Making a global gig workers’ movement meaningful locally: Friction in activists’ everyday strategies

Abstract

Research by critical technology researchers shows platform-mediated (“gig”) work has increased the precarity of workers worldwide and sparked resistance to unjust working conditions. I build on the growing scholarship about the transnationalization of gig work, which has taken structural and organizational approaches. I argue that to understand gig workers’ transnational activism, we must ethnographically attend to “friction,” or the work it takes to make global concepts meaningful locally. Drawing from 20 months of ethnographic research with an Ecuadorian gig workers’ union, I take an actor-focused approach to highlight activists’ work making a particular kind of global movement gain traction: resituating words with contentious histories, reframing issues to resonate with global causes, and contesting the moral meanings of practices. My analysis shows that although global connections are facilitated by the transnational reach of platform companies, activists must work to make a particular kind of global movement “stick” in their local contexts.