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Accepted Manuscript of:
Valeria Piro and Annalisa Murgia (2024, Online First) Dissenting and innovating:
Freelancers’ emerging forms of organising in the Netherlands, Current Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921231223176
This version of the article has been accepted for publication after peer review but is not
the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any
corrections. The Version of Record is available online at:
https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921231223176
Dissenting and innovating:
Freelancers’ emerging forms of organising in the Netherlands
Abstract: This article investigates precarious workers’ organising by considering the
case of freelancers, a category between the self-employed – usually represented by
employer organisations – and employees – whose interests are traditionally defended by
trade unions. Drawing on a six-month ethnography conducted in the Netherlands within
two freelancer associations, our study shows their capacity to exercise collective forms
of ‘critical agency’ – on the one hand by questioning their established practices and
seeking to innovate their repertoire, and on the other by staging protest actions, despite
the long Dutch tradition of consensus-based social dialogue. The aim of the article is
twofold. First, it contributes to the debate on precarious workers’ organising by
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considering freelancers as agentic subjects, whose collective identity and organising
practices shape and are shaped not only by the socio-institutional context, but also by the
type of relationships they create and in which they are embedded. Second, by focusing
on collective everyday practices as fields of production of the new, it illustrates diverse
forms of critical agency exercised by freelancers, thus offering an empirical contribution
to the understanding of critical agency in its making.
Keywords: Critical agency, Ethnography, Freelancers, Organising, Precarious work, The
Netherlands.
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Introduction
The changing nature of labour in recent decades has also implied a change in collective
practices of organising that can give voice to workers’ dissent and foster innovative ways
of mobilising. In the Fordist era, in the European context, work was traditionally
embodied in a (white, male, and heterosexual) employee with an open-ended and full-
time contract, who enjoyed the protection of labour law and the welfare system. In this
context, labour conflicts were mainly epitomised by a strong and socially homogeneous
working-class movement, within which trade unions played an important role. In the last
few decades, however, the flexibilization and fragmentation of the labour market has led
to a crisis of identification of workers with a labour movement and its main organisational
structures, namely the trade unions (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013; Wieviorka,
2013). Indeed, almost everywhere in Europe, precarious workers have experienced a lack
of voice in traditional industrial relations and its political arena, while at the same time
unions have suffered a drastic reduction in their membership (Keune, 2013; Heery and
Frege, 2006). Freelance workers, who fall between self-employment and employment,
embody these tendencies, as their status – especially in European national contexts with
strong legal employment protections – suffers, compared to employees, from a severe
lack of collective representation (Bologna, 2018; Conen and Schippers, 2019). The
situation is different in more deregulated institutional regimes, such as the UK and
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Ireland, where in recent decades there have been several examples of freelance collective
organising (Heery et al., 2004; Wynn, 2015).
By positioning this study at the crossroads between industrial relations and social
movement debates, this article discusses two case studies conducted in the Netherlands
and illustrates how precarious workers’ organising practices also develop among
freelancers. The selected cases are relevant for two sets of reasons: on the one hand,
because freelancers in the European context tend to join associations that focus mainly
on service provision (i.e., training or legal and fiscal assistance), while they rarely engage
in direct forms of collective action (Jansen, 2020); on the other hand, the case studies
were conducted in a country, the Netherlands, where the institutional framework is
characterised by a low level of conflict and a consensus-based tradition not only in the
case of freelancers, but also with regard to employees (Connolly et al., 2017; Gumbrell
McCormick and Hyman, 2013). In particular, by leveraging the cartography of the current
debate on ‘critical agency’ proposed by Rebughini (2018) in this journal, we explore
grassroots freelance initiatives within the two associations studied, selected for their
innovative organising practices compared to those traditionally used by this category of
workers.
The article is structured as follows. The first section deals with the debate on
precarious workers’ forms of organising in industrial relations and social movements
studies and introduces the concept of ‘critical agency’, explaining how we adopted,
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deployed, and empirically defined it to analyse freelancers’ organising practices. In the
second and third sections, the research context and methodology are illustrated. Findings
are then reported based on the two case studies conducted: ‘The Orde van Registertolken
en-vertalers’ (Orde), an association of sworn interpreters and translators (I&Ts); and the
‘Dancers’ Council’ (DsC), an informal network of dancers. The discussions and
conclusion outline the theoretical and empirical contribution of our study.
Precarious workers’ organising: What spaces for collective agency?
After being neglected for a few decades, the forms of organising of precarious workers
have become a pivotal topic in both industrial relations and social movements debates,
although until recently these two fields of study have mainly developed separately (Della
Porta, 2015; Murgia et al., 2020; Türkoğlu, 2019).
Generally speaking, the former has mostly explored how the traditional actors in the
industrial relations arena (i.e., well-established trade unions) are willing and able to attract
underrepresented constituencies, such as women, migrants, young people and, more
generally, precarious workers (Alberti et al., 2013; Pernicka, 2005). From the perspective
of the unions, the changing composition of labour and the increasing number of
precarious workers contributed to accelerating the enduring crisis of these organisations,
because of a difficulty in extending their membership (Heery and Frege, 2006; Keune,
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2013). Over the years, a lively debate around how to revitalise unions (Baccaro et al.,
2003; Trif, 2023) has begun, showing how, by adopting an organising model, some
unions have succeeded in ‘organising the un-organised’, in both the US and Europe
(Connolly et al., 2017; Holgate, 2005). By endorsing this approach, unions have
rediscovered their social movement origins (Simms et al., 2013), in the attempt to
organise groups of workers through direct actions, by identifying and recruiting leaders,
and reaching out to communities (Holgate, 2021; McBride and Greenwood, 2009).
Within this discussion, several authors have suggested that theory and research on
precarious workers’ organising should expand its gaze to different collective actors and
coalitions (see Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick, 2017). Attention has been paid to
‘alternative’ collective actors, considered as less institutionalised forms of collective
mobilisation than trade unions, and identified as potential allies to face the challenges of
growing labour market insecurity (Heery and Frege, 2006; Ibsen and Tapia, 2017).
However, apart from a few recent studies (Alberti and Però, 2018; Però, 2020; Trlifajová
and Formánková, 2022), the focus of the industrial relations’ scholars dealing with the
forms of organising of precarious workers has mainly been on organisations, delving less
into the agency of workers and their ability to build bottom-up collective actions.
Studies on social movements have also become interested in precarious workers’
organising, in particular after the outbreak of several waves of protests in the 2000s
(Casas-Cortés, 2019; Della Porta et al., 2016; Mattoni, 2012). Different from the debate
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on employment and industrial relations, in this corpus of studies, the objective conditions
of working in a precarious job are often considered together with its subjective perception.
Mattoni (2022), for instance, found that the variety of lived experiences of precarious
labour are mirrored in various types of movements and organisations, and this is both a
richness and a challenge that activists need to face. Mattoni and other scholars, following
Melucci’s approach (1996), have devoted their attention to the formation of a precarious
collective identity and on workers’ ability to develop specific frames to cope with
uncertainty (Flesher Fominaya, 2010; Milan, 2015), considering the implication of these
processes for collective action (Colombo and Rebughini, 2019; Mattoni and
Vogiatzoglou, 2014) and for the formation of a ‘precarious movement’ (Mattoni 2022).
Various authors have thus emphasised the strong connection between collective identity
and the construction of ‘relationships of trust’ among different social actors (see Della
Porta and Diani, 2006). Moreover, social movements scholars have analysed how,
notwithstanding the limited impact in terms of social policies and labour markets
regulations in the short run, precarious workers’ movements have strongly contributed in
the long run to the production of a critical knowledge (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008; Della
Porta and Pavan, 2017) that recognises and understands precariousness and informs
renewed repertoires of actions, in response to labour market transformation but also to
workers’ subjective perception of insecurity (Della Porta et al., 2016). In this regard,
recent studies have highlighted how strikes have been coupled with new forms of protest
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that have proved to be pivotal for stimulating alliances between activists and other
subjects (such as consumers and citizens) who also face precariousness in their everyday
lives (Mattoni, 2012; Zamponi and Fernández González, 2017; Wieviorka, 2013).
The last few years have seen a growth in the relationships between traditional unions
and other collective actors in civil society with the purpose of organising and representing
precarious workers, as well as an increase in grassroots forms of organising and
mobilising emerging outside well-established unions (Cini et al., 2022; Meardi et al.,
2021; Mezihorák et al., 2023; Royle and Rueckert, 2022). Consequently, a fruitful
comingling has occurred between industrial relations and social movements’ theoretical
frameworks that has stimulated in both fields the development of approaches that take
workers’ agency as a starting point (Alberti and Però, 2018; Murgia and Pulignano, 2021;
Però, 2020; Vatansever, 2022). This perspective therefore considers precarious workers
as agential subjects, whose collective identity and organising practices take shape and are
shaped not only through the socio-institutional context, but also through the types of
relationships they create together with other workers (precarious or not) within trade
unions, but especially within newly emerging activist groups.
To enhance the comingling between industrial relations and social movement studies,
and to contribute to fostering a bottom-up approach, this study explores workers’
collective agency in the case of two freelance associations in the Netherlands by
investigating the contemporary processes of collective identification and the formation of
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alliances that underpin their practices of organising. In particular, to contribute to the
debate on the agency of under-represented workers, we rely on Rebughini’s analysis of
the concept of critical agency, understood as “a collective enterprise of aspirations and
knowledge opportunities” (2018: 16). In her article aimed at offering a reconstruction of
the ongoing debate, Rebughini (2018: 3) states:
While the slippery notion of agency is usually conceptualized as the capacity
of a subject to act in an autonomous way, critical agency can be considered
as a more focused variant related to the interpretation of such agency as
‘critical’, that is, able to be at the same time dissident and innovative, oriented
against and beyond what is perceived as unjust, unequal, unacceptable.
This definition brings to the fore the very notion of ‘critique’, today characterised by
a difficulty to identify an ‘historical subject’ of critical and emancipative attitudes – as
the working-class movement was – observing on the contrary the emergence of scattered
and local ‘critical initiatives’, much more focused on the present, on contingency and on
situated solutions to structural problems.
In modern Western thought, from Kant to Foucault, critical agency has been
conceptualised mainly as the self-reflexive ability of the human subject, and therefore as
its capacity to be aware and take a distance from domination and conformism. Following
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the end of universalistic forms of critique typical of modernity and industrial societies
and drawing on analytical references mainly from post-colonial and post-human studies
(see Butler, 1987; Prakash, 1999), Rebughini, instead, enhances an understanding of
critical agency intended nonexclusively as an “un-masking tool”, based on a dualism
between the subject and the object, and thus on the subject’s capacity to objectify and
‘criticise’ reality. Contrariwise, the author stresses the inner ambivalence characterising
the contemporary nature of critique and critical agency: “A critique generated by a subject
capable of negation, resistance and refusal in the name of an abstract ideal and a critique
arising from the subjective imagination, the search for the new, the creative situated
relationship with the environment” (Rebughini, 2018: 5). Therefore, beyond the idea of
‘critical capacities’ (Boltanski, 2011), focused on practices and justifications of action in
situations of dispute, ‘critical agency’ refers to a broader historical transformation of the
ways in which it is possible to express a social critique, considered at the same time as a
form of dissent against given power relations and as an adaptive innovative creativity.
In this frame, also building on the understanding of De Certau (1990), precarious
workers’ critical agency and their organising practices can be conceived as tactical
actions, elaborated according to the opportunities and limits of each situation, without
necessarily requiring a shared definition of a global project, but taking advantage of
contingent, concrete occasions, and mobilising individuals’ capacity to read the context,
and to handle situations that cannot be radically changed (Colombo et al., 2022).
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Moreover, we argue that Rebughini’s (2018: 16) emphasis on the fact that the two
elements of critique – the capacity for dissent and opposing the status quo, and the
creative imagination to innovate the existent – are complementary and “need be thought
and performed together” is helpful to advance our understanding of the ways in which
critical agency is collectively enacted in the case of precarious workers’ organising. In
this context, in fact, ‘critique as negation’ alone risks appearing as self-sufficient and
“supported by the intractability of antagonism” (ibidem: 8), while ‘critique as creativity’
alone risks being perceived as an individual, naïf act, and a-political aspiration to
“authenticity” (Rebughini 2015). By advancing this conceptualisation of critical agency,
this perspective opens up a way to analyse it in its making, rather than focusing on who
is the subject of critique, what is criticised, or why it emerges.
To understand the critical agency of precarious workers and how it is expressed
through collective organising practices, the case of two freelance associations, that
mobilise outside the traditional field of industrial relations, proves to be particularly
unusual across Europe and especially in the Dutch context, which is characterised by a
high level of cooperation with a low level of conflict. In particular, we aim at developing
our understanding of how critical agency works in practice by focusing on two main
aspects that represent relevant topics of reflection for industrial relations and social
movement scholars, namely the creation of alliances and the formation of collective
identities.
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Research context
The Netherlands is an interesting example in Europe not only because it is the country
with the largest increase in the number of freelancers in recent decades (Conen and
Schippers, 2019; Eurostat, 2022), but also because of several attempts to give them a
voice in the industrial relations arena (Mezihorák et al., 2023; Jansen and Sluiter, 2019).
According to an analysis conducted by Jansen (2020) using the second wave of the 2014
Solo Self-Employment Panel (promoted by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and the
research company Panteia), in the reference period approximately 40% of freelancers in
the Netherlands were affiliated with several types of organisations, including professional
associations (19%), trade unions (11%), or independent self-employed worker
associations (12%).
Notwithstanding the wide variety among these organisations, their practices generally
converge, as they mainly share a negotiating approach to advance their claims in the
political arena, and are mostly oriented towards providing services, training, and
networking opportunities for freelancers (Pernicka, 2006; Wynn, 2015). Within this
scenario, as part of a broader study on collective practices of organising developed by
freelancers in Europe (see Murgia et al., 2020), we selected two associations whose
practices appeared to be particularly innovative compared to those traditionally used by
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organised freelancers. We therefore opted for the selection of two “atypical” case studies,
that could “challenge and assist theorizers to account for enigmatic counterexamples at
the margins of generalized explanations, offering invaluable opportunities to improve
abstracted representations of social phenomena” (Mabry, 2008: 218).
The set of practices developed by the studied association is not atypical per se, since
they historically belong to the repertoires of actions of workers generally organised
through unions or social movements. Their originality depends, instead, on the context in
which they are adopted: first, they can be considered innovative for freelance
associations, usually focused on providing services, training, and networking
opportunities for members. Second, they are even more atypical in the Dutch context,
characterised by a long tradition of consensus-based social dialogue, for both employees
and the self-employed, where the latter are also formally included in the industrial
relations system (Connolly et al., 2017; Gumbrell McCormick and Hyman, 2013).
The first case study is ‘The Orde van Registertolken en-vertalers’, called ‘Orde’ by its
members, which was created in 2020 by a group of around 600 sworn interpreters and
translators (I&Ts) who decided to distance themselves from the more established
freelance associations in the I&T sector. Since its official creation, the Orde has carried
out two main waves of demonstrations – in October 2021 and February 2022 – organising
public assemblies, petitions, media campaigns and demonstrations in several Dutch cities,
especially in the Hague.
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The second case study is represented by the ‘Dancers’ Council’ (DsC), a group of
around 30 dancers, who recall in their collective name the experience of workers-
councils, a movement of workers oriented towards the self-management of
production, that spread throughout Europe during the first decades of the 19th century
(Bologna, 1973). Since 2017, the DsC group began to organise informal meetings with
the aim of sharing information about the situation both within companies and in the
independent dance scene, focusing mainly on the city of Amsterdam.
Research methods
Our ethnographic study was carried out in the Netherlands between September and
December 2021 and – due to severe pandemic restrictions – continued online until
February 2022, with short stays during the summer of 2022.
Access to the fieldwork was negotiated with representatives of the organisations
studied and facilitated by the fact that one of the authors was a visiting researcher at the
University of Amsterdam. Notwithstanding the pandemic restrictions, it was possible to
attend organisations’ premises and participate in public and sometimes private meetings,
and public events (both online and offline), and to conduct several informal
conversations. The researchers were also provided with a range of materials intended for
internal and external use, such as flyers, press releases, internal reports, and pictures.
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Moreover, 55 in-depth interviews were carried out, both online and offline, in Amsterdam
and several other Dutch cities. Interviews were conducted with organised freelancers (19
interpreters and translators and 24 artists and creative workers) as well as with 12 unions’
and employer associations’ representatives. Their names are changed in the text to
preserve their anonymity. The interviews – each lasting between one and two hours –
were audio-recorded and collected in English. During the conversations, the researchers
investigated both the careers of the freelancers and their relationships with the
associations to which they belonged.
The interviews were fully transcribed and analysed in three steps using a thematic
approach (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2013), supported by the software Atlas.ti9. In the
initial coding round, we identified innovative organising practices and therefore selected
the two case studies at the core of this article as both atypical cases of practices of
organising compared to those traditionally used by freelancers. In doing so, we realised
that the case studies selected for their uniqueness and innovation (one of the dimensions
of critical agency), were also coupled with forms of dissent (the other key dimension of
critical agency), albeit with different degrees of intensity. Therefore, in a second step, we
analysed how innovative and oppositional practices were combined and configured
differently in each of our two case studies. Finally, in a third phase, the findings of the
thematic analysis conducted within the two freelance associations were compared to
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identify emerging transversal themes and thus consider commonalities and differences in
their collective practices of organising.
Findings
Sworn interpreters and translators go on strike
The agencies have started to pay less and less! The conditions in the
courts are bad, and interpreting is very badly paid work! So, that’s why I’ve
started to get a more activist attitude.
Alexandra, interpreter
In 2019, a group of I&Ts, mainly organised through social media and thanks to word of
mouth, founded the so-called ‘Action Group for registered I&Ts’ that carried out several
waves of demonstration and strikes, especially in January 2019, organising a strike that
involved around 1,500 sworn I&Ts, achieving unprecedented success in this professional
sector. In December 2020, this group gave birth to the ‘Orde’, whose practices appeared
to be strongly innovative compared to those of similar freelance associations.
First, Orde organised simultaneous demonstrations in several Dutch cities, bringing on
the street and in front of courts and Ministries placards like those visible in Picture 1:
“Well translated, badly paid”, “The state falters”, “Many interpreters and translators are
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under pressure but don’t lower their head”. In addition, they found creative ways to
increase the group’s visibility, while at the same time establishing the boundaries of the
group itself. As an example, Orde’s members wore red and black clothing and invented
ritual gestures that were performed during the protest, like putting a finger in front of their
mouths to signify silence (see Picture 1), a practice observed on other occasions during
the fieldwork.
Picture 1. The Orde.
Today I have the opportunity to join a demonstration organised by Orde that is protesting in
front of the Parliament, in The Hague. When I announced my presence to the members, they
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seemed very happy to ‘host’ me and, as the only requirement, they asked me to get dressed in
black and red clothes. […] Once I reached the area around the Parliament, I immediately
identified the group of around 35 people. All together, they look very diverse: men and women,
old and young people, coming from different countries and – evidently – different social
backgrounds. I immediately think that the idea of wearing similar clothing is a good choice:
people on the street notice the group and sometimes stop to ask what is going on and, at the
same time, Orde’s members recognise each other very quickly. Indeed, I realise that not all the
participants knew each other from before: when a new person joins the group, s/he is
recognised easily because of the dress code, and s/he is promptly welcomed by the other
members… me included – immediately identified as an Italian translator.
Author’s fieldnotes, 6 July 2022
Together with demonstrations, a second innovative practice implemented by Orde’s
members was the strike – the refusal to work for public agencies during agreed periods.
Since this represented a fairly new practice among I&Ts, its content and boundaries (how
often and for how long to strike, how to engage Orde’s members in it, and how to make
it effective) necessitated several internal discussions. The outcome of these debates led to
the adaptation of this practice to Orde members’ needs and possibilities. Fergus, among
others, explained how and why the group decided to shift from a ‘traditional’ full time
strike to an intermittent work refusal:
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[Within the ‘Orde’] there are people who say: “We shouldn’t work for the government at all,
we should go on strike for an undetermined time, until we get our demands”, but there are also
people who say: “I have to pay for my home, I have to pay for my children, I just can’t go on
strike”. So, we try to find the middle road. For example we went on strike for a[n entire] week,
[…] or we also have what we call the ‘stop days’: any given month on the 1st, 11th and 21st of
that month, on those three days, we ask everybody to refuse work, also thinking that this must
be possible for everybody, you can generate income all the other days of the month. At least
we give a clear sign to the authorities.
Fergus, I&T
Alongside demonstrations and strikes, Orde also engaged in public campaigns,
launched petitions and inquiries into working conditions in the I&T sector, all practices
drawn from social and labour movements’ repertoires of actions. Together with the
innovative aspects, in the organising practices carried out by Orde the oppositional
elements were pivotal for aggregating consensus around its main claims and stimulating
the emergence of a collective identity among its members. Orde aimed to criticise the
Dutch government and its marketisation policies, while at the same time expressed
disapproval of the existing system of representation of freelancers’ interests.
The government embodied Orde’s principal target of contestation since the association
openly opposed forthcoming reforms and asked for improvements in the existing
legislation. In particular, Orde required the indexing of minimum tariffs established by
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law that, according to the research participants, were extremely low and had not increased
since 1981 (for interpreters) and 1963 (for translators). In addition, Orde protested the
outsourcing of the recruitment system for sworn I&Ts through translation agencies:
before the contested reform, officially registered sworn I&Ts were contracted directly
and individually by the public offices in need of their services. Since the end of the 1990s,
while this mechanism was still in place, large multinational agencies had also started to
enter the market, offering services of intermediation between professionals and public
administrations with the aim of making recruitment faster and cheaper, by lowering
freelancers’ fees and increasing competition. At the time of the fieldwork, the Dutch
government was in the process of implementing procurements to select, for a fixed
number of years, agencies as exclusive providers, therefore aiming at ‘buying’ an overall
cheaper service at detriment of I&Ts labour conditions and freedom to negotiate their
fees. In this context, although describing themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’ and
‘businesspeople’, Orde’s members openly contested the market logic and the neoliberal
economic project entailed in the government reforms:
They call it “market”, but we think that [the work of I&Ts] should not really be subject to the
laws of market. And maybe that’s contradictory because we are entrepreneurs, we are
businesspeople, but we don’t think that you should have this kind of market approach…
There’s no business here! I mean, if the police or a judge needs something translated or needs
an interpreter for the public cause, there is no place for business... I think personally that
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neoliberalism has done a lot of [damage]… The system maybe wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t
flawless, but it could have been improved without selling it out to the market.
Hannie, I&T
While Orde challenged the Dutch government and its neoliberal policies, at the same
time it criticised the actors playing an institutional role in the existing system of
representation of freelancers’ interests. In particular, it contested the NGTV, the biggest
association of Dutch I&Ts, counting around 1,200 members, and taking part in the PZO,
the network of self-employed associations with a seat on the Economic and Social
Council. Although several interviewees took part in both the associations, they made a
clear distinction between them, considering Orde to be a “union type organisation”
[interview with Ireen and informal conversations], and the NGTV as a more traditional
lobbying actor, defining it as a “club” or a “place for networking” [interviews with
Abigail and Giselle]. Therefore, several research participants criticised the NGTV’s and
PZO’s moderate political approach that, according to them, had proved to be ineffective
throughout the years:
What Orde has done in one year is more than what the NGTV or other institutions in Holland
have done for us in the past 30 years. Our voice has started being heard.
[Mustafa I&T]
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[Q: Was there any connection between Orde and NGTV?] No, not only was there no
connection, but this was also a protest against all the associations of I&Ts, because all those
associations didn’t do their work and that’s why there was an action outside these associations.
It was a spontaneous action organised by people who were not organised at that moment […]
and they hoped to make a new association more focused on the struggle.
[Kamel, I&T]
These open criticisms, coupled with the radicality of Orde’s practices, paved the way
to differentiate but also distance Orde from other networks and organisations of I&Ts in
the Netherlands. Therefore, while Orde was able to find support abroad (for instance,
from similar organisations in Germany and Belgium) and to build alliances with
associations representing other professional groups (such as orders of lawyers, judges,
and journalists), its protest did not extend to other I&Ts’ associations in the Netherlands,
including those with a more established position in the industrial relations arena.
Dancers unite in a Council to raise up their voice
[We are] working to create awareness on the importance to dare, to ask, to
have claims, because if nobody does it, things will never change. While if we
all start to ask, to require [changings] therefore things can change. We need
more awareness on this.
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Milena, dancer
From summer 2017, a group of around 30 dancers started to gather in informal meetings;
a few years later, in 2020, the group created a Facebook page with the name ‘Dancers’
Council’ aimed at attracting people’s attention on a virtual platform, to disseminate
campaigns on topics concerning the dance scene and the cultural sector in the
Netherlands, and in the city of Amsterdam in particular. At the very beginning, at least
two representatives from six dance companies joined the Council, constituting a sort of
informal bimonthly assembly of coordination in the city; a few months later a group of
freelancers began to participate. As recounted by Jimmy:
I’m a troublemaker kind of person [giggling]… and I’ve seen that the ‘Dancers’ Council’
started from a group of dancers within the Omscholing programme [to re-train dancers in other
careers] […]. They were doing meetings among themselves to understand how the situation
was, and how to have a voice, to bring a voice. At a certain point, I decided to write to the
person who was posting the meeting’s pictures online and I told her: “Hey, I see no freelancers
there”… as it would be better to have meetings with those who are really in need! Because it’s
different if you simply want to improve the situation for those who are already inside – since
waged dancers are the “privileged” ones – and if you really want to think about young people
today, those who are more in need […]. So, I wrote, then another guy joined, and therefore we
started discussing about opening the group also to freelancers.
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Jimmy, dancer
This practice continued during the pandemic, although the meetings were organised
online (see Picture 2).
Picture 2. The Dancers’ Council.
During their meetings, DsC members complained about the fact that their job was
physically and emotionally exhausting: for the employees this was mainly due to long
shifts required by the companies and to the difficulty of exerting their rights to a 12-hour
rest after a performance; for freelancers, the exhaustion was connected to “being at work
24 hours” [interview with Ramona and Jimmy]: training, rehearsing, performing or
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looking for the next job. Moreover, the fact that many freelance dancers held a second
job to keep their income stable caused a further extension of their working day, and this
topic was widely debated in the DsC’s assemblies. In addition, DsC members shared
discontent for what concerns the tensions and the levels of control experienced within the
workplaces: dancing was described as a very stressful activity due to the pressure exerted
by choreographers, because of “a very formal hierarchy, which really influences how
empowered you feel at work” [Michelle], and because of the risk of harassment, reported
by some of the research participants during both interviews and informal conversations.
As in the case of the Orde, the grassroots and informal political work carried out by
the DsC was not innovative per se since it represented a common practice among
unionists and social movements activists. Nevertheless, it was innovative among
freelancers, especially in the Dutch context, where workers very rarely engage in
grassroots forms of participation, that implies refusing a delegation mechanism preferring
a direct engagement. Indeed, the fact of being a grassroots and informal group was
conceived by research participants as a strength, because it implied the horizontality of
the organisational structure and freedom of expression for its members:
At some point, I thought “Maybe we have to become a society or a business or something to
make ourselves formal”, but now I see [DsC] as a more informal group… and I think the other
dancers do too: they see it more as an informal meeting place. And I think it’s much more
26
interesting to keep it that way, because it is really about creating a safe space for dancers to
meet and talk and organise.
Stephany, dancer
The organised dancers were also engaged in transforming the existing system of
representation of freelancers’ interests. Indeed, after an initial period of autonomy, they
began an intense collaboration with the Kunstenbond, a well-established artists’ and
creative workers’ union in the Netherlands, with around 7,000 members, composed of
employees but also freelance, with a strong bargaining power and political lobbying
capacity. DsC worked as a group to stimulate Kunstendbond to hear their voice and
therefore to be more responsive towards the interests of its potential membership:
In 2017 we invited Joren [union official] to our meetings. […] And it was the first time, I think,
that he saw what we were doing and how we were working, and I remember he had a day at
each company, he came, and he just sort of lived with us – you know? – he was doing the
rehearsals, he came on the bus to go to perform… So, we really try to help him with
understanding the struggles.
David, dancer
After the creation of a ‘trustworthy’ relationship, DsC and Kunstenbond worked
jointly to negotiate a collective labour agreement in the industry of ‘Dance and Theatre’,
27
also pursuing the goal of including freelancers in its scope, as explained by Stephany, a
DsC member directly involved in the negotiation of the agreement:
The relationship we have with the Kunstenbond is good, so it means that they trust us, and we
trust them. […] Now I’m also trying to broaden the scope to include freelance dancers in the
collective agreement. […] I’m the middle person, so I get informed by those dancers [DsC’s
members] and then I inform Joren and then back to them. […] And then through assemblies
with DsC, I organise them, and I listen to what they tell me.
Stephany, dancer
The grassroots work of DsC was pivotal for negotiators to collect fresh information
about dancers’ labour conditions and to consequently orient collective bargaining.
Moreover, their effort to extend the collective agreement to freelancers was successful,
since the negotiations led to the approval of an agreement, signed between Kunstenbond
and the employer organisation Nederlandse Associatie voor Podiumkunsten (NAPK),
which also included freelancers among its target groups. This represented a novelty for
freelancers and provided them with a legal framework to require a minimum fee that,
according to the agreement, should be at least 50% higher than the minimum income
established for the employees [interviews with Adil, dancer, and with Joren, union
official]. While Kunstenbond members considered the collective agreement a great
success, DsC members appeared more cautious or even critical, due to the lack of any
28
enforcement mechanism identified within the text to protect the interests of freelance
dancers [interview with David].
The DsC’s innovative practices – their ability to directly discuss their working
situation and formulate proposals to improve it – combined with its oppositional drives.
Indeed, the meetings organised by the DsC responded to the need to share the members’
discontent about their precarious working conditions, also affected by high levels of
competition between waged and freelance dancers.
The DsC’s assemblies can be considered as spaces to share information and to
collectively express dissent towards the status quo. Nevertheless, these internal
discussions rarely reached out to the public at large or officially targeted employers and
clients or the Dutch government. Therefore, the practices developed so far by DsC could
be defined as weakly oppositional. The lack of formulation of radical claims, the
difficulties in identifying a clear target to address them, and the lack of collective actions
other than internal assemblies to express dissent and to inform collective bargaining were
all elements that limited DsC’s capacity to build a cohesive and committed group.
Therefore, some of the members foresaw difficulties in engaging more actively with DsC
because of the fuzziness of its practices and collective identity.
It is nice to exchange information: you realise that here it works like this, and there it is like
that… But we’re still trying to figure out, I think, what’s the way, what’s our struggle, because
29
there’s so much stuff to do, we have to figure out what we want to focus on, how to reach out
to people. [At the moment] there aren’t many people [in the group] because we don’t really
know what this organisation is, because we don’t really know what we’re doing, so we lack a
bit of identity, let’s say. Because it’s also a bit difficult for us to understand where to move
and how to do it.
Jimmy, dancer
Thus, notwithstanding the DsC had been active for several years, its members
expressed ambivalent feelings towards its organising practices and uncertainty about its
future. Nevertheless, the group’s ability to create a long-lasting alliance with the most
representative trade union in its sector allowed DsC to contribute to the lobbying and
bargaining activities in the Dutch dance scene, as well as to increase the union’s
responsiveness towards its potential membership.
Discussions
Our findings illustrate the practices of organising among two freelance associations in the
Netherlands, showing how the studied freelancers managed to exert critical forms of
agency.
In the case of Orde, its members were able to exercise a type of agency that combined
aspects of strong innovation – by adopting practices which were novel among freelancers
30
(and historically, in the Dutch context, also rather uncommon among employees), and by
adapting them to the specific needs of its membership – with elements of strong
opposition towards the government and its neoliberal policies and towards the existing
system of representation of freelancers’ interests.
For the DsC, it was mainly the grassroots political activity that was strongly
innovative, especially in the context of the Netherlands, which is characterised by a high
level of institutionalization. At the same time, DsC’s organisational practices, differently
from the case of Orde, appeared as weakly oppositional, since they conveyed a general
lack of contentment towards precarious work, but they did not clearly oppose a specific
government policy or economic model, nor did they reject, while instead tried to improve,
the existing industrial relations system.
Thus, the element characterising the practices of both associations and driving the
selection of our case studies was their strong innovativeness compared to other freelance
associations, especially considering the national context under investigation. Moreover,
while analysing our data, in both cases, we also observed the emergence of forms of
dissent, but with a different intensity, ranging from strong to weak oppositional drives. In
the case of Orde, strongly innovative practices were combined with strongly oppositional
actions, and we therefore described this combination as a radical form of critical agency.
In the case of the DsC, instead, strongly innovative practices were combined with weakly
31
oppositional actions, and we defined this combination as an adaptive form of critical
agency.
The identification of different forms of critical agency has several implications
concerning the ability to develop a collective identity among freelancers and build
alliances with other subjects representing and organising them, two of the most debated
topics in social movements and industrial relations studies. As highlighted in the case of
Orde, by exerting a radical form of agency, sworn I&Ts were able to raise clearcut and
focused claims, aimed at challenging the government’s neoliberal policies and providing
alternatives. The radicality of the claims coupled with the radicality of Orde’s practices,
such as strikes and demonstrations, allowed the emergence of a strong collective identity
among mobilised I&Ts and clearly defined group boundaries. Nevertheless, Orde’s
radicality discouraged the construction of alliances with other actors in the arena of
industrial relations, i.e., unions, employer organisations and well-established I&Ts
associations. This might constitute a shortcoming in the long run, since it could hamper
the possibility of achieving effective and stable results.
In the case of DsC, the exertion of an adaptive form of critical agency implied that the
organised dancers that we studied did not identify strong and clear claims or precise
‘enemies’. On the one hand, this could endanger the DsC members’ collective
identification, jeopardising the success of organising in the long run. On the other hand,
by smoothing the radicality of its claims, DsC was able to build a significant alliance
32
with a well-established trade union – the Kunstenbond – and, thanks to a joint effort, to
achieve some significant results, such as the extension of the collective labour agreement
to freelancers, although abandoning more radical oppositional practices.
Conclusions
Precarious workers’ organising practices have been widely analysed within both social
movement and industrial relations studies (Della Porta, 2015; Hyman and Gumbrell-
McCormick, 2017; Meardi et al., 2021). By focusing on the case of freelancers – a
growing category of workers at the boundary of employment and self-employment,
increasingly exposed to the risk of precarity – this research contributes to debates, in both
disciplinary fields, that are interested in workers’ agency and their capacity to build
alternatives through collective action (Alberti and Però, 2018; Mattoni, 2012; Però, 2020;
Piro et al., 2023; Trlifajová and Formánková, 2022; Zamponi and Fernández González,
2017). More specifically, in light of the case studies conducted, we engage with the
research that focuses on both the abilities to develop a collective identity (a research
interest typical of social movements studies, e.g., Flesher Fominaya, 2010; Milan, 2015)
and to build alliances between old and new collective actors (around which a lively debate
has recently developed within industrial relations studies, e.g., Hyman and Gumbrell-
McCormick, 2017; Holgate, 2021). To fulfil this goal, we demonstrate how the concept
33
of critical agency, as discussed by Paola Rebughini (2018), translates into collectively
constructed embodied practices, informed by a collective production of critical discourses
and knowledge (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008; Della Porta and Pavan, 2017).
This article therefore offers an in-depth grounded analysis of how the concept of
critical agency is empirically articulated, using the cases of two freelance associations to
show how they developed collective practices that are innovative with respect to the
existing repertoire of actions, while at the same time being able to challenge the current
social order (in a more or less confrontational manner). In this perspective, critical agency
is intended, following De Certau (1990), as the actors’ tactical capability to read the
context and act accordingly, and contingently combine innovation and opposition. In
cases of strong organisational innovation, such as the two associations studied, we have
identified two possible combinations of critical agency: one that we defined as radical
(strongly innovative and strongly oppositional) and one that we labelled adaptive
(strongly innovative and weakly oppositional). Further investigations could extend this
analysis by detecting other possible patterns, consequently improving our understanding
of how critical agency is empirically configured in specific contexts. In fact, this research
does not consider cases where there is a weak capacity for innovating existing
organisational repertoires.
To understand the different configurations of workers’ agency, a key element relates
to the geographical and historical context in which workers are embedded, that in our
34
case is represented by a political and industrial relations scenario with a high level of
cooperation and centralization (Gumbrell McCormick and Hyman, 2013) and, at least on
paper, a strong capacity to represent freelancers’ interests (Mezihorák et al., 2023; Conen
and Schipper, 2019). Our study did not allow us to investigate how freelancers’ collective
actions were reflected in the implementation of social policies or new labour rights.
However, the analysis of two ‘atypical’ case studies contributed to envisaging future
novel potential trajectories for precarious workers, as it shows that when they mobilise,
established industrial relations systems – which continue to keep them on the margins –
can be collectively stimulated to become more inclusive.
More specifically, the identified forms of critical agency highlight that the capacity to
develop collective identities (Mattoni, 2012; Milan, 2015; Vatansever, 2022) and to build
alliances with other actors (Cini et al., 2022; Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick, 2017;
Holgate, 2021; Mezihorák et al., 2023) can be considered proxies of precarious workers’
possibility to sustain their mobilisation in the long run. We argue, on the one hand, that
radical forms of critical agency can promote the emergence of strong forms of
identification with the group, while they do not simultaneously facilitate the emergence
of alliances, with the risk of making prospective mobilisation unsustainable. On the other,
we found that adaptive forms of critical agency, although poorly able to develop
collective identification among its membership, can provide a more fertile ground to build
alliances and, therefore, to sustain processes of organising in the long run. Moreover, this
35
study shows that – where there is the capacity to develop innovative organising practices
with respect to the traditional collective representation of freelancers (Bologna 2018;
Jansen 2020) – spaces of dissent, more or less radical, can be opened up, in which
collective identities as well as novel alliances can be built, even for under-represented
and particularly individualised workers. This result is interesting not only for the Dutch
context, but more generally for understanding how to make current industrial relations
systems more inclusive across Europe.
Finally, in line with other studies (Cini et al., 2022; Della Porta, 2015; Mezihorák et
al., 2022; Meardi et al., 2021; Murgia et al., 2020; Türkoğlu, 2019), this contribution calls
for a closer dialogue between industrial relations and social movements studies, which
can better serve the purpose of analysing precarious workers’ forms of organising.
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the
Editor of the journal for the insightful feedback provided during the review process. Many
thanks also to Paola Rebughini for her comments on a previous version of this work. We
are also very grateful to the associations studied and the freelancers interviewed for their
generosity and for the time and experiences they shared with us.
36
Funding information: This article is part of the SHARE project, which has received
funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 715950).
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Author biographies
42
Valeria Piro is Assistant Professor in Labour Sociology at the University of Padova,
where she is also a member of the research group S.L.A.N.G. (Slanting Gaze on Social
Control, Labour, Racism and Migration). In addition, she is a research member of the
ERC project SHARE – ‘Seizing the Hybrid Areas of work by Representing self-
Employment’. Her main research interests concern migration and labour processes,
labour organising, individual and collective forms of workers’ agency. She recently
authored the book Migrant Farmworkers in the Plastic Factories – Investigating Work-
life Struggles (London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2021).
Annalisa Murgia is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Milan, where
she is also the Scientific Coordinator of the Research Centre GENDERS and PI of the
ERC project SHARE – ‘Seizing the Hybrid Areas of work by Representing self-
Employment’. Her main research interests lie in sociological qualitative and ethnographic
studies with a focus on precariousness and its implications for workers’ agency, emerging
forms of collective organising, and the social construction of gender in organisations. She
recently co-edited the book Faces of Precarity - Critical Perspectives on Work,
Subjectivities and Struggles (Bristol University Press, 2022, with Joseph Choonara and
Renato Miguel do Carmo).
