Abstract
The rapid growth of e-commerce in recent years has reshaped the distribution of goods to customers. It has also created new workplaces, many of which however operate under precarious working conditions. Attempts to organize workers have had mixed results, as can be witnessed in the case of the efforts by workers at Amazon in Germany to obtain a collective bargaining agreement. While public interest has been extraordinary compared to other labour struggles, this area of trade union activity has received relatively little scholarly attention. This article argues for the use a global value chain approach to explore the opportunities and limits for labour organizing of e-commerce workers, with the aim of better understanding their specific positions along global value chains and how their working conditions can be improved. E-commerce workers are a heterogeneous group over the globe: they include warehouse workers located at the distribution hubs of targeted markets as well as call centre agents, marketing experts and software engineers. The article examines the power resources of labour for organizing e-commerce workers at different stages of the value chain. Labour struggles in seven countries are compared on the basis of documentary evidence as well as of testimonies by trade unionists.