Disrupting Precarity: An Enquiry into Worker Voice in Nonstandard Employment

Walker, Michael Brian

Disrupting Precarity: An Enquiry into Worker Voice in Nonstandard Employment

Walker, Michael Brian

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2020

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Walker, Michael Brian
dc.date.accessioned	2021-03-16T23:40:55Z
dc.date.available	2021-03-16T23:40:55Z
dc.date.issued	2020
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/147264
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Business.	en_US
dc.description.abstract	Employee voice implies unions or employer‐controlled channels. Many workers do not have access to either. Moreover, the status of employment is itself under pressure with increasing presence of intermediaries between actual power‐holders and workers (Weil, 2014; Peetz, 2019), the most extreme of which is the new phenomenon of ‘gig employment’. Employers are less likely to see a reason to engage with workers with whom they do not have an ongoing relationship (Colvin, 2013). The thesis interrogates this presumed situation of voicelessness in today’s workplaces, specifically in the gig economy. The internet has broken down barriers to employee voice. I observed, through interviews and netnographic analysis, instances of online voice where workers acted collectively and achieved material improvements to their working conditions by so doing. I also found that algorithmic management acts as a barrier to the effective carrying out of voice. It fragments and isolates workers and, by dehumanising management, displaces worker grievances away from the true source of disgruntlement. The major contributions to theory are that employee voice can occur, and achieve material results, without any coordinator, and that algorithmic management is an exercise of Foucauldian biopower that deflects many gig workers’ grievances.	en_US
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/147264/2/02whole.pdf
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/ppc
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.title	Disrupting Precarity: An Enquiry into Worker Voice in Nonstandard Employment	en_US
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

Employee voice implies unions or employer‐controlled channels. Many workers do not have access to either. Moreover, the status of employment is itself under pressure with increasing presence of intermediaries between actual power‐holders and workers (Weil, 2014; Peetz, 2019), the most extreme of which is the new phenomenon of ‘gig employment’. Employers are less likely to see a reason to engage with workers with whom they do not have an ongoing relationship (Colvin, 2013). The thesis interrogates this presumed situation of voicelessness in today’s workplaces, specifically in the gig economy. The internet has broken down barriers to employee voice. I observed, through interviews and netnographic analysis, instances of online voice where workers acted collectively and achieved material improvements to their working conditions by so doing. I also found that algorithmic management acts as a barrier to the effective carrying out of voice. It fragments and isolates workers and, by dehumanising management, displaces worker grievances away from the true source of disgruntlement. The major contributions to theory are that employee voice can occur, and achieve material results, without any coordinator, and that algorithmic management is an exercise of Foucauldian biopower that deflects many gig workers’ grievances.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/147264