Suchergebnisse

So far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested with a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers' agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike without following the existing regulations. This book develops a critique of platforms and platform capitalism from the perspective of workers and contributes to the ongoing debates about the future of work and worker organising. It presents an alternative portrait returning to a focus on workers' experience, focusing on solidarity, drawing out a global picture of new forms of agency. In particular, the book focuses on three dynamics that are driving struggles in the platform economy: the increasing connections between workers who are no longer isolated; the lack of communication and negotiation from platforms, leading to escalating worker action around shared issues; and the internationalisation of platforms, which has laid the basis for new transnational solidarity. Focusing on transport and courier workers, online workers and freelancers author Jamie Woodcock concludes by considering how workers build power in different situations. Rather than undermining worker agency, platforms have instead provided the technical basis for the emergence of new global struggles against capitalism.

*Shortlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography 2017*

Over a million people in the UK work in call centres, and the phrase has become synonymous with low-paid and high stress work, dictatorial supervisors and an enforced dearth of union organisation. However, rarely does the public have access to the true picture of what goes on in these institutions.

For Working the Phones, Jamie Woodcock worked undercover in a call centre to gather insights into the everyday experiences of call centre workers. He shows how this work has become emblematic of the shift towards a post-industrial service economy, and all the issues that this produces, such as the destruction of a unionised work force, isolation and alienation, loss of agency and, ominously, the proliferation of surveillance and control which affects mental and physical well being of the workers.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a popular topic of debate, both within and beyond academia. According to some commentators, we are on the cusp of major social and economic change. The future of work is now to become the present. This introduction aims to lay out some of the emerging and pressing issues relating to AI in management. It is not an attempt at prediction or doomsaying but instead outlines what research questions and methods can equip us to make sense of these changes.

This article provides an overview of the growth of game worker organising in Britain. These workers have not previously been organised in a trade union, but over the last 2 years, they have developed a campaign to unionise their sector and launched a legal trade union branch. This is a powerful example of so-called 'greenfield' organising, beyond the reach of existing trade unions and with workers who have not previously been members. The article provides an outline of the industry, the launch of the Game Workers Unite international network, the growth of the division in Britain as well as their formation as a branch of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain. The aim is to draw out lessons for both the videogames industry, as well as other non-unionised industries, showing how the traditions of trade unionism can be translated and developed in new contexts.

Universities have been the site of a variety of shifts and transformations in the previous few decades. Both the composition of students and academics are changing (to a lesser or greater extent), along with the ways in which teaching and research is supported, conducted, and delivered. The effects of neoliberalism, privatisation, precarious employment, debt, and digitalisation have been highlighted as important factors in understanding these changes. However, the ways in which these tendencies are expressed in universities – both in specific and general ways – remain fragmented and under-analysed. In particular, the role of academic labour processes, increasingly mediated through digital technology, remains in the background. There is a risk of viewing these transformations as abstracted, far removed from the day-to-day activities of academic labour on which universities rely. This article will therefore focus on connecting the broader changes in funding, organisation, and digital technology to the labour processes of academics. Rather than seeking a return to a romanticised pre-neoliberal university, this article explores the possibilities of resistance and alternatives to the university as it is now.

Abstract
It has been five years since the first strikes of Deliveroo workers in London in 2016. Since then, workers have continued to organise. The campaigns have involved five different aspects: first, wildcat strike action; second, networks and internationalisation; third, union organising with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (iwgb); fourth, legal campaigning; and fifth, wider leverage campaigns. What is less understood so far is the different strengths and weaknesses of these aspects, and how they have contributed to the build of workers' self-organisation and power at Deliveroo. This article explores the different aspects and considers the effectiveness of each. It concludes by considering what can be learned from these struggles for the understanding of platform work and trade union organising today.

This article discusses the Fast Food Shutdown, a strike on 4 October 2018 that involved Wetherspoon, McDonald's, TGI Fridays and UberEats workers in the United Kingdom. It compares the different strategies of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers' Union at Wetherspoon and Industrial Workers of the World at UberEats. The two case studies, drawing on the authors' ongoing ethnographic research, provide important examples of successful precarious worker organising. In particular, the argument focuses on the role of action in organising, as well as the relationship between the rank-and-file and the union. While these could point the way to the recomposition of the workers movement – both in greenfield sectors and within existing unions – there remain important questions about how these experiences can be generalised.

This article discusses the Fast Food Shutdown, a strike on 4 October 2018 that involved Wetherspoon, McDonald's, TGI Fridays and UberEats workers in the United Kingdom. It compares the different strategies of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers' Union at Wetherspoon and Industrial Workers of the World at UberEats. The two case studies, drawing on the authors' ongoing ethnographic research, provide important examples of successful precarious worker organising. In particular, the argument focuses on the role of action in organising, as well as the relationship between the rank-and-file and the union. While these could point the way to the recomposition of the workers movement – both in greenfield sectors and within existing unions – there remain important questions about how these experiences can be generalised.

This paper examines the varied cultural meanings of computer game play in competitive and professional computer gaming and live-streaming. To do so it riffs off Andrew Feenberg's 1994 work exploring the changing meanings of the ancient board game of Go in mid-century Japan. We argue that whereas Go saw a de-aestheticization with the growth of newspaper reporting and a new breed of 'westernized' player, the rise of professionalized computer gameplay has upset this trend, causing a re-aestheticization of professional game competition as a result of the many informal elements that contribute to the successes, and public perceptions, of professional players. In doing so we open up the consideration of the aesthetics of broadcasted gameplay, how they reflect back upon the players and the game, and locate this shift historically and culturally within the last two decades of computer games as a creative industry, entertainment industry, a media form, and as an embodied practice.