Introduction: Work and Labour Relations in Global Platform Capitalism

Abstract

In this chapter we first place the emergence and growth of labour platforms within the broader development of global capitalism and then discuss four distinctive dimensions of labour platforms: i) the way labour platforms shape the relationships between the global North and the global South; ii) the way labour platforms organise and control the labour process; iii) the construction of the subjectivities of platform workers; and iv) worker resistance and worker organisation in labour platforms. We find that labour platforms are at the frontier of capitalist development, comprising both important continuities and meaningful novelties. They also generate new dependencies and a new international division of labour between the global North and South. Labour platforms present a mix of different historical forms of control of labour, to which they add control through algorithmic management. Furthermore they are built on and foster the ideal of the entrepreneurial self and are riddled with tensions between dependency and autonomy, the shape of which influences the extent and ways in which workers organise.