UNION builders are seeing a huge expansion of platform-style working conditions across the labour market, as capitalism pursues its latest ruse to shift business risks from itself to working people.

But organisers are having notable successes building collective power among the digital disrupters — in strike action at Amazon and agreements over access, neutrality and foundation bargaining within Apple, Evri, Uber, Bolt, Boohoo and Deliveroo.

The employment algorithms shared by platform-working businesses have expanded way beyond their original boundaries and into more traditional job areas in the care, construction, retail and education sectors as software rapidly replaces management and HR.

App-based platform working, on-demand shifts, digital shift-rostering and robotic micro-management of insecure tiny hours workers are reaching into most parts of the economy and can no longer be framed and sanitised by the quaint term “the gig economy” as if it is a novel and curious phenomenon.

To working people caught in this web, it means a rights-free zone, forced and/or bogus self-employment, erratic and unreliable shift patterns, living wages they can’t live on, bullying, harassment, and unsafe, reckless work rates.

Potentially up to a third of working people in Britain experience management via an app in some form. As well as hampering collective bargaining, for many, this amounts to an end to their right to bargain even as an individual worker on their shift patterns, pay and working hours — in the name of “freedom,” “flexible working” or “choice.”

Endlessly in the media, we hear about the lucky few, with independent means of paying the rent and feeding their families, who see this as an expansion of choice and a “progressive” development. But the reality is starkly different for most working people faced with these terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

Flexible earnings offer no solution to rising rents, mortgages, fuel and food bills. Although state-subsidised through inflexible universal credit benefits, “flexible” workers labour under the yoke of a benefits bureaucracy after their day shifts are over to get what they are due each month.

Politicians will wring their hands and talk to us about how this system is not working and failing the economy. Working people know that in reality the system is working perfectly and as it is designed to do — to shift business risk from employers to workers, to drive exploitation and wage theft to ever wider parts of the labour market and maximise the state subsidy of low pay to bolster failing profits.

The most exploited workers in the economy have always been the least visible, and polite society always turned away from those without whom their lifestyles would be impossible.

Today’s invisible workers work in hotels, deliver goods and food bought online to our doors, drive our cabs, clean our hospitals, schools and offices, empty our bins, sweep our streets, and care for our elderly.

Since 1889, union builders have been told that they couldn’t organise such invisible workers because of their low skills, or because so many of them were migrant workers. Then, as today, this has been proved wholly wrong.

But worse is when union builders are lectured and told by conservative elements in our own movement that they shouldn’t organise invisible workers.

Whether they’re Bryant and May “match girls,” migrant workers or e-logistics staff at Amazon, Evri or XPO, invisible workers have all attracted the finger-wagging of the labour aristocrats at some point or other. And the fallacy is always the same — that somehow if you help these workers organise you are endorsing the work they do and promoting their exploitation.

The reality is the opposite — if we merely call for such business to be banned or boycotted, we fail to help workers organise and turn our backs on the most vulnerable in our society, losing any analysis of late-stage capitalism as experienced by today’s working class.

It is simply playground politics to hold that unions organising defence industry workers, tobacco workers, benefits office staff, tattoo artists, pole dancers, casino workers and nuclear power workers promote warfare, smoking, unemployment, body art, sex work, gambling or nuclear power.

The simple challenge facing union builders is just as it was in 1889 — we either fit our organisations around the working class as it is today or decline into the obscurity and irrelevance of the history books.

Unions have to earn, re-earn — and then re-earn again — the faith of working people to build our strength. We cannot take union name recognition for granted or think that any one union is inherently better than another.

And in this part of the labour market unions are establishment figures — we are an insurgency for social justice and must campaign and organise as such. This is a major transitional challenge for unions grown into part of established collective bargaining structures post-1945 — and one we have yet to completely conquer, despite recent advances.

It is sometimes hard to avoid the siren calls of the marketing industry which will tell us we simply need to secure more brand recognition for our strong, long-standing brands to grow, and focus on achieving social media hits and unique visits to our website to measure our impact. Power has to be built in each workplace not borrowed from social media, bought from politicians or begged from employers.

App and platform companies are the new power in the world of work and will concede nothing without demands. But our organising approach needs to be both consistent with our principles and be tailored to the new realities working people face, and seek to build unity among each group of workers in the face of the division promoted by the platform companies.

And while the app becomes a trap for many workers, it can also be the place workers can subvert, meet each other and organise out of sight, via their smartphones: the modern Tolpuddle Tree.

Martin Smith is the former head of organising at GMB.