Another point of intervention my analysis points to is skill upgrade. The government can provide more support for skills upgrading ofmigrant workers. In this respect, China has a good institutional foundation based on which a lot can be done: in fact, the Chinese government has long been committed to providing skill training and upgrade for ordinary workers through labour authorities such as the Ministry Human Resources and Social Security and its local bureaus. It has also encouraged private capital to provide related training courses. In other words, a skill upgrade infrastructure that involves multiple players and sectors is already in place. The question, then, is why, as my preliminary interviews have indicated, this infrastructure seems to have not been able to benefit migrant workers, and what can be done to change the situation. Further research can be conducted to map this skill upgrade landscape and explore why migrant workers have difficulty benefiting from it. These analyses can inform reforms in skill upgrading and help address the problem of precarity.
Finally, the analysis in this chapter about how migration—while perpetuating precarity—simultaneously enable association, connection and solidarity among migrant platforms workers also point to another possible form of intervention, namely solidarity economy. This is especially important in a time when collective actions are politically sensitive, if not impossible at all. In fact, my fieldwork in the past several years in Guangzhou and Shenzhen reveals that some worker-led small platforms are emerging. They are exploring new, alternative forms of organization and operation in the platform economy, pretty much in the spirit of the fast-expanding platform co-operativism/commons movement across the world (Scholz, 2023). These bottom-up practices may be small and vulnerable to commercial encroachment, but they nevertheless bear the seeds for an alternative platform future where we can labour with decency.
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