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

该项目旨在通过有组织的劳工和其他手段，识别和了解工人抵制非标准、不安全、数字化或零工经济雇佣合同和工作条件扩散的形式。这项工作的不稳定和经常脱离实体的性质似乎对工人的动员，特别是对工会组织构成障碍，但近年来发生了多起工人利用数字商业模式带来的颠覆机会的例子，提高了工人在提出要求时的筹码。自2011年以来，英国出现了多个小型独立工会，动员了这些抵制的例子。尽管他们对罢工行动的扩张和热情似乎对工会成员总数和劳工行动总数下降的模式构成了挑战，但它们并未被作为一种连贯的现象进行实证调查。通过在这些工会正在进行的运动中进行人种学工作，我的目的是了解他们如何在这种限制条件下动员工人，他们制定和部署了什么战术和战略，并了解其成员对零工经济工作的经验和看法。除了这些工会，我还将在未加入工会的工人中进行研究，这些工人通过非正式网络和集体在他们自己的工作场所和更广泛的范围内动员起来。为了从概念上探讨这一不断演变的主题，我将发展预产期作为过程的概念，即客观的不安全措施和主观的不确定体验都被理解为增加或减少，这取决于过程中那些人的行动。这与将贪婪视为一个静态的范畴是相反的，因为这往往是‘预产阶级阶级’的流行概念的情况。我的方法将在这一未得到充分利用的概念框架上展开和扩展。人种学的持续参与和灵活性提供了最好的手段来捕捉和准确传达在一个不断发展且至今未被研究的领域中经常闻所未闻的危险工人的经验和观点，使我能够跟踪实地的变化，利用新出现的机会，并对工人的经验和行动进行深入的描述和分析我的方法将在很大程度上借鉴社会运动学者的研究成果。随后，这个项目将弥合社会运动和工作社会学之间的学术差距，利用这两种文献为实证研究提供信息。这有望对可能适用于其他行业和国家的方法进行有价值的新综合。按照我确定英国危险工人抵抗和动员特征的总体目标，三个研究问题将指导我的研究：1.是什么促使工人在危险的工作条件下抵制加薪？2.可以识别哪些种类的抵抗？3.新工会如何寻求动员和增强抵抗？我是这项研究的理想人选，因为我通过自己的工会参与和MA研究建立了网络，全面了解了新工会在多个地点正在进行的活动，以及将提供进一步访问的联系人，使我的数据收集像滚雪球一样滚雪球。在我的研究过程中，我将优先考虑知情同意、权力动态识别和数据安全存储，保持对原始数据被那些反对相关动员的人访问的风险的认识。

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 actionsMy 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.