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# Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance
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References in Greek
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L. KRETSOS AND V. CHARITSIS
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Vassilis Charitsis is an independent researcher who has held positions at higher education institutions in Ireland, Sweden, Finland, and England. His research focuses on the intersection of digital capitalism and the datafication of everyday life. His work has appeared, amongst others, in Information, Communication & Society, Television & New Media, Social Movement Studies, Surveillance & Society, and tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique.
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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.
CHAPTER 3
G. Peterlongo (B)
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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The paper first looks at the phenomenology of platform work through the theoretical lens of refeudalisation. In the first part of the paper, this concept is critically discussed with reference to the theoretical debate surrounding it. The perspective it offers constitutes a fruitful starting point not to highlight a phantom return to the past, but to underline how the expressions of contemporary capitalism—especially digital and platform capitalism—are innervated by contradictions and mixtures of heterogeneous elements in its global development. Subsequently, the paper examines the dynamics of inclusion of platform labour, noting how this has become the privileged space for the migrant workforce and highlighting the modes of adverse incorporation that underlie it. Finally, in support of these theoretical interpretations, the paper presents the case of digital caporalato as an emblematic and particularly illuminating expression of the forms of refeudalisation of work and predatory inclusion of migrant labour in the gig economy.
2 Refeudalisation of Work
In recent years, a debate has been sparked among social scientists as to whether or not the idea of refeudalisation is an appropriate way to capture the current transformations of work and society. This idea should not be interpreted as a mere mechanical return to premodern patterns or a simplistic comparison with feudal Europe. At the heart of the refeudalisation concept lies a paradoxical modernity where the rapid global advancement of certain social processes, such as digitisation or platform capitalism, coincides with an escalation in the intensity of labour exploitation along global value chains. This juxtaposition often points to shocking outcomes, especially considering the fact that there are now more slaves and forced labourers than at any other point in human history (Bodei, 2019; Neckel, 2020; Volscho & Kelly, 2012). This process is to be conceived as paradoxical in nature, as it entails the resurgence of premodern social models as a consequence of modernisation (Chakrabarty, 2007; Neckel, 2020). The concept of refeudalisation, as elucidated by the scholars who employ it, serves primarily as a means to escape the limitations of a linear understanding of history and the univocal trajectory of socioeconomic processes, thereby emphasising their inherent contradictions. In that sense, it represents an insightful metaphor to avoid the so-called trajectorism trap, that is the idea that history and modernity have a unique direction and an ineluctable telos (Appadurai, 2013; Borghi & Peterlongo, 2023).
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Notably, although, some scholars have also criticised the use of refeudalisation as an oversimplified and inadequate way of looking at the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In a recent article, for instance, Morozov (2022) sharply criticised and rejected the most common positions supporting the return of feudal mechanisms into capitalism. Many today, from both the political right and the left, argue that we are in an era often described as neo-feudalism or techno-feudalism. Among the liberal thinkers, such as in the case of Posner and Weyl (2018), the return to a feudal realm is the cause of a stuck economy incapable of innovation because corroded by politics, in the same way feudalism was unable to promote the good development of societies (and they claim consequently for an even more radical and free spirit of the market). On the left, it is possible to find many more thinkers arguing for a feudal resurgence. From Mazzuccato (2019) to Varoufakis (2023) and Streeck (2017), many of those leftist scholars argue that economic and political social relations have gradually eroded, moving backwards towards a mechanism more akin to the feudal one between servants and lords than the capitalist one between capital and labour. While Varoufakis (2023) focuses more on the perverse mechanisms of global finance and the role of international economic organisations in strangling the growth of countries, Mazzucato (2019), with the idea of digital feudalism, criticises the immense profits of tech companies that dominate the global economy and hold national governments hostage, even though their growth was made possible by public investment (Mazzucato, 2018). Of course, these discussions also raise important questions, such as what kind of wealth creation underlies the Amazon or Uber model, whether it is purely rentier or also productive and innovative. None of them, indeed, goes so far as to say that the economy has returned to aspects of the Middle Ages, but the arguments they use still draw on some correspondences with the past. This, according to Morozov (2022), does not help to understand the real extent of the transformations taking place and leads to underestimating the elements of continuity that some aspects considered feudal have always had in the development of capitalism, as well as to ignoring the elements of complexity that always permeate global development processes with contradictions. In his conclusions, he therefore distances himself from these interpretations, arguing that, refeudalisation or not, the features highlighted by the proponents of the feudal reason are still attributable to capitalism as such.
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However, among the most interesting advocates of the refeudalisation argument, it is worth noting that the idea is used as a metaphor rather than an equivalence with the past, and that it can contain a strong and useful sociological perspective (Arvidsson, 2020; Borghi & Peterlongo, 2023; Neckel, 2020; Supiot, 2013). According to Neckel (2020), refeudalisation represents a social metamorphosis that characterises various aspects of our contemporary capitalist societies: from the oligopolistic concentration of wealth to the growth of inequalities, from the restructuring of welfare in the Global North to the reorganisation of economic processes dominated by speculative-financial logics, up to the reaffirmation of new and old forms of forced labour along the global value chains. This process deeply impacts the entire sphere of labour, where first and foremost a refeudalisation of the public–private relationship and workers’ rights is observed, as argued also by Supiot (2013) or by Volscho and Kelly (2012). In the realm of platform capitalism, this paper argues, some of the characteristics of the refeudalisation come to the fore. Today, gig economy platforms reflect a refeudalisation process for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the hegemony of the platform business model reveals a (re)feudalisation of capitalism itself, in the sense that the processes of accumulation and operations of capital increasingly turn towards speculative, extractive and predatory activities. Indeed, following Arrighi (1994), refeudalisation is a symptom of the crisis in every cycle of capitalist accumulation, as also occurred during the late Middle Ages in many parts of Italy “when capital withdrew from the risky market activity to be invested instead in land ownership or other secure assets” (Arvidsson, 2020, p. 50). Today, we see certain markets dominated by global companies run by a handful of managers who focus more on lobbying and financial speculations than purely productive activities; consider, for instance, the striking case of the Uber Files that surfaced in 2022 revealing the fraudulent and abusive practices employed by Uber managers to secure the endorsement of economic lobbies and governments worldwide. The Uber files, a trove of over 124.000 documents leaked to The Guardian by a whistleblower, has thus ignited a global firestorm of outrage and scrutiny against the Californian company. These revelations have exposed a dark underbelly of Uber’s operations, spanning from flouting laws to duping local authorities, exploiting violence against drivers and engaging in secretive lobbying efforts during its aggressive global expansion (Davies, 2022). In addition, platform companies rely on a restructuring of previous existing markets more than in the creation of new ones, leveraging upon their role as economic intermediaries (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2024). Moreover, on the second hand, as we will delve into in the empirical analysis, platforms promote a refeudalisation and informalisation of working conditions, as old expressions of feudal relations are reintroduced into the digital organisation of work—foremost among them, piecework (Supiot, 2020), which however has never disappeared along capitalism global value chains—but also the permeability to informal mechanisms—such as digital caporalato (gangmastering) and other industrious and informal circuits of labour—that develop behind the scenes of the gig economy (Arvidsson, 2020; Peterlongo, 2023). But it is above all the mixture of contradictory and seemingly irreconcilable elements that characterise the model of refeudalisation, rather than an illusory return to old organisational patterns.
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3 Migrant labour and Its Predatory Inclusion in the Gig Economy
Another noteworthy aspect which is partly related to the idea of refeudalisation concerns the composition of the platform workforce and its relentless and gradual racialisation over the years. To see how the world of digital labour platforms has rapidly become a ‘stronghold’ of migrant labour, one need only look at any of the many metropolises around the world where on-demand platforms are present (Altenried, 2021). Extensive analyses, both focusing on the digital crowdwork sphere and those concerning place-based urban service platforms, have highlighted how the labour markets offered by these platforms have become a preferred terrain for migrant workers, sometimes evolving into an infrastructure of mobility in migration, often reproducing and crystallising past colonial trajectories and disparities (Bernard, 2023; Casilli, 2017). In the case of online crowdwork, for example, an ILO 2021 report even argues that platforms can be a suitable space to ‘train’ and put to work the masses of asylum seekers in refugee camps across Africa (Hackl, 2021). Regarding on-demand work, as Van Doorn and Vijay (2021) suggest, it is increasingly evident that the availability of migrant labour pools constitutes a crucial resource for platform growth, as significant as financial investments and permissive regulatory environments. As Bernard (2023) points out in her recent research about Uber drivers in Paris, London and Montreal, racialised workers constitute a valuable reserve army for the platform, providing it with a docile and available workforce. However, this is not always and necessarily the case, as platforms can also see a strong presence of indigenous workers, especially in smaller urban areas or in peripheral areas of economic development (where labour markets are commonly insufficient to ensure the reproduction of the workforce and where unemployment rates are high).
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In studies on domestic work, ride-hailing and food delivery in Europe (Altenried, 2021; Altenried et al., 2021; Bernard, 2023; Huws, 2014; Doorn, 2022), as well as research on ride-hailing in China (Zhao, 2019) and the United States (Cottom, 2020; Ge et al., 2016), in India (Athique & Parthasarathi, 2020) or Latin America (Abílio, 2020; Cordero & Salazar Daza, 2020; Del Nido, 2021), many scholars recognise that “the movement ofpeople within and across borders in search ofwork and a better future thus seems to constitute a critical condition ensuring the existence of urban gig economies” (Doorn & Vijay, 2021, p. 2). The reason many migrants enrol in digital platforms lies in the simplicity of access to employment amid the structural difficulty of entering the formal job market and also, perhaps primarily, in the adverse conditions of labour force inclusion. In other words, according to the empirical analysis contained in this contribution, the engagement rules of the gig economy offer a deliberately crafted race to the bottom specifically designed to include the migrant component of the workforce in its political economy, unveiling a novel model of labour entrapment (Boutang, 2002). This evidence comes not only indirectly from the observation of working conditions, but also explicitly from the words of the platform managers themselves, who, as we will see, consciously aim to build a downgraded labour market in order to ensure the availability of a constrained workforce and constant access to a mass of potential workers to be activated according to platforms’ needs.
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All of this is clearly in line with the company’s strategy of minimising labour costs by guaranteeing a kind of flexible availability for underemployment, i.e. what Mezzadra (2023) calls potential labour. The condition of employment insecurity and the coercion of unemployment, however, are not peculiar consequences of the platform era; instead, they result from a long historical and political process of definitively archiving the wage society model in the Global North and the informalisation of economies and labour relations more generally (Breman & Linden, 2014). In this regard, revisiting the three trends identified by Robert Castel (1997, 2011) as salient features of the end of the wage society is helpful. These trends include the destabilisation of stability, the establishment of precariousness and the reappearance of surplus populations. The gig economy platforms provide compelling arguments for all three trends, which are seen by many scholars as symptoms of a global informalisation of the capitalist economy that seems to be reversing conventional development trajectories, leading to an increasing heterogeneity of economic worlds, with the West looking more and more like the Rest, rather than vice versa. (Beck, 2000; Breman & Linden, 2014; Routh & Borghi, 2016).
However, what I particularly want to emphasise here is the resurgence of a surplus labour force population experiencing conditions of instability and coercion in labour markets, tracing the entrapment of migrant labour in digital capitalism. Without any doubts, platforms have settled into the process of chronicling precarity and uncertainty, inscribing themselves into the professional paths of individuals already accustomed to living day by day. This is especially relevant in countries where the regime of precarious, informal and intermittent work is the norm, and standard employment is the exception (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008). However, my primary focus is on the increase and reappearance of a “surplus population”, as defined by Castel (1997), which has stabilised over time and is now being incorporated into gig economy labour markets. The key difference from thirty years ago, as noted by Castel, is that while this population was composed of individuals unable to integrate into labour markets then—long-term unemployed and beneficiaries of welfare policies—today, in the face of the definitive crumbling of welfare forms, the surplus population is reintroduced into productive circuits and is immanent to platform labour markets. This reintroduction follows a peculiar form of adverse incorporation (or predatory inclusion), often in the form of a ‘potential’ labour army rather than a reserve army as Marx explained about the industrial era (Mezzadra, 2023).
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