Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry

A

theory-driven account of the stakes and knowledge-building practices of

the resurgent labor movement from organizers across the gig economy and

tech industry.

As

tech billionaires align with Trump, they are also launching a renewed

political and technological assault on labor. But it still takes workers

to make fortunes for the bosses, and collective action is again on the

rise. The rank and file are coming from the precarious new “gig jobs”

and drawing strength from a new class of worker who does the jobs that

computers still cannot. Previously thought to be “unorganizable,” these

workers are part of a North American collective movement that is

reaffirming faith in collective revolutionary action with new forms of

organizing, new ways of association, and new ways of thinking and

recombining labor organizing and research.

To

capture this growing class consciousness as it happens, the Capacitor

Collective has conducted ten illuminating interviews with platform

workers who are also organizers committed to connecting old motivations

and new tactics in a text that shakes up the worker inquiry tradition to

imagine new ways to produce knowledge with and for workers.