Labor Power and Precarity in Digital Work: Union Responses to Work from Home

• In Event: From Shop Floors to Work from Home: Workplace Determinants of Political Behavior

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic was disruptive to workers and to labor unions. Millions of unionized workers shifted to remote or work from home (WFH) arrangements during a short time period – across service industries with high union density, such as telecommunications and the public sector, as well as in a range of administrative or white-collar jobs in manufacturing firms. Worker representatives have typically viewed these arrangements with ambivalence. On the one hand, they provide an opportunity for protecting workers from infection, enhancing worker-side flexibility and work-life balance, and reducing commute times and costs. On the other hand, they make it more difficult to communicate with or organize workers, build solidarity within a workplace, and ensure management compliance with collective agreements – while potentially posing longer-term risks for both mental and physical health (Dedden et al. 2023; Scasserra and Partenio 2021; UNI 2020). In the post-pandemic period, large numbers of employees have moved to permanent work from home contracts, raising concerns that this could enable the future shift of these jobs to more precarious (and non-union) outsourced, offshore, or platform-based gig contracts (Erickson and Norlander 2021).

While there is a large and growing literature on the impact of WFH on working conditions and worker well-being, there has been relatively less research on how unions are representing and organizing their WFH members. How are unions adapting to the ‘new normal’ of work from home and hybrid remote work arrangements? Under what conditions have unions been more or less successful in helping their members to gain benefits from work from home arrangements, while avoiding or countering their potential negative impacts on job security, health and safety, and access to collective voice? These questions are at the heart of broader debates about worker precarity under digitally mediated employment arrangements (Wood et al. 2019); as well as on the conditions for collective action and representation in remote and digital work (Joyce et al. 2023; Maffie 2020).

In this paper, we compare union and works council responses to the shift to work from home arrangements in contact centers in the US and Germany, based on matched case studies in both countries, as well as worker surveys in the US. Large numbers of contact center workers moved to WFH during the COVID-19 pandemic in both countries; with many workers subsequently being transitioned to (or hired into) permanent or hybrid WFH contracts. Our analysis focuses on two central questions. First, how did the shift to work from home affect unions’ and works councilors’ ability to represent and organize contact center workers? Second, what explains variation in outcomes – particularly regarding worker representatives’ success in adapting to this new environment to continue to represent and communicate with members?

We find that across the cases, work from home created substantial and similar challenges for worker representatives. However, their responses and success in maintaining voice (and avoiding precarity) differed across our cases. Findings point to two factors that were critical to outcomes: first, strategic choices by worker representatives to encourage a (regulated) approach to remote work; and, second, institutional and organizational resources that supported negotiating strong worker protections associated with these arrangements. While both factors were overall stronger in Germany, this was not universal – with subcontractors in particular experiencing steep challenges in the face of employer strategies to use work from home arrangements more explicitly to derecognize unions, avoid works councils, or weaken organizing campaigns. Our survey findings suggest that contact center workers strongly prefer work from home, experience better outcomes in these arrangements, and are willing to mobilize around defending these rights – supporting the importance to unions of taking leadership in promoting options that combine strong agreements and representation with WFH. We conclude with a discussion of implications for debates in comparative political economy on the future of worker representation and labor power in digital capitalism (Kemmerling and Trampusch 2023; Sadowski 2020).

Authors

• Virginia Doellgast, Cornell University

• Sean O'Brady, McMaster University

• Jeonghun Kim, Cornell University