Contingent workers and innovative digital collective action in Europe. Exploring inclusiveness through political intersectionality

According to many scholars, digitalisation generates new inequalities that intersect and stratify old ones, and endangers the exercise of collective voice and the role of unions. This article aims to reverse this perspective by exploring how digital technology could strengthen collective action. To this end, we adopt a political intersectional approach as a framework to assess whether the case studies considered in this article represent more inclusive ways of engaging different marginalised groups situated at the intersection of various forms of inequality. Our analysis draws on 13 case studies involving platforms and digital tools used as strategic devices to aggregate and support intermittent and contingent workers across five EU countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria. The findings suggest that digitalisation holds significant potential for fostering new forms of worker action and representation. However, many social groups remain marginalised, even when their specific conditions or demands are strongly articulated in an effort to drive regulatory and policy responses.