These studies offer important insights into platform workers’ precarity and resistance in terms of how these are rooted in factors related to labour process arrangements. Yet this is far from sufficient. For example, this cannot account for why more and more riders and drivers overwork to death, for to point out workplace control is harsh and stringent and exploitative cannot account for why they risk their lives. In existing literature, one reason to account for this has been the gamification features of digital labour platforms, which serves to generate consent among platform workers. Yet if we consider the extremely long working hours drivers and riders have to endure, the pains and occupational diseases they suffer—not to mention rising cases of overwork to death, it is not difficult to realize that the arguments of gamification and consent significantly downplays—hence makes invisible—the pressures workers face when taking on such a harsh workstyle. To argue they are fooled to overwork themselves to death is simply untenable, if not absurd. This draws our attention to the role of migration in shaping platform workers’ precarity and resistance, which can help enrich our understanding of how, alongside factors of labour process arrangements, institutional and cultural factors also shape gig workers’ conditions and the gig economy in general. This will in turn help inform policymaking to enhance worker well-being and alleviate class conflict. This line of analysis can also provide clues for concerned parties to cultivate collective power and culture among migrant platform workers, paving the road for alternative forms of community economy and social relations.
In what follows, I first delineate my analytical framework, centring on notions of migrant precarity and modes of differentiation. I then elucidate my data sources. The main body of the analysis will identify three distinct modes of differentiation, explaining how they lead to migrant platform workers’ precarity, on the one hand, while enable their solidarity and collective actions, on the other. To conclude the chapter, I draw some implications related to policymaking and bottom-up efforts to enhance worker welfare.
8 MIGRATION, PRECARITY AND SOLIDARITY AMONG
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