuppilikkat, 2022; Leonardi & Pirina, 2020; Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020). In this frame, the ability of migrant workers to mobilise against the precarity produced by digital labour platforms has proven effective on several occasions. Indeed, “many of the groups, associations, and unions leading these disputes were either founded by migrant workers or supported by them. Rather than take exploitation as a given at a time of pandemic-induced economic instability, they have organised to resist unfairness” (Alyanak et al., 2023, p. 668). While the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities, it has also facilitated a series of struggles, albeit with different intensities in different global contexts (Della Puppa & Perocco, 2021).

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Migrant platform workers have collectively defended their rights and interests mainly through grassroots groups and independent trade unions also because it took some time for traditional trade unions to realise how disruptive the platform model was (Bagnardi and Murgia, forthcoming). Such non-union collective actors have shown the ability to take legal action, to approach already self-organised groups of migrant and local BAME workers, to build communities of workers as well as networks and alliances, not only based on working for digital labour platforms, and to innovate established trade union practices by supporting new forms of mutual support and solidarity (Borghi et al., 2021). Moreover, in the case of platform migrant workers, as well as for migrant workers more generally, co-ethnic networks, both online and offline, have also played a relevant role (Borghi & Murgia, 2024; Però & Downey, 2024; Wood et al., 2018). Indeed, gig economy workers have been able to take advantage of the networks developed in their local area, as well as digital communication channels, not only to connect with other workers, but also to build broader forms of solidarity, established in their everyday lives beyond work relationships. By activating their families, friends, and ethnic groups, migrant platform workers have managed to create a sense of mutual identification that is necessary for collective action. These communities have then been able to provide critical logistical and emotional support, enabling workers to organise protests, advocate for better working conditions, and challenge unfair labour practices (Atzeni & Cini, 2023).

Drawing on this flourishing literature, our study uses the case of the IWGB, an independent union based in London, to investigate the construction of forms of mobilisation as the result of processes of continuous negotiation with migrant and BAME workers. In doing so, we focus on the perspective of both workers and unionists supporting the protests and show how the observed strategies of organising were built both inside and outside the union.

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