Data-driven Labor Organizing. Helping workers or driving the insatiable hunger for data?

This article is a response to Nyman et al. (2024) article on forging a research agenda on data-driven labor organizing. While recognizing the potential benefits, this short commentary posits that data-driven labor organizing might transfer the responsibility from trade unions to individual workers. This transfer, however, may have limited efficacy as it fails to address today’s major power imbalances and the constrained collective bargaining capacity of trade unions in certain industry sectors.