Organising Migrant Platform Workers in London: The Case of IWGB

This chapter aims at analysing the intersection between agency, collective resistance, and trends towards self-exploitation of migrant and BAME platform workers involved in specific protests supported by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain—IWGB. Drawing from an ethnographic study conducted in London between 2019 and 2021, we discuss the construction of collective forms of resistance 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 forms of resistance are affected by both workers’ trajectories, including trends towards self-exploitation, and their collective (and political) claims denouncing the racialised exploitation perpetuated by platforms. At the theoretical level, this chapter aims at contributing to the debate that investigates the ways in which migrant workers mobilise and organise autonomously or supported by independent and well-established unions. In particular, we are interested, on the one hand, in formal and informal mechanisms of union voice, on the other, in how community organising, and the intertwining of class and ethnicity, can facilitate forms of collective resistance. In analysing this debate, particular attention will be paid to the research conducted so far on migrant platform labour. Several authors have indeed shown that platform work, while offering working opportunities to migrant workers, it also contributes to perpetuate structural inequalities as the platform economy takes advantage of historically rooted racialisation processes.