in the Venetian mainland. The primary victims of this form of ‘digital gangmastering’ appear to be migrant riders. Initially, this sector offered a precarious and underpaid form of employment that appealed primarily to young locals, often students, who sought to balance what was considered a ‘side job’ with their private lives, family obligations, and studies.
However, due to an acceleration particularly driven by the pandemic (Antunes, 2021), the ‘Uberized’ service sector (Antunes, 2020) has expanded significantly, becoming a labor market with a notable concentration of migrant workers. This expansion has not led to the erosion of the ideological rhetoric that portrays these jobs as vehicles of supposed ‘self-entrepreneurial’ opportunities (Della Puppa, 2022). At the same time, these jobs have become a ‘safety net’ for migrants upon their arrival in the host society and, consequently, also a ‘transitional sector’ toward other, more stable and desirable employment opportunities. So, within the context of Italy—characterized by the ‘Mediterranean model of migration’ (King & De Bono, 2013; Pugliese, 2011), in which informal labor plays a structurally significant role in the national economy—lowskilled digitalized services have emerged as a new entry-level employment sector alongside traditionally seasonal and low-mechanized agricultural labor (Della Puppa & Piovesan, 2023).
The low barriers to entry—requiring only a smartphone to download the app and a human-powered bicycle, as the app itself handles linguistic mediation and navigation—make this type of work particularly accessible to newly arrived migrants, even those lacking social connections in their new socio-territorial environment. For this same reason, food delivery work is also viable for undocumented migrants, for whom the only ‘obstacle’ is the platform registration process, which requires valid residency documents. However, this barrier is often circumvented through the use of intermediaries and gangmasters who provide their identity and platform profiles—sometimes even their bicycles—in exchange for a percentage of each completed delivery, further reducing the already meager earnings of the worker. This practice constitutes a genuine form of labor intermediation what can be accurately described as ‘caporalato’—operating within a digital labor brokerage system, exacerbating the exploitation already embedded in platform-based work. The platforms themselves suffer no loss from this arrangement; rather, they stand to gain as the number of active riders increases, fostering competition among them.
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F. DELLA PUPPA ET AL.
N. Montagna
University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy
e-mail: nmontagna@unisa.it