Abstract
Work and Labour Relations in Global Platform Capitalism, edited by Julieta Haidar and Maarten Keune, focuses on the global nature of platform capitalism and asks how it shapes the social relations of work, labor relations, and consumption around the world. The book takes on the tensions, ambiguities, and controversies posed by the platform economy. It discusses them within the broader development of global capitalism by bringing together scholars from the global North and South to engage in a constructive, scholarly conversation about the advantages and the perils the platform economy poses to workers and their families across a worldwide perspective. The book is a lesson in socioeconomic and political economy studies of employment and the platform economy. The authors investigate the systemic forces that underpin global platform capitalism by uncovering the socioeconomic interdependences and international division of labor it creates within (and across) worldwide regions. They also discuss the political underpinnings of global platform capitalism, something that is often forgotten in the studies of the global platform economy.
But what is platform capitalism, and what does it entail? The central element of the book is this notion of global platform capitalism, and particularly the way in which labor platforms are at the frontiers of global capitalist development. Hence, platform capitalism can be understood as global structures of networking, for example, within retail, business services, delivery of food and other products, domestic and care work, online content streaming, the development of artificial intelligence (AI), and transport. These global networking arrangements are surrounded by—and articulated within—processes of concentration and accumulation of capital as labor platforms are often major transnational corporations, which act as big players within the economic global realm. With this regard, the book theoretically and empirically points to the novel transnational character of value creation and extraction, the enhancement and distribution, which are enabled by labor platforms. It shows how value creation and extraction take place through processes of fragmentation, commodification, and exploitation that conform to established patterns of networked global production and trade. The book editors contend this pattern occurs because labor platforms optimize value along value chains by facilitating outsourcing and offshoring of a growing range of service activities to a large pool of individuals and freelancers, thereby inducing global fragmentation. In so doing, labor platforms allow clients and firms to access individual workers across the globe to seek the most favorable matching of price and quality of services. They create the conditions for a “putting out” system (i.e., subcontracting; see Chapter 6) by exploiting differences in labor and other costs between (and within) countries, global regions, and the workforce across all these countries and regions.
Haidar and Keune also reveal that labor platforms not only widen globalization through fostering fragmentation and exploitation that are geographically circumscribed but also deepen this exploitation particularly in sectors that are characterized by direct transactions between producers or service providers and buyers, such as creative content production, accounting, consultancy legal services, and medical consultation. As such, platforms position themselves as agents fostering fragmentation and exploitation and as rentiers in new labor markets. In addition, they create or consolidate new markets and forms of digital production, especially in data-driven sectors. These themes are central especially in the narratives presented in Part I of the book with contributions by Nick Srnicek, Mariano Zukerfeld, and Petar Marcˇeta.
Examining labor platforms through the lens of global platform capitalism, networked through global production and economic exchanges, enables Haidar and Keune to point to the disruptive force of platform capitalism and to understand the nature of this disruption, what it entails, and therefore to assess the social outcomes it generates. This analysis is at the core of the contributions by Janine Berg and Uma Rani; Vili Lehdonvirta, Isis Hjorth, Helena Barnard, and Mark Graham; and Wing-Fai Leung, Premilla D’Cruz, and Ernesto Noronha in Part II of the book. One important aspect here is the assessment of platform capitalism as capital-grounding exploitation based on the capacity to exploit by offering idyllic prospects of development, particularly in the case of online labor platforms. Haidar and Keune’s main argument is that the exploitation starts from the fact these labor platforms are financed by capital from the global North, where most of the demand for labor on these platforms also originates, whereas most of the work is done by workers from the global South. Although a reality, treating the global North and the global South as similar in their respective diversity may be not enough as it may risk marginalizing the internal variation between rural and urban areas within each region.
Part III examines the nature of social outcomes that result from global platform capitalism. Here, the book assesses outcomes through an examination of the labor process and the nature of the labor relations in global platform capitalism through the contributions by Simon Joyce and Mark Stuart; Cora Arias, Nicolás Diana Menéndez, and Julieta Haidar; Kurt Vandaele; and Graciela Bensusán and Héctor Santos. Besides the material forms of direct and indirect control, such as algorithm management and ratings, the authors discuss the importance of global platform capitalism to discipline the workforce. One of the main arguments is that this often occurs through the attempt by labor platforms to increase the control over the labor process by enhancing the discursive power of the “entrepreneurial self.” Thus, labor platforms become a contested terrain in which notions of flexibility, freedom, and autonomy are in tension with notions of dependency. The book admirably points to the tensions between dependency and autonomy as crucial to understanding the scope and the variety of forms of workers in the collective organization within the global platform economy.
To conclude, I highly recommend this book to those who have already stepped into the terrain of understanding the platform economy, those who are just taking that step, and those who have not yet begun but are willing to do so. Why? Because this is one of the few existing books that offers a rich, critical, fresh, and contemporary analysis of the platform economy embedded into capital and capitalism worldwide. It reveals what global platform capitalism entails by uncovering its internal social, economic, and political contradictions and tensions from a much-needed critical standpoint.