In today’s digital economy, capital increasingly relies on automation and artificial intelligence to restructure and intensify work. In Bangladesh’s garment factories, for example, automation and heightened surveillance have pushed production to new extremes while making working conditions more precarious. Because these systems are so opaque, non-technical workers and activists often struggle to keep pace.

Where labour once found relative cohesion in large factories or traditional offices, the rise of digital and platform-based labour adds further fragmentation, governed by inscrutable algorithms and hidden supply chains. Although these changes have energised certain labour struggles, many workers believe that traditional unions and activist networks have not yet adapted effectively to the challenges posed by today’s technologically dispersed workplaces.

How do we make sense of this challenge to labour? What are the possibilities for building worker power? I would like to bring a perspective informed by a group of critical scholars, including Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, and Ned Rossiter. Their framework for understanding the “multiplication of labour” and the expanding role of digital and physical infrastructure reveals how new forms of collective labour power might emerge despite the scattering and differentiation of workers.

Rather than viewing fragmentation and flexibilisation as a one-way path to defeat, they suggest these transformations may contain seeds of renewed worker agency. Through this lens, once-isolated groups—ranging from gig workers to nickel miners—can be seen as part of a shared orbit, opening opportunities for alliances that bridge old divides.

Multiplied in a Connected Infrastructure

Mezzadra and Neilson argue that contemporary capitalism, propelled by intersecting forces of extraction, logistics, and finance, has shifted not only how people work but also how they understand themselves as workers. Neilson and Rossiter extend this idea by focusing on algorithmic governance. They highlight how infrastructure—whether it be ports, data centres, or delivery apps—now functions as a new form of oversight and control, fragmenting schedules, scattering workers, and obscuring who is ultimately accountable.

These scholars view logistical and digital infrastructure as central to a new form of extractivism. Where “extraction” once primarily referred to natural resources, it now also includes capturing labour, social interactions, personal data, and ordinary human movements. Labour exploitation remains at the heart of capitalist accumulation, but it is increasingly mediated by software and hidden in cloud computing systems.

Legacy labour organising methods struggle to respond. With few shared physical spaces and many workers classified as “independent contractors” or employed on short-term contracts, a unified sense of belonging can be difficult to sustain. Multinational corporations further intensify this dynamic by swiftly shifting production across borders, pitting one group of precarious workers against another. At the same time, the global networks that perpetuate precarity can also galvanise new alliances, as modern communication tools make it possible for workers to coordinate large-scale protests and strikes with a renewed imagination of labour geographies.

Challenges and Possibilities for Organising

The move toward app-based labour disrupts traditional approaches but also propels activists to develop inventive tactics. Urban platform workers often coordinate “digital pickets,” timing their collective actions to peak demand. In Bangkok, for instance, on-demand delivery riders have staged synchronised “log-offs,” refusing orders until the platform’s management conceded to negotiations. Although lacking a physical picket line, these app-based strategies show how workers can flip an exploitative tool into a collective bargaining asset.

While food-delivery riders working multiple apps often experience unpredictable pay rates and sudden deactivations, they can also build collective forms of resistance: “gaming” an app or sharing strategies to circumvent platform rules becomes a nascent demonstration of worker power, even if traditional unions rarely acknowledge it.

For precarious workers with unpredictable schedules, group chats and rapid-response actions can recreate the supportive community once provided by robust union membership. Hybrid labour associations—often operating outside legal frameworks—offer services, legal advice, and solidarity to those shut out of formal collective bargaining. While small and dispersed, these digitally coordinated efforts suggest that online connectivity might well complement in-person assemblies and older face-to-face organising methods.

By framing both digital and physical platforms as infrastructures of labour governance, this framework repositions platform labour—frequently dismissed as too individualised or fragmented—as strategically located within logistical systems, capable of exercising power by targeting the digital nodes that structure their work. Though seemingly divided by sector, formality, or technological mediation, truckers and platform workers are governed by infrastructures—often literally connected—that sustain global capitalism. For instance, truckers handling last‑mile deliveries are tracked by the same kinds of platforms that govern app‑based couriers. In doing so, the framework not only highlights shared terrains between logistics and platform workers but also points toward new forms of cross‑sectoral solidarity grounded in infrastructural interdependence.

Organising, then, is not merely reactive but generative—it assembles fragmented workers into new collectivities, often faster than formal institutions can adapt. What once appeared as disconnected struggles—between truckers in Indonesia, data-centre workers in Malaysia, and platform couriers in Bangkok—are now increasingly visible as part of interlinked systems of governance and control. For practical reasons, we can even call this system “a supply chain.” These systems span global supply chains, coordinating the movement of goods and labour through a mesh of software, physical infrastructure, and layered subcontracting. But connectivity alone isn’t enough. To build lasting power, workers need spaces for shared political education—where they can reflect on their conditions, map systems of control, and plan collectively. These are the foundations for strategy, not just resistance.

Second, this framework strengthens and expands the often-invoked—but weakly applied—concept of chokepoints to include algorithmically controlled spaces where labour is routed, timed, and disciplined. In this broader view, chokepoints are no longer limited to physical bottlenecks in the circulation of goods or production hubs accessible only to certain groups of workers. They also include the invisible infrastructures that govern labour itself—scheduling systems, delivery apps, and platform dashboards. Crucially, this shift makes the idea of algorithmic management more tangible for platform workers.

Disrupting chokepoints, however, is more than blocking a road or logging off an app. Recent research shows success rests on at least two intertwined factors: multi-sited terrains and political capacity.¹ A single blockade can always be rerouted or broken up unless actions are well‑timed, sustained, and coordinated across multiple sites. It is important to note that seizing chokepoints is likely to fail if the  action is narrowly planned and executed. In power terms, real leverage comes from associational depth and broad coalitions. Large‑scale impact demands cohesive organisations, cross‑sector alliances, and community legitimacy; without these, actions risk isolation, fragmentation, or backlash.

Yes, chokepoint tactics can spark powerful moments. Still, they rarely deliver lasting gains unless woven into long-term strategies that match capital’s ability to outmanoeuvre resistance with broad, sustainable, and solidaristic movements. This is the difference between mobilising and organising. Mobilisations—like a sudden walkout or a viral campaign—can capture attention. But organising builds relationships, structures, and strategies that last beyond any one action. Effective organising today must engage three critical dimensions: infrastructural rootedness, strong associational ties, and a compelling shared narrative—one that unites workers across apps, warehouses, and the streets.

A New Source of Power?

Reimagining labour power means treating supply chains as contested terrain where cross‑border, cross‑sector alliances can take root. Supply chains are not just points of vulnerability to expose; they are infrastructures that workers can redirect toward new forms of collective power. This article is not nostalgic for the era of large, grant‑funded coalitions under global union federations. Transnational solidarity that lacks deep organising is merely symbolic—and at a time when trade wars and nationalist protectionism pit unions against one another, symbolism rings hollow.

Most digital workers today, especially those in platform economies, are simply fighting to survive, with little time or institutional backing for globe-spanning projects. Instead, this is a call to intentionally cultivate infrastructure-oriented networks—grassroots, self-organised groups that are already embedded in the logistical infrastructure that shapes their lives. These networks may look modest compared to legacy coalitions, but they are strategically situated and increasingly capable of leveraging collective power from below. By organising along the circuits of logistics, data, and care, workers are not just surviving—they are transforming the infrastructures of control into infrastructures of power.

1. Danyluk, M. (2023), Seizing the Means of Circulation: Choke Points and Logistical Resistance in Coco Solo, Panama. Antipode, 55: 1368-1389. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12836; Pons-Vignon, N. (2025). Power resources and the last-mile problem in logistics: reflections on a Swiss labour struggle. New Political Economy, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2025.2462141