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Based on materials obtained from fieldwork in three Chinese cities and data collected through online ethnography as a complementary method, this article investigates the relationship between Chinese trade unions and food delivery workers resisting the exploitation of platform capitalism. The article first analyzes the impact of the official character and structure of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) on its compatibility with delivery workers. Constrained by Chinese policies and regime, the ACFTU is absent from the collective action mobilization of delivery workers. Thus, it is shown that, by this absence, the Chinese couriers have opted for self-organization. However, while avoiding the role of mobilization, Chinese unions have responded and acted on the emergence of the couriers and the growth of their protest actions. As a result of these practices, some new union organizing patterns in platform capitalism have emerged in different regions. Whereas unions for platform workers, initially in the form of service stations, focused on providing welfare to workers, the actions of these unions are now shifting toward promoting collective bargaining. This article highlights that the ambiguous legal relationship between platforms and workers, the multiple outsourcing of Chinese platforms, and the geographical dispersion of outsourcing companies have challenged the ACFTU’s traditional union organization patterns, with the result that special unions have been created at different levels for couriers by innovating beyond the established system, abandoning the tradition of employer-controlled “paper unions” and potentially gaining substantive bargaining power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an editorial in which the author discusses the journal's dedication to academic research on work and employment, changes to the journal's article embargo period beginning in 2016 to a single year embargo, and the journal's policy of French and English article parity. The article also mentions the articles in this issue on work-family conflict, recession and its impact on aboriginal people in Canada, and employers and minimum wage policies in China.