Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance

Notes on Contributors

Soham Bhattacharya is PhD Student in Development Studies at Dr. B.R.
Ambedkar School of Economics University of Bengaluru, in India.

He is specialized in Development Economics, Labour Economics, and Agricultural Economics.

He has published widely in books and journals.

Among his last publications:

Bhattacharya, Soham (2022), “Is Extreme Poverty Declining? Findings from Agricultural Households in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, 57(49).

Modak, Tapas Singh, and Bhattacharya, Soham (2021), “The Covid-19 Pandemic and Agriculture in Rural India: Observations from Indian Villages,” Review ofAgrarian Studies, 11(1).

Bhattacharya, Soham (2019), “Agricultural Tenancy in Contemporary Punjab: A Study based on National Sample Survey Data”, Review ofAgrarian Studies, 9(2).

TorsaSaha, Dipsita Dhar, Bhattacharya, Soham (2022), “Gendered Realities of Higher Education”, in Dhar and Narayanan (eds). “Education or Exclusion: The Plight of Indian Students”. Leftword: India.

Debodeep Banerjee, TorsaSaha, Bhattacharya, Soham (2022), “NEP 2020 and Drop-outs in Education in India: Some Concerns”, in

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Dhar and Narayanan (eds). “Education or Exclusion: The Plight of Indian Students”. Leftword: India.

Paolo Borghi is currently a senior researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Pavia, where he works on several research projects on digitalisation processes, welfare systems, housing, platform work and collective representation, with a mixedmethod approach. He obtained a double PhD in 2018 at the Department of Sociology and Social Research (Bicocca University of Milan) and at the Department of Sociology (Humboldt University of Berlin), where he conducted comparative research on collective representation of selfemployed workers in Italy and Germany. He has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Work and Employment Relations Division of Leeds University Business School and at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan conducting qualitative fieldwork in Italy and the UK as part of the ERC SHARE- Seizing the Hybrid Areas of work by Representing self-Employment (2018–2023) project. He worked as a researcher at the Department of Economics ‘Marco Biagi’ of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Vassilis Charitsis is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel Business School, Brunel University of London. His research interests lie on the intersection of digital capitalism and the datafication of everyday life. His work has been published, amongst others, in Information Communication & Society, Television & New Media, Social Movement Studies, Surveillance & Society and Triple C: Communication, Capitalism and Critique.

Francesco Della Puppa (PhD) is Associate Professor in General Sociology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is interested in international migration; migrant family and family reunification; labour and social conflict; migrant work; digital work; everyday-life; Bangladeshi Diaspora; ethnography and qualitative social research.

Lately, he has been interested in social sciences and comic, (ethno)graphic novels, and in establishing academic, scientific, social and human relations with Cuba.

Dipsita Dhar is an activist researcher and PhD Scholar at Centre for Studies of Regional Development in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her doctoral thesis looks into the relationship between

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Social Capital formation and Gulf Migration, from the lens of the Left Behind. From 2020 she has been engaging with the Gig workers in India and her academic outputs have been published in journals like Gender and Development, Proceedings ofthe ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Asian Ethnicity. She has also written extensively for Jacobin Magazine an Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung South Asia. Trained as a geographer, she is passionate about building movement around labour rights, gender equality and climate justice.

Lefteris Kretsos is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University of London, Brunel Business School and Programme Leader for the PhD Programme with Ahlia University, Bahrain. To date he has participated in 15 international research projects supported by a number of important institutions and funding streams, such as the European Commission and the European Research Council, the European Regional Development Fund. He has also published articles, co-edited books and book chapters in world leading academic journals and academic presses. During 2015–19 Lefteris served as a Cabinet Minister and as a Permanent Secretary responsible for Digital and Media Policy. During his tenure he championed successful policies for boosting creative industries and making Greece a global film friendly location.

Nicola Montagna, Ph.D., is currently Associate Professor at the University of Salerno after spending 19 years teaching at Middlesex University London, building a distinguished career in both research and education. He has published extensively in prestigious academic journals, including Sociology, The Sociological Review, International Migration Review, Ethnicities, International Migration, and Ethnic and Migration Studies. His research critically examines undocumented migration, migrant activism, border policies, and social movements. Beyond academia, Nicola Montagna is actively engaged with voluntary associations and contributes to public discourse regularly providing expert analysis on political issues to radio station.

Annalisa Murgia is Associate Professor in Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan, where she is also the Scientific Coordinator of the research centre GENDERS. Her research interests focus on precariousness, emerging forms of organising, and gender differences in organisations. She is the PI of the ERC project

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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SHARE—‘Seizing the Hybrid Areas of work by Re-presenting self-Employment’. She recently edited the book Hybrid Labour: Measuring, Classifying, and Representing Workers at the Boundaries of Employment and Self-employment (Routledge, 2025). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Organization and Studi Organizzativi.

Gianmarco Peterlongo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan (Italy). He obtained his PhD in Sociology at the University of Bologna in 2022 and has carried out research stays in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, France and Portugal. His work focuses on the metamorphosis of labour, platform capitalism and informal economies. In 2023 he published the book “Nella trama dell’algoritmo. Lavoro e circuiti informali nella gig-economy”, a multi-sited ethnography on platform labour between Europe and Latin America.

Giorgio Pirina holds a degree in Sociology from the University of Padua and a PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Bologna. His research interests focus on the socio-ecological consequences of digital capitalism, platform labour, and territorial inequalities. He currently works as a post-doc research fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, within the project “Exit—Exploring sustainable strategies to counteract territorial inequalities from an intersectional approach” (Horizon Europe). He is the author of the monograph Connessioni Globali. Una ricerca sul lavoro nel capitalismo delle piattaforme (Franco Angeli Editore).

Isabel Roque is a researcher in Sociology of Labour. at Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. She belongs to the Board of Associate Editors of the “Journal of Labour and Society”, and “Journal ofWorking Class Studies”. She is a Rapporteur and Independent External Expert for the European Cooperation in Science and Technology, a member of the “Observatory of Living and Working Conditions” of NOVA University, a member of the EURYO—European Rural Youth Observatory and a member of the Research Group “Work and Social Theory”, University of Brasília. Her research interests focus on: Call and Contact Centres; Digital Platform Work; Precarity; Social Protest Movements; Trade Unionism; Psychosocial Risks; Social Inequalities; Safety and Health at Work; Alienation; Life Trajectories; Vulnerabilities; (Un)employment; Rural NEETs.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Suddhabrata Deb Roy is an Izaak Killam Notley Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta in Canada. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Otago in New Zealand. His research mainly focuses on labour, humanism, technology, workers’ organisations, and class composition.

Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada. His work centers on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), with a focus on the role of technology in worker resistance, particularly within digital labour platforms.

Yang Zhou is a research assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University. His research looks at the opportunities and challenges changing forms of digital technologies present for workingclass formation in China. His recent work on platform labour in China appeared in EPA: Economy and Space, Media, Culture & Society and New Media & Society.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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List of Tables

Chapter 2

Table 1 Drivers and mobile equipment operators/motorcycle
drivers, 2015–2023 25
Table 2 Turnover rate for drivers of vehicles and mobile equipment
operators (NACE 56 Activities of accommodation and food
service activities) in Greece, 2018–2021 25
Table 3 Turnover rate for drivers of transport and mobile
equipment operators/motorcycle drivers (NACE 56
Hospitality services activities) in Greece, 2018–2021 26
Table 4 Turnover rate for drivers of transport vehicles and mobile
equipment operators/motorcycle drivers (NACE 53 Postal
and courier activities) in Greece, 2018–2021 26
Table 5 Drivers of transport vehicles and mobile equipment
operators/motorcycle drivers (NACE 53 postal and courier
activities) in Greece, 2018–2021 26
Table 6 Sample distribution and participant data 37
Table 7 Population with non-Greek citizenship, 1971–2001,
Population Census 40
Table 8 Employment share of migrants in Greece, 1987–2023 41
Chapter 6
Table 1 Sociodemographic characterisation of the interviewees 155
Chapter 9
Table 1 Expansion of Bangalore City Agglomeration, 1971–2011 256

xviii LIST OF TABLES

Introduction: Migrant Labour in the Platform Economy—The Intersection of Labour Digitization, Platform Capitalism, Migration, and Resistance

Francesco Della Puppa, Dipsita Dhar, and Nicola Montagna

1 Digital Precarity: Migrant Labor and the Exploitation of Food Deli_very Workers in North_-Eastern Italy

On October 7, 2023, Il Gazzettino, a local newspaper from the city of Venice and the Veneto region in north-eastern Italy, published an article denouncing the phenomenon of alleged ‘caporalato’ (illegal gangmaster labor intermediation) within the app-based food delivery sector, facilitated by well-known platforms such as Glovo, Deliveroo, and Just Eat,

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

D. Dhar

CHAPTER 1

_{F. Della Puppa (}B₎ Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venezia, Italy e-mail: francesco.dellapuppa@unive.it

e-mail: dipsita.dhar@gmail.com

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025

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in the Venetian mainland. The primary victims of this form of ‘digital gangmastering’ appear to be migrant riders. Initially, this sector offered a precarious and underpaid form of employment that appealed primarily to young locals, often students, who sought to balance what was considered a ‘side job’ with their private lives, family obligations, and studies.

However, due to an acceleration particularly driven by the pandemic (Antunes, 2021), the ‘Uberized’ service sector (Antunes, 2020) has expanded significantly, becoming a labor market with a notable concentration of migrant workers. This expansion has not led to the erosion of the ideological rhetoric that portrays these jobs as vehicles of supposed ‘self-entrepreneurial’ opportunities (Della Puppa, 2022). At the same time, these jobs have become a ‘safety net’ for migrants upon their arrival in the host society and, consequently, also a ‘transitional sector’ toward other, more stable and desirable employment opportunities. So, within the context of Italy—characterized by the ‘Mediterranean model of migration’ (King & De Bono, 2013; Pugliese, 2011), in which informal labor plays a structurally significant role in the national economy—lowskilled digitalized services have emerged as a new entry-level employment sector alongside traditionally seasonal and low-mechanized agricultural labor (Della Puppa & Piovesan, 2023).

The low barriers to entry—requiring only a smartphone to download the app and a human-powered bicycle, as the app itself handles linguistic mediation and navigation—make this type of work particularly accessible to newly arrived migrants, even those lacking social connections in their new socio-territorial environment. For this same reason, food delivery work is also viable for undocumented migrants, for whom the only ‘obstacle’ is the platform registration process, which requires valid residency documents. However, this barrier is often circumvented through the use of intermediaries and gangmasters who provide their identity and platform profiles—sometimes even their bicycles—in exchange for a percentage of each completed delivery, further reducing the already meager earnings of the worker. This practice constitutes a genuine form of labor intermediation what can be accurately described as ‘caporalato’—operating within a digital labor brokerage system, exacerbating the exploitation already embedded in platform-based work. The platforms themselves suffer no loss from this arrangement; rather, they stand to gain as the number of active riders increases, fostering competition among them.

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F. DELLA PUPPA ET AL.

N. Montagna

University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy

e-mail: nmontagna@unisa.it

The newspaper article also reports the formation of an association of migrant riders, the Italia Rider Association, which presents itself as a mutual aid and solidarity organization, positioning itself in continuity with the mutualist and class-based worker associations and trade unions of the late nineteenth century. This initiative undeniably represents a noteworthy development.

The transformation of labor facilitated by digitalization has led to the progressive exclusion of workers from the remnants of social protection legislation, an intensification of work rhythms and hours, and the externalization of fixed capital costs onto workers themselves—ultimately yielding significant savings for businesses. Indeed, app-based food delivery labor can be framed within the logistics of the ‘last mile’ and conceptualized as an extreme form of subcontracting.

Analyzing food delivery through the framework of (last-mile) logistics invites reflection on the process of value production within the broader circulation of commodities. While surplus value is traditionally understood as being generated in production, capitalist production, and industrial capital transcend strictly material production. The production process is inherently linked to consumption, as production, distribution, circulation, exchange, and consumption constitute a unified process. Particularly in exceptional cases—such as perishable goods that require swift consumption or specific transportation conditions—commodity circulation plays a role in generating, or more precisely, ‘preserving’ surplus value. The production process, therefore, encompasses both production in the strict sense and circulation. Consequently, the shorter the circulation time of a commodity, the greater the productivity of the labor involved in its production, thus increasing profit and surplus value generation. Service workers, including those in ‘Uberized’ sectors, even if not directly engaged in primary surplus value production, play a crucial role in its preservation by minimizing circulation time. Therefore, riders actively contribute to this process.

1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRANT LABOUR IN THE PLATFORM

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