The emerging geographies of platform labour: Intensifying trends in global capitalism

Kelle Howson, Alessio Bertolini, Srujana Katta, Funda Ustek-Spilda and Mark Graham

Chapter 11 in A Research Agenda for the Gig Economy and Society, 2022, pp 193-214 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: To understand the distribution of agency, power, and accumulation in the platform economy, it is important for geographers to trace the ways in which digital labour platforms are interacting with and even transforming the spatial dynamics of labour. By strategically occupying different points of geographical embeddedness at local, national and global scales, platforms can influence and extract value from local labour transactions whilst avoiding many of the costs of local regulation. They are also able to harness and exacerbate existing social and geographical inequalities to further commodify labour and to undermine workers' power and agency. To better understand these geographies of digital labour platform power, this chapter situates international digital labour platforms at the forefront of globalising trends which have given rise to uneven economic geographies of production, and undermined labour protection. We discuss developments and possibilities that have emerged in response to these trends; in national and supra-national regulation, worker resistance, and consumer and third sector campaigns. Our key argument and contribution to the literature is that the platform labour countermovement is increasingly responding to the need to meet platforms at all the geographical scales across which they manifest and attempt to retreat. This includes in local, global and virtual terrains.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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