Unionisation and mobilisation within platform work: towards precarisation—a case of Uber drivers in Poland

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12315
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Dominika Polkowska

Unionisation and mobilisation within

platform work: towards precarisation—a

case of Uber drivers in Poland

Dominika Polkowska

ABSTRACT

There are several barriers to the unionisation of platform workers. Based on in-depth

interviews with Uber drivers and trade unionists from Poland, it turns out that these

barriers are related to the temporary nature of their work and the specif‌ic tripartite

relationship within the framework of Polish platform work (driver, f‌leet partner and

Uber). However, what is unique in this context is the ‘mutual invisibility’of Uber

drivers and trade unions, which intensif‌ies the normalisation of precariousness of

drivers’work.

1 INTRODUCTION

Non-standard employment practices, with almost unlimited f‌lexibility and

hypercompetitiveness on the one hand and limited social protection and diff‌icult ac-

cess to collective protection (e.g. by trade unions) on the other, threaten the employ-

ment standards of all workers (Drache et al., 2015) and might lead to precarisation.

The emergence of digital forms of work has disrupted the established patterns of work

organisation and employment relations (Irani, 2015; Zwick, 2018). The Fourth Indus-

trial Revolution (Schwab, 2016) has exacerbated neoliberalism’s industrial relations

to the point where a new term, the gig economy, has arisen to describe that workers

now have ‘gigs’instead of jobs (Zwick, 2018: 680).

As described by Tassinari and Maccarrone (2020: 36), ‘gigs’are small tasks or jobs

that individuals are contracted to carry out by companies that ‘adopt platforms as

their operational model, using internet technology to act as de facto intermediaries

of labour supply and demand for the provision of services—such as delivery, cleaning,

admin and data processing work’.

The conclusions drawn from other research on ‘gig’workers show that this group is

particularly exposed to precariousness (Schor et al., 2020; Sutherland et al., 2020). A

recent study on precarisation of Uber drivers in Poland conf‌irms those conclusions

(Polkowska, 2019). In Poland, the f‌lexibilisation of employment leading to the

precarisation of work became a widespread phenomenon during the post-1989 sys-

temic transformation, and the process even intensif‌ied in the 2000s and 2010s

(Karolak and Mrozowicki, 2017). The precarisation of vulnerable groups of workers

❒Dominika Polkowska, Institute of Sociology, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Dominika Polkowska, Department of Sociology, Maria

Curie-Sklodowska University, pl. Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej 4, 20-031 Lublin, Poland; email: dominika.

polkowska@umcs.pl

Industrial Relations Journal 52:1, 25–39

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd