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

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Vulnerability and Resistance Among Digital and Platform Immigrant Workers in Portugal

Isabel Roque

1 Introduction

Since the 1970s that the emergence of a new flexible accumulation regime has been leading to a new stage of capitalism production, through financial and technological reorganisation, reconfiguring and dismantling dramatically the labour market, quite distant from the conception of formal work based on human rights and dignity (Harvey, 2013). With the emergence of new social dynamics of work, a metamorphisation of the capital process has led to different forms of partial, precarious, informal and on-demand work, especially through the uberisation and platformisation of work creating economic activities and reinventing pre-existing ones, such as accommodation, transport, logistics, call and contact centres (Antunes, 2018, 2020; Srnicek, 2016).

Call and contact centres were among the first sectors where this process of machinic and algorithmic management has been seen in a more pronounced way, representing one of the easiest ways for immigrants to enter the labour market and were also the first service to implement digital and platform work. This service emerged not as an industry, but as a business function that crosses several industries and/ or sectors in a post-industrial service economy (Roque, 2018), being one of the fastest developing forms of digital work, available all around the clock, and delivered from almost any spot (Paul & Huws, 2002). As in the case of local accommodation (Airbnb), call and contact centres foster an entire local economy and involvement with the neighbourhood, creating bonds of interdependence and job opportunities, especially in cities where job scarcity predominates (Roque, 2023a). Call and contact centre operators are emblematic of digital capitalism, better known in the literature as the cybertariat, infoproletariat and cyberproletariat (Antunes et al., 2009; Dyer-Whiteford, 2015; Huws, 2003, 2014). This is the new service proletariat in the digital era who is expropriated of its working and personal life by global companies, suffering the consequences from the expansion of intermittent and informal work. It is made up, above all, of women, racialised workers and immigrants, who are often made invisible and remain in precarious and penalising working conditions (Antunes, 2020; Roque, 2020, 2023a, 2023b, Festi & Roque, 2025 please insert in the references Festi, R., & Roque, I. (2025). "Representation, regulation and voice of immigrant couriers and platform drivers in Portugal", Globalizations, Special Issue-Work time, lifetime and the daily routines of migrant workers on digitalised platforms and services. 1-19.).

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Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal e-mail: isabelmbroque@gmail.com

© 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\_6

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The pandemic exposed and accelerated this process of flexibilisation, informalisation, precariousness, and vulnerability of the labour market that platformisation has been implementing in societies in general. In fact, during the first lockdown of the pandemic, class inequality became even more pronounced with a segmentation of the labour market and invisibilisation of workers (Bourdieu, 1998). There was a division between non-essential and essential frontline workers, demarcating those who risk their lives on a daily basis, dealing face to face with the health crisis, subjecting themselves to the virus. According to Antunes (2022), these are situations of pandemic capitalism in which life is disregarded for the sake of profit.

Having not fully recovered from the Great Recession, which resulted in a restructuring of work and global economy, the working-class has been facing a Covid-19 pandemic, a scenario of environmental crisis, a continuous war between Ukraine and Russia and the eminence of a nuclear war in the middle east. This context has been leading to massive dismissals, inflation crises, wages and housing costs that have diverged so dramatically that the dream of a middle-class life has become impossible to achieve. Millions of people around the world are becoming itinerant and migrant workers, due to the lack of permanent and location-based jobs and the high cost of housing and living. This phenomenon is occurring not only in the United States, but especially in Europe, experiencing significant immigration from African, Asian and South American countries, as people search for better life and working conditions. Between the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, Portugal went from being traditionally known as a country of emigration, to being also recognised as a country ofimmigration. Several migratory flows have been observed since then in the country, obeying concrete economic-political circumstances, with migratory flows from PALOP (Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe), Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Asia. These people form the extensive and long-lasting reserve army of labour that is always available to perform temporary, informal, and precarious work.

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The precariat has always experienced unstable contracts and informal working conditions, with weak institutional and organisational links, and has continually been called upon to work for a fraction of the wages paid to most permanent workers performing the same jobs (Ness, 2005, pp. 22–23). Neoliberalism is intrinsically linked to the processes of “class desubjectification” and the manipulation of working-class subjectivity, breaking class solidarity (Casulo, 2023, p. 167). Neoliberalism created an ideal of self-realisation where most informal and flexible workers do not realise that they are a mix of self-bourgeois and self-proletarians, within a situation of transfiguration in salaried work. The State transfers an individual burden to the worker who becomes a service provider, carrying all the risks and costs, being under the command of the algorithm without access to social protection in employment and unemployment (Antunes, 2018; Lorey, 2012). In the absence of quality employment opportunities, this may be the only way to enter the labour market, especially for immigrant, flexible, temporary, racialised and atomised workers.

Every form of platform work activity is increasingly associated with different shapes and shades of precarity (Eurofound, 2018), where work is performed on the job, or on-demand (gig), being managed by the algorithm or through the mediation of temporary work agencies, especially in the deliveries and call and contact centre service and the tourism sector (Huws et al., 2019). This condition of permanent insecurity, intermittence and suffering leads them into a state of vulnerability and suffering, corroding their character (Alves, 2011; Roque, 2023a; Sennet, 1998).

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