Labor Protests in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2016. A. Michael Simms/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by)
These are hard times for trade unions. Private sector union membership in the US is down to under 7% of workers. While private sector membership in the UK is higher, at 14%, the ability of UK unions to win disputes, outside of some key public services, is nevertheless on the wane. This is clearly demonstrated by the steel industry, once a mainstay of the labour movement but now a sector in which unions are forced to offer up concessions just keep their members in paid work.
It is from these weak foundations that unions face the growing winds of change currently ripping through the economy. New economic processes are becoming possible due to the astronomical growth of personal data. This data is produced as more and more of our everyday activities are facilitated by internet-based platforms and smartphone apps. We now live in an almost permanent state of connectivity. The so-called advent of ‘big data’, ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘self-tracking technologies’, and the ‘quantification’ and ‘datafication’ of social life is helping to disrupt long-held business conventions and is enabling a new flexible temporality of capitalism to emerge.
