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While there are heated debates about how digitalization affects production, management and consumption in the context of global value chains, less attention is paid to how workers use digital technologies to organize and formulate demands and hence exercise power. This paper explores how workers in supplier factories in global value chains use different digital tools to exercise and enhance their power resources to improve working conditions. Combining the global value chain framework and concepts from labour sociology on worker power, the paper uses examples from the garment industry in Honduras and the footwear industry in China to show how workers used old and new digital tools to create and enhance associational and networked powers. Digital tools were used by workers and their allies in the global value chain to lower costs of communication, increase information exchange and participate in transnational campaigns during labour struggles vis-à-vis firms and governments in structurally and politically repressive environments. The paper contributes to our understanding of how workers use of digital technologies to exercise and combine different resources of power in online and offline actions in global value chains, as well as how they are confronted by new dimensions of constrains which include digital surveillance and control by the state.

Dieser Beitrag präsentiert erste Einblicke in eine Organisationsbefragung zur Auswirkung der COVID-19 Pandemie auf Vereine und Initiativen in Deutschland. Die Studie unterstreicht, dass die Zivilgesellschaft mit großer Wucht getroffen wurde und weitreichende, negative Auswirkungen der Pandemie zu verzeichnen sind. Dennoch zeigen die Ergebnisse ebenfalls, dass sich Teile der Zivilgesellschaft der pandemischen Entwicklung anpassen und ihre Handlungsfähigkeit aufrechterhalten konnten. Besonderes Augenmerk wird in dem Beitrag auf Muster der (De-)Aktivierung sowie die Digitalisierung zivilgesellschaftlicher Akteure in der Krise gelegt. This article presents preliminary findings of a survey conducted among civil society organizations in Germany on the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of this research document widespread and profound negative consequences. Yet, the data also shows that parts of civil society were able to adapt their activities to the pandemic situation and maintained their ability to act. In particular, this article focusses on patterns of (de-)activation and the digitalization of civil society actors during the crisis.

This article examines the neglected question of workers’ voice in the transnational governance of labour rights. While governance studies often neglect worker's agency and labour studies focus on strikes or collective bargaining, this article takes the theoretical lenses of recursivity to explore and compare new channels for worker participation that developed in the context of transnational governance schemes. Taking the example of the Fair Labor Association, a prominent multistakeholder initiative in the garment industry, the article distinguishes between three channels: workers’ surveys during audits, complaint procedures, and local grievance mediation. Despite the fact that such opportunities count as key innovations for the participation of labour in transnational governance, statistical and qualitative data from FLA's factory audits and self-conducted interviews show that locally situated actors, especially workers, are only occasionally able to make their voice heard in formally open channels. The article identifies two main sources of constraints: the first is workers’ lack of knowledge of these channels and distrust towards these procedures. This is tied, secondly, to the more fundamental problem that business continues to have interpretative power over the nature of the problems and solutions in transnational labour governance.