As has been shown by numerous studies, news reports and surveys, labour conditions among these migrant gig workers are precarious and backbreaking, characterized by intense exploitation, high risks of sexual assaults and occupational injuries and diseases, and a lack of employment protection, which only worsen as leading platforms secured market leadership (Chen et al., 2020; I Zhou, 2020). In daily management, riders and drivers, legally designated variously as independent contractors, selfemployed or dispatched agency workers, are subject to the dual pressure of algorithmic systems and human managers that systematically favour platform and customer interests over theirs. Despite high risks of work injuries and occupational diseases, most of them are not covered by the occupational injury insurance scheme, not to mention other forms of social protection and public services like education, healthcare, housing etc..<sup>3</sup> Finally, there is little space for skill upgrade, career development as well as little space for them to air their own voice, in managerial decisionmaking related to price-setting, commission deduction, service standards, and reward and punishment system. Under this condition, if, as ILO’s report cited above shows, riders and drivers enjoyed relatively higher—yet unstable—income than local wages before the pandemic, this was because they had worked for excessive hours. For example, a 2018 survey showed that 30% food couriers worked for more than ten hours each day in a week (Wu & Li, 2018). The condition only got worse since 2021, as the much-anticipated post-pandemic economic recovery did not materialize. In my post-pandemic trips to Shenzhen and Guangzhou, riders and drivers frequently complained that they now needed to work for even longer hours to get less income. They frequently used ao’shijian, enduring time, to describe their work, because they needed to work for 4–5 more hours to earn the same amount as pre-pandemic times. Many reported working for 12–16 hours a day. Some even slept on their cars during the night.<sup>4</sup> Pervasive overwork has severely damaged the health of drivers and riders. Occupational diseases like backpain, prostatitis, sexual malfunction, and heart attack are commonplace. Even cases of sudden death in cars were not rare.<sup>5</sup> Official statistics on such fatalities are nonexistent. Yet according to E-hailingHeadlines, the WeChat portal of a Guangzhou-based legal and repair service provider for ride-hailing drivers, and several other channels of its kind, more than 50 drivers were reported dead in their cars in 2023 after prolonged periods of overwork. Given EhailingHeadlines relies on its fans for news resources, which is around 80.000, it is plausible to say that across the country, the actual number of such cases can only be higher.
198
Y. ZHOU
<sup>2</sup> Meituan is China’s largest food delivery platform. It forms a duopoly with its largest competitor, E’leme in China’s food delivery market.
<sup>3</sup> This is even so given the state’s recent move to institutionalize gig workers’ social protection, by decoupling social protection from employee status. Under this new regulation, a centralized work injury fund was set up for all gig workers to apply in cases of injuries, alongside a platform-instituted commercial insurance. For other social protections, gig workers are made eligible to pay for their own social protection scheme, which are too costly for many.