Exercising associational and networked power through the use of digital technology by workers in global value chains

Abstract

While there are heated debates about how digitalization affects production, management and consumption in the context of global value chains, less attention is paid to how workers use digital technologies to organize and formulate demands and hence exercise power. This paper explores how workers in supplier factories in global value chains use different digital tools to exercise and enhance their power resources to improve working conditions. Combining the global value chain framework and concepts from labour sociology on worker power, the paper uses examples from the garment industry in Honduras and the footwear industry in China to show how workers used old and new digital tools to create and enhance associational and networked powers. Digital tools were used by workers and their allies in the global value chain to lower costs of communication, increase information exchange and participate in transnational campaigns during labour struggles vis-à-vis firms and governments in structurally and politically repressive environments. The paper contributes to our understanding of how workers use of digital technologies to exercise and combine different resources of power in online and offline actions in global value chains, as well as how they are confronted by new dimensions of constrains which include digital surveillance and control by the state.

Rethinking Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains: Worker Power, State‒Labour Relations and Intersectionality

“…Associational power is traditionally exercised along the horizontal dimension, via collective bargaining through trade unions, or political representation through worker parties (Wright, 2000). It can also be exercised through informal worker organizations and bottom‐up modes of mobilization (Do, 2017), or it can take the form of alliances between workers and non‐labour actors such as union–NGO coalitions and ‘community unionism’ (Wills, 2001; see also Helmerich et al., 2020). The latter is linked to the concept of ‘social movement unionism’ (Scipes, 1992), which views unions as vehicles for broader socio‐political change pursued in alliance with other social movements — women's, ecological, human rights or peace movements — and which resurfaced after new rounds of large‐scale labour unrest in the global South in the 2000s (Coe, 2015; Nowak, 2017).…”

“…Rather than substitutes, structural and associational power are often interrelated and interdependent. For workers with weak structural power — for instance in captive GVCs, where the threat of exit by lead firms diminishes workers’ capacity for disruption — associational power can be used to bring about change (Helmerich et al., 2020). On the other hand, workers with high structural power often need to organize and mobilize to realize the potential gains arising from their strategic positionality (Brookes, 2019).…”

To see and be seen: Technological change and power in deforestation driving global value chains

“…While deforestation‐linked GVCs are a particularly clear place to observe these dynamics, there is reason to believe they might play out elsewhere. Numerous emerging tools are empowering downstream and civil society actors to remotely monitor some aspects of upstream production processes in analogous ways in other GVCs (e.g., Bakker & Ritts, 2018; Helmerch et al., 2021), extending the potential for actors to use common strategies of leveraging environmental governance concerns as part of struggles to appropriate value (Havice & Campling, 2017; Ponte, 2019).…”

Impacts of digital business on global value chain participation in European countries

“…Applying digital technologies to production and business processes has enhanced the productivity and efficiency of communication between customers and suppliers (Rehnberg and Ponte 2018 ). Furthermore, digitization has also largely converted the nature of work in GVC factories, causing a shift from traditional machines to modern machines, artificial intelligence, robots, as well as enhancing the communication effectiveness among factory workers or between GVC services and online collaboration platforms (Helmerich et al 2021 ).…”