Conference Agenda

The dynamics of capital and labour undergo significant changes as various production processes across sectors are being brought into the fold of digitalisation, particularly at the cost of informal women workers whose work traverse sectors, and who do not self-identify as 'productive' workers. The growing trend of agricultural digitalisation, particularly in the Global South, has solidified existing class precarities, and has modified land relations among several marginalised agricultural workers and farmers. Not just this, with land sovereignty being increasingly pegged to data sovereignty, or the lack thereof, there is also an emerging threat to tenure rights. Against the threat of digitalisation enabling and mutating existing precarities at the cost of women informal agricultural workers from the Global South, this research study, in collaboration with SEWA Cooperative Federation examines two questions: (1) How socio-economic trust, emerging from a cooperative mode of production, can challenge the skewed labour-capital dynamic, and (2) What kind of alternative data systems can be created by imbibing the socio-political phenomenon of trust into SEWA’s current process of building a worker-designed and worker-led data cooperative through democratic co-design, with the aim to resist the extension of Big Tech into Global South food systems. In this paper, we theorise through a Critical Grounded Theory approach (N = 25 women members of SEWA) on the often underexplored concept of economic trust as the socio-political basis for SEWA’s success in executing a cooperative mode of production. Through a follow-up Participatory Action Research of platform co-design, we demonstrate that a successful “physical-digital” data cooperative model - pegged on SEWA’s existing, unique hyperlocal Farmer Facilitation Centres (FFC) - must embed within itself the dynamics of economic trust, and is in fact a necessary exploration in the unique context of uneven digital access found in the Global South in order to challenge emerging digital platform firms (Nicoli & Paltrineri, 2019). The study highlights the need for techno-design to be informed by socio-economic narratives, and the intricate process of executing the often-cited digital commons contextualised by the digitalisation challenges of the Global South. With over 300,000 active women members who are often caste and class-marginalised, SEWA is one of the largest labour-managed cooperatives in India that is completely self-organised and led by informal workers; techno-design blueprints emerging from this collaboration are significant addition to the body of work on executing platform cooperative models.

The concepts of job-security, rights at work and social dialogue but also personal meaning, dignity and purpose lie at the heart of the ILOs call for a sustainable and inclusive post-Covid recovery focused on the concept of Decent-Work (Brill, 2021). However, for vulnerable workers, a reinforced digital-capitalism and the dominance of new forms of platform work has meant experiencing increased flexibilization, technological-unemployment, job-precarity, social insecurity and often a loss of agency and respect. This radical labour-market restructuring and path towards “rationalized unaccountability” (Vesa and Tiernari, 2020), has exposed the limitations of current models of governance and social policy to regulate the negative social-economic consequences resulting from dramatic technology (AI) - driven change and disruption.

A continued embedded institutional inequality however presents a dilemma and area of potential future conflict for HRM as digitalization is now dramatically transforming practices across a wide area of HR operational responsibilities (Strohmeier, 2020). On the other hand, the emergence of the digital-organized phenomena of digital activism and technology-enabled, system-critical, virtual democratic communities (George and Leidner, 2019), shows that the digital revolution (apart from creating negative challenges and disruption), also offers opportunities for collective resistance and positive social change (Young, Selander, Vaast, 2019), particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups (Stornaiuolo and Thomas, 2017). HRM has however failed to perceive the inherent potential of democratic digital collaboration in the search for more ethical, sustainable and stakeholder-friendly strategies, at least for platform-workers. Our research therefore asks the questions:

What is the role of institutions (organizations and HRM) in addressing digital-reinforced institutional inequalities?

How can different but complementary collectivist organizing theoretical approaches be integrated to develop more democratic and collaborative digital frameworks to enhance the participation and social inclusion of vulnerable workers, especially platform workers?

We examine the role of business institutions (Organizations and HRM), in addressing challenges to decent work and workers agency (through the advancing digitalization of HRM), from a common-good HRM perspective (Aust, Matthews and Muller-Camen, 2020). Specifically, we suggest the integration of Albareda and Sison’s (2020) solidarity-based, collective model of Commons Organizing and the anti-hierarchical concept of Digital Organizing as a comprehensive, sustainable solution. Although the open virtual-spaces of our proposed new pro-welfare, self-organizing framework of “Digital Commons Organizing” cannot be expected to fully replace physical workplace democratic-zones of reciprocal interaction and social dialogue (Rosa, 2022), we argue, they can act as a stepping-stone towards a future more radical organizational structural change.