Contingent workers and innovative digital collective action in Europe. Exploring inclusiveness through political intersectionality

According to many scholars, digitalisation generates new inequalities that\r\nintersect and stratify old ones, and endangers the exercise of collective\r\nvoice and the role of unions. This article aims to reverse this perspective\r\nby exploring how digital technology could strengthen collective action. To\r\nthis end, we adopt a political intersectional approach as a framework to\r\nassess whether the case studies considered in this article represent more\r\ninclusive ways of engaging different marginalised groups situated at the\r\nintersection of various forms of inequality. Our analysis draws on 13 case\r\nstudies involving platforms and digital tools used as strategic devices to\r\naggregate and support intermittent and contingent workers across five\r\nEU countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria. The findings\r\nsuggest that digitalisation offers significant potential for developing new\r\nworker actions and forms of representation. However, many social groups\r\nremain marginalised, even when their specific conditions or claims are\r\nforcefully invoked in an effort to drive regulatory and policy responses.