Platform worker organizing for power: relational dynamics of platform unionism in Taiwan’s food delivery sector

Abstract

While many industrial relations and sociological studies have examined platform worker organizing, two puzzles remain. First, their empirical focus on the Global North may obscure the challenges of organizing in non-Western settings characterized by institutional fragmentation and weak union power. Second, understanding worker power requires a relational and processual analysis of how labour actors’ strategies evolve in interaction with platforms’ adaptive responses and shifting political opportunities. This article combines the power resources approach with a relational perspective in social movement studies to examine courier unions’ emergence, dynamics, and power-building strategies in Taiwan’s platform-mediated food delivery sector from 2019 to 2026. Using a qualitative case study – with data comprizing interviews with union and non-union couriers, union officials, and a legislator, supplemented by observation and document analysis – it reveals workplace-level and institutional barriers to building collective power. It shows how unions with different interests built and activated multiple power resources – particularly institutional, coalitional, and ideational resources – to fight platforms and push for labour-policy reform. By contrast, platforms mobilized structural economic power and ideational power to contest workers’ power-building strategies. These struggles nonetheless generated new opportunities for diverse unions to collaborate and amplify their voice in institutional and public arenas, culminating in a special law protecting couriers in 2026. This study contributes to the literature on the power resources approach, precarious worker organising, and platform labour activism by advancing a relational and processual perspective on worker and platform power, and by mapping the interactions between different types of power resources under multi-unionism.