Recasting workers’ power: Work and inequality in the shadow of the digital ageEdwardWebster and LynfordDor. Bristol University Press, 2023, pp.

The 21st century has brought with it optimism and pessimism in as far as workers' movements are concerned globally. The book seeks to problematize the pessimistic narrative on work in the digital age extracting examples from South Africa, Uganda and Kenya. The pessimistic narrative on work is supported by the declining membership and density in the Global North. Examples are drawn from liberal economies, namely Australia, the United States of America, Germany and Sweden, respectively. The 'end of labour thesis' is argued to reify globalization and the digital age giving them a logic and coherence that they do not have. The pessimists present workers as victims. Hence, the result is that labour can only act defensively − fight militantly to defend a demand, even when it is unrealistic. The result is that labour is viewed as an actor without an agency that cannot think of alternatives or imagine a future towards which labour can work. Trade Unions in Transformation initiated by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung form part of the project to restore a focus on workers' agency and demonstrate how workers are responding innovatively to globalization. The book draws from the power resources approach to examine new forms of worker organization emerging along large swathes of precarious and informal labour in Africa. The authors identify examples where workers on the margins are beginning to cross the divide between the protected and the unprotected, the established workers and those marginalized by liberalization (p. x). They further argue that workers' structural power has been constrained by increased competition between workers globally, by intensified managerial control at the workplace level deepened by digitalization and by unfriendly strike regulations. 'Self-employed workers' with law structural power tend to create new forms of associational power, which diverge from traditional trade unions. All the chapters in the book each detail how workers are experimenting with different approaches to organizing and building power − approaches that differ significantly from the categorization of 'union revitalization' enunciated by Jelle Visser. Visser's categories all assume the traditional union form to be hegemonic, whereas this is not the case in much of the Global South and is even changing in industries in South Africa. The book complements literature by returning to the labour process to examine how changes in production within a given geographical location have the effect of unmaking and remaking the older sections of the working class and making new sections in the process, as capital searches for ways to extract higher rates of surplus value (p. 22). In chapters 2, 3 and 4, there is a focus on the informal sector workforce in post-apartheid South Africa which although not as large as its continental neighbours, now make up a significant section of the country's labouring class. The chapter further explores how South Africa's largest labour federation, the Congress of South Africa Trade Union, has acknowledged the growing threat of informalization in the South Africa labour market at different moments in the last 30 years. However, it has largely been unable to reorient itself towards various types of vulnerable workers, especially in the informal sector. Four manufacturing workplaces are used from Ekurhuleni (east of Johannesburg) highlighting how changes in production have the potential to significantly restructure the character of the industrial workplace. Permanent unionized workplace has been expelled from the factory overtime and replaced by workers in more precarious forms of employment. In chapter 5, the authors examine the emergence of a new worker in the digital economy − the online platform-driven food courier rider. Instead of clocking in with a timecard as it at a traditional workplace, 'gig' workers log into an 'app'. In doing this, they become subject to a new business model based on a form of algorithmic management. The authors conclude the chapter by suggesting that the new digital technology is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it leads to an extension of authoritarian managerial control over workers, increasing their insecurity and deepening levels of inequality. On the other hand, this technology linkage has increased workers' workplace bargaining power providing them with the ability to develop collective solidarity and even strike action. In chapter 6, the focus is shifted to East Africa, particularly Uganda using the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers' Union − a Ugandan transport union is argued to have successfully revitalized by crossing the divide between formal and informal workers. It is now one of the largest transport unions in Africa with nearly 100,000 members. The union substantially transformed from 5000 paid-up members to become a hybrid organization within 15 years. In chapter 7, the introduction of digital technology is a contested process. The Global Union Federation (GUFs) are playing an intermediary coordinating role in supporting the exercise of power by trade unions at the supernational level. Through transnational activism in Kenya and Uganda, the GUF Education International has effectively resisted the de-professionalization of teachers through the global campaign against the privatization of education by for-profit operator Bridge International Academies (BIA). At the centre of BIAs' business model is the standardization of education through digital technology. The authors argue that global unions played an important role in facilitating local unions' resistance to global corporations. All in all, it is essential to return to the labour process and its changes, because the workplace remains an important terrain in which struggles against exploitation and domination take place.