Worker Resistance in Digital Capitalism| Solidarity and Resistance Meet Social Enterprise: The Social Logic of Alternative Cloudwork Platforms

Abstract

Amid the popularity of global cloudwork platforms that connect vast numbers of clients and workers across geographic boundaries, local platforms have emerged. These alternative platforms, such as social enterprises, are established by platform workers and social entrepreneurs offering pro-worker platform-mediated work organization. Through two case studies, I situate the ambivalence of alternative platform formations within the social imaginaries and “entrepreneurial solidarities” underpinning cloudwork in the Philippines and the local sources of identification—spatial and local affinities and gender identities driving them. I then examine how these sources of identification shape the versions of fair and inclusive relations of production that they seek to embed in platform design. These represent an expression of agency aimed at improving platform conditions in ways that simultaneously embody and challenge the platforms’ business models. The article seeks to contribute to the enrichment of the debates in terms of the politics, nuances, and possibilities for solidarity and resistance in cloudwork in the Global South amid continuing technological development and platform reforms.