Digital Caporalato and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy
Gianmarco Peterlongo
1 Introduction
Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars have questioned the role of digital platforms in economic markets and labour organisation of our societies. According to an extensive literature, gig economy platforms can be conceptualised as both technological and economic infrastructures (Marrone & Peterlongo, 2020; Plantin et al., 2016). They are technical systems based on a hierarchical configuration of the work process, governed by information asymmetries and opaque evaluation standards set by algorithms. But they also function as economic intermediary organisations, reshaping the power structures of the economy and exploiting a surplus of workers and their misclassification as independent contractors. The debate sparked by the rise and expansion of the platform model has so far mostly focused on the implications and consequences for society. How have work and social relations changed? Are we in a radically new era compared to the usual structures of capitalism? Are we living in a moment of revolutionary technological innovation, or are we instead returning to premodern mechanisms of economic coordination? What kind of new and/or old dynamics of labour exploitation does platform capitalism unveil? The idea behind this contribution is to enter this debate and to seek answers in a critical way, through an empirical exploration of some of the consequences that platforms have brought to the world of work today.
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<sub>G. Peterlongo (</sub>B<sub>)</sub>
University of Milan, Milan, Italy
e-mail: gianmarco.peterlongo@unimi.it
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 F. Della Puppa et al. (eds.), Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy, Dynamics of Virtual Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-91262-7\_3
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