United in Diversity: Inter-Union Relationships in the Food Delivery Sector in Italy and the UK

The food delivery sector has been central to workers’ challenges against platform capitalism, particularly in confronting anti-union behaviours and achieving significant, though limited, outcomes. Despite being largely organised outside traditional unions, food delivery workers have secured notable results, influencing national and transnational policymaking and reaching collective agreements. These successes have attracted scholars’ attention, who have explored strategies (Cini & Goldmann, 2021), practices (Tassinari & Maccarone, 2020; Woodcock, 2021), and discourses (Borghi et al., 2021) highlighting their ability to innovate union practices. However, despite the role they occupy in IR debate, the relationships between independent and traditional unions has been less investigated. This contribution aims to fill this gap by investigating inter-union relationships in the UK and Italy to identify those factors responsible for collaborative and competitive dynamics, and their impact in terms of organising, bargaining and regulation. In the UK, traditional unions often viewed independent unions as competitors, limiting joint actions that nevertheless still happened on a transnational level. In contrast, Italy had more collaborative dynamics, which favoured the approval of the so called 'Rider Law' (2019) and a national agreement with Just Eat (2021) that created the conditions for more competitive dynamics. The work develops a comparative analysis based on data collected in two separate fieldworks conducted by the authors between 2018 and 2024. It will be highlighted how, although with different degrees, competition and collaboration emerged in both cases, facilitated by both structural and cultural factors. Moreover, the work highlights how collaborative dynamics have been crucial to obtain organising, bargaining and regulation achievements. In the conclusion, by challenging some of the assumptions of the literature on inter-union relationships (Gumbrell-McCormick & Hyman, 2015; Brigden & Kaine, 2015), we emphasise the strategic role that union diversity has not only in facilitating collaboration, but also in obtaining improvements.