Within and Against Precarization: Mobilisation and Resistance Amongst Workers in the UK's Gig Economy

This project aims to identify and understand forms of workers' resistance to the proliferation of non-standard, insecure, digitalised or 'gig economy' employment contract and working conditions, through organised labour and other means.

The precarious and often disembodied nature of this work may appear to present barriers to workers' mobilisation and to trade union organising in particular, yet recent years have seen multiple instances of workers taking advantage of opportunities for disruption engendered by digital business models, enhancing workers' leverage when making demands.

Multiple small, independent trade unions have emerged and grown rapidly in the UK since 2011, mobilising such instances of resistance. Despite the challenge that their expansion and enthusiasm for strike action appears to pose to patterns of declining overall union membership and industrial action, they have not been empirically investigated as a coherent phenomenon. By conducting ethnographic work amongst such unions during their ongoing campaigns, I aim to understand how they mobilise workers under such restrictive circumstances, what tactics and strategies they develop and deploy, and to access their members' experiences and perceptions of gig economy work.

Beyond these unions, I will also conduct research amongst non-unionised workers who mobilise through informal networks and collectives, within their own workplaces and more broadly.

In order to conceptually approach this evolving subject, I will develop conceptions of precarity as process, or 'precarization', where both objective measures of insecurity and subjective experiences of uncertainty are understood as either increasing or decreasing depending on the actions of those within that process. This is opposed to viewing precarity as a static category, as tends to be the case in popular conceptions of a 'Precariat' class. My approach will deploy and expand on this under-utilised conceptual framework.

The sustained participation and flexibility of ethnography provides the best means of capturing and accurately conveying the experiences and perspectives of often unheard precarious workers in an evolving and hereto unstudied field, allowing me to track changes on the ground, to take advantage emerging opportunities and to produce and analyse thick descriptions of workers' experiences and actions

My methods will draw heavily on those developed by scholars of social movements. Subsequently, this project will bridge the gap between scholarship on social movements and on the sociology of work, utilising both literatures to inform empirical research. This promises a valuable new synthesis of approaches that may have applicability in other sectors and countries.

Following my overall aim of identifying the characteristics of precarious workers' resistance and mobilisation in the UK, three research questions will guide my research:
1. What motivates workers to resist increases in precarious working conditions?
2. What varieties of resistance can be identified?
3. How do new unions seek to mobilise and enhance resistance?

I am the ideal candidate for this research as I have developed networks through my own union involvement and MA research, gaining comprehensive knowledge of the ongoing activities of new unions in multiple locations and contacts who will provide further access, snowballing my data collection.

I will prioritise informed consent, recognition of power dynamics, and secure storage of data throughout my research, maintaining awareness of the risks of raw data being accessed by those opposed to the mobilisations in question.