The findings presented here stem from a qualitative research conducted between January and June 2022. The empirical data were collected with a participant observation as walker, supported by 12 semi-structured interviews with couriers, and several informal conversations.
2 Gig Work as a New Step of the Casualisation of Labour
The de-qualification, degradation, fragmentation, and casualisation of labour are not unique to the platform economy but rather have been present throughout the evolution of the capitalist labour process, with acceleration during its neoliberal phase. It is now recognised that the term “gig” did not originate with the platform economy but rather in a sector characterised by occasional work performance and connotations of creativity, particularly in the music industry (Woodcock & Graham, 2019). The process of impoverishment of labour has been reinforced by regulatory frameworks promoting the proliferation of contractual typologies and job relationships that have allowed for the spread of temporary work. This is due to the widening of the modalities of labour supply and the reduction of labour costs by enterprises (Kalleberg, 2009), making temporary staffing an infrastructural element of the job market (Peck & Theodore, 2012). In the academic literature, there is now a consensus on defining precarious employment as the result of the loss of work or the fear of losing it, in which there is a shortage of alternative employment in the market, with the risk of losing acquired skills (Kalleberg, 2009; Standing, 2014). One of the principal consequences of this phenomenon is an increase in insecurity, instability, and economic inequalities.
A substantial body of literature has sought to elucidate the factors motivating temporary workers to work as hard as they do. At least three reasons have been identified: consensus, coercion, and surveillance (Kojima, 2015). Buroway (1979) was one of the first scholars to delve deeper into this topic, identifying external incentives that motivate individuals to produce more. The pressure exerted by management on workers to be more productive, for example, using piecework, is resisted by workers who adopt game mechanisms to obtain economic and cultural rewards. These gamification dynamics also form the basis of platform work. Buroway (1979) framed these dynamics as creative agency, due to the conscious choice of the workers. Other motivations are coercive and surveillance-related, related to management’s power to exert a form of (in)direct control over workers, where the fear of dismissal and unemployment comes into play. At the root of these motivations is the power asymmetry between worker and employer, linked to entrance surveillance, i.e. the evaluation of the worker’s (still potential) profile and work performance, which induces workers to self-discipline and work hard (Kojima, 2015).
4 DELIVERING IN THE LAGOON. CRITICAL REFLECTIONS …
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