Workers Solidarity in an Age of Precarity

Chapter 6 illuminates tensions in various collectives established by online transport drivers, in the form of workers’ communities and associations, which redistribute resources gathered by their members to provide support for one another. In doing so, those collectives instil individualisation in a collectively experienced situation. They thus (inadvertently) condition workers’ acceptance of their role as active participants in a system that reduces corporate risks, while shifting these to workers. Some collectives have become a force behind protests and strikes against poor working conditions. Nonetheless, individualising mechanisms that operate in workers’ collectives often inhibit the further development of the kind of solidarity that might sustain a more coherently organised movement against the sort of precarity that benefits corporations and that is often insulated by state policy.