Platform couriers substitute brand shaming for workplace bargaining power.

Evidence

From the outset, the couriers’ main goal was to elaborate new tactics and strategies in order to improve the working conditions and the workers’ rights in their sector. To achieve this, they intentionally mixed old and new action repertoires, the latter taking place above all in the digital sphere, reflecting the fact that the use of social media and other tools of communication has facilitated the organization of grassroots collective action and protest events in recent years. An innovative form of protest especially crucial for the couriers in this context was the “digital strike,” which involved couriers logging out en masse from the applications used by the companies to allocate work shifts and deliveries. At the same time, they carried out mass pickets on the streets and an online campaign on social media simultaneously (Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020). By combining online and offline actions, they aimed at damaging not only the companies’ profits, but also—and more importantly—their public reputation. … Aware of their limited bargaining power at the workplace (Silver 2003) and their consequent inability to successfully block the delivery service circuit, couriers carried out disruptive action aimed at hurting the firm at the “point of realization”—in other words: the relationship between the delivery platforms and their client base. To do this, couriers consciously adopted a strategy of “brand shaming,” attacking the public image of the company with the aim of mobilizing public opinion in support of workers and, thus, indirectly inflicting harm on its business. Hereby, they took advantage of the strong symbolic component of the food delivery business model and its exclusive dependency on a positive online image, making the companies involved particularly sensitive to such challenges by the couriers, who are the only employees associated with the company with whom the customers experience direct, face-toface contact. Indeed, food delivery companies seek to profit from the projection of an image of fresh, “nice” and “environmentally friendly” business practices, thanks to the fact that their workers operate on bikes. That image, however, becomes less resonant when a number of couriers collectively decide to challenge its credibility. — Donatella della Porta et al., Mobilizing Against the Odds, 74

Categorization

• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s question about food-delivery couriers’ broader identity frame — the digital strike and brand-shaming are the union-side tactic counterpart to the organizing-frame analysis. — connects to: Platform workers must struggle to be recognized as workers at all — Donatella della Porta et al., Mobilizing Against the Odds: Solidarity…, 38; Influencer labor value is not convertible into bargaining leverage against platforms — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 44; Corporate apologies for racism often substitute gestures for structural change — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1489 (+1 more)
• SEED: The ‘digital strike’ and brand-shaming as a template for how workers without workplace leverage assault a firm’s intangible assets — a piece on ‘vulnerability inversion’ in platform labor.

Broader Connections

• Influencer labor value is not convertible into bargaining leverage against platforms #expands (0.82) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 44
• Corporate apologies for racism often substitute gestures for structural change #exemplifies (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1489
• Platform workers must struggle to be recognized as workers at all #qualifies (0.75) — Donatella della Porta et al., Mobilizing Against the Odds, 38
• Corporate solidarity gestures can provoke activist backlash when company practices contradict them #complicates (0.75) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 724