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

These studies offer important insights into platform workers’ precarity and resistance in terms of how these are rooted in factors related to labour process arrangements. Yet this is far from sufficient. For example, this cannot account for why more and more riders and drivers overwork to death, for to point out workplace control is harsh and stringent and exploitative cannot account for why they risk their lives. In existing literature, one reason to account for this has been the gamification features of digital labour platforms, which serves to generate consent among platform workers. Yet if we consider the extremely long working hours drivers and riders have to endure, the pains and occupational diseases they suffer—not to mention rising cases of overwork to death, it is not difficult to realize that the arguments of gamification and consent significantly downplays—hence makes invisible—the pressures workers face when taking on such a harsh workstyle. To argue they are fooled to overwork themselves to death is simply untenable, if not absurd. This draws our attention to the role of migration in shaping platform workers’ precarity and resistance, which can help enrich our understanding of how, alongside factors of labour process arrangements, institutional and cultural factors also shape gig workers’ conditions and the gig economy in general. This will in turn help inform policymaking to enhance worker well-being and alleviate class conflict. This line of analysis can also provide clues for concerned parties to cultivate collective power and culture among migrant platform workers, paving the road for alternative forms of community economy and social relations.

In what follows, I first delineate my analytical framework, centring on notions of migrant precarity and modes of differentiation. I then elucidate my data sources. The main body of the analysis will identify three distinct modes of differentiation, explaining how they lead to migrant platform workers’ precarity, on the one hand, while enable their solidarity and collective actions, on the other. To conclude the chapter, I draw some implications related to policymaking and bottom-up efforts to enhance worker welfare.

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2 Theoretical and Analytical Framework

In this chapter, my central research question concerns the relationship between gig workers’ migration status, and their precarity and solidarity. To answer this question, I construe a theoretical and analytical framework that brings together labour process theory (LPT) with Stephen Castle’s notion of modes of differentiation.

LPT explains workers’ precarity and solidarity in terms of the outcome of the interaction and interdependence of managerial power and worker power in the labour process. In labour processes of capitalist nature, it is argued that capital/management has the inherent tendency to overcome the double indeterminacy to push for the highest possible amount of surplus value, through constantly changing labour process arrangements (Burawoy, 1979; Gandini, 2019; Smith, 2006). In this process, insofar as production requires certain level of collaboration among them, workers, while being exploited, also forge connections among themselves, which provides basis for solidarity (Atzeni, 2010).

First formulated by Burawoy in his Manufacturing Consent, LPT has since been variously critiqued and developed. In his later work, Burawoy himself challenged the unjustified empirical priority given to what is happening inside the factory workshop when understanding worker precarity and solidarity through the lens of the interactions between managerial and worker power. In The Politics ofProduction, he considered the impact of the state and the conditions of the external labour market (Burawoy, 1985). Later work in this tradition further explored how sociocultural factors/institutions like gender and race shape micro-level labour process dynamics, including the implications for workers (e.g. Lee, 1998; Ness, 2005). This article considers the role of migration status, drawing on the notion of mode of differentiation.

In relation to migrant workers, the concept of modes of differentiation denotes the institutional and sociocultural mechanisms, in both home and host societies, that give migrant workers unequal chances in market competition and the ideologies used to legitimate them (Castles, 2015). For Castles, modes of differentiation are comprised of contextspecific combinations of a range of factors—including race, legal status, ethnicity and nationality, among others—that are weaved into modes of differentiation that align with the interest of capital, in different historical, social and cultural contexts. Historically, governments across the world play an important role in shaping particular modes of differentiation, especially through its control over immigration-related institutional arrangements to respond to labour needs and social malaise engendered by the changing capitalist political economy. Castles’s account focused exclusively on western, advanced economies. As Munck (2013) pointed out in his critique of early, European-centric debates around precarity, changes in work due to the decline of Atlantic Fordism (Kalleberg, 2013) are but one modality of precarity, and that workers—especially migrants— have always-already been precarious in the South, shaped by, echoing Castle, the ‘fraught relations between workers, the state and society’ (p. 751) (see also Schierup & Jørgensen, 2016).

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The notion of the mode of differentiation as outlined above can usefully help us capture migrant workers’ possession or lack of power in relation to their employers, whether rooted in immigrant/migration policies, or broader sociocultural factors. By shaping the power relations between migrant workers and management, these modes of differentiation, along with factors in the immediate labour process arrangements, further shape the interaction and interdependence between workers and management and among the workers, giving rise to different forms of exploitation and connections/solidarity among migrant platform workers.

In the specific context of China, hukou and gender has long been two important and interlocking modes of differentiation that propel precarity among migrant workers (Fan, 2008; Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005). The hukou system is comprised of a set of policies and legislations regulating the supply, rights and entitlements of migrant workers. It distinguished between rural and urban residents in terms of their social, civil and political rights and entitlements and varies across localities. Rural migrants were in the early days required to apply for a temporary residence permit in order to live and work legally in Shenzhen, yet still excluded from social welfare and public goods provision. It is well documented how employment practices exploited their non-local status to create varied forms and experiences of precarity (Peng, 2011; Wu, 2017). This is further compounded by the role of gender, rooted in the patriarchal family and gendered conceptions of work. Where male migrants were generally under immense pressure to provide for the family and struggled constantly to retain control over work (Choi & Peng, 2016; Lin, 2013), female migrants were caught between rural patriarchy and urban exploitation. Besides, managerial practices were gendered, often conceiving young women as inferior, docile and disposable.

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Migrant precarity can be understood in terms of structural condition, but experiences of precarity simultaneously create possible rallying points and harbinger novel strategies and discourses for resistance (Waite, 2009). This has shown to be the case among immigrants in advanced capitalism (Ness, 2005). In China, migrant workers are not docile and diffused mobs who do not feel part of a solidaristic labour community. As hukou and gender render them more precarious, this same key mode of differentiation also shapes their collective actions to negotiate precarity, by, for example, forming self-organized cooperative groups and participating in strikes (Chan, 2010; Fan & Xue, 2017).

To sum up, migrant precarity is relational, context dependent, contested by the state, capital and migrant workers themselves, and mediated by certain modes of differentiation. It designates structural conditions of neoliberal dispossession while provides a platform for contention and reclaiming commons. In China, migrant precarity has long been part of the state’s development strategy and mediated by hukou and gender as two modes of differentiation. The gig economy developed in China amid profound political and economic shifts. How, then, does these politics of precarity and solidarity unfold for migrant gig workers?

3 Method

To answer these questions, this chapter focuses on two platform-based gig sectors, namely, food delivery and ride-hailing. They are chosen because they are epitome of the gig economy in China. Like many other gig platforms in China, they both emerged against the larger backdrop of post-2008 economic downturn. Both quickly gained market leadership through financial power. And they share similar legal, technological and managerial arrangements with other gig platforms, setting low threshold for entry, defining drivers as independent contractors, and relying on an algorithmic management and a delicate balance of crowdsourcing and outsourcing models for daily operation and labour control. Particularly relevant here are that both sectors employ a large workforce, among whom most are migrants, and that like gig workers elsewhere, the expe rience of migrant drivers and riders is a mixture of precarity, indecency, anger and frustration. Sudden deaths are not uncommon, while numbers and scales of driver collective actions increased over the past years. All these promise rich insights into the research question raised.

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Data analysis in this chapter draws mainly on my fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta area, since 2020, mainly using ethnographic observation and in-depth interview. Two phases of fieldwork are carried out. The first phase lasted for 10 months between 2018 and 2019, during which period I stayed in an electronics factory and its nearby villages in Dongguan and Shenzhen. Initially, the goal was to understand migrant workers’ mediated work and life experiences amid the rapid digitalization of the Chinese economy. In this process, I carried out 46 in-depth interviews with worker-turned-Didi drivers, recruited through (1) snowballing from factory colleagues; (2) drivers’ WeChat groups; (3) reaching out directly at gathering points, each lasting for 1.5–2 h. In addition, I spent time with the drivers as they went through daily routines, observed their WeChat groups, participated in their regular meetings, and followed them in their collective actions.

The second phase was carried out between 2020 and 2023 in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Nanjing and several small cities in Guangdong and Jiangsu Provinces, where I mainly carried out in-depth interviews with riders and drivers, with more than 40 interviewees. These interviewees were mainly recruited via connections with drivers and riders in Dongguan and from gathering points and charging stations in Shenzhen, Nanjing and Guangzhou. Most interviews lasted from 0.5 to 2 hours and centred around their experiences of precarity and practices of resistance and solidarity making.

To sum up, this chapter draws on my ethnographic fieldwork, and around 90 in-depth interviews with riders and drivers, over a period of a few years. This provides solid basis for some preliminary systematic analysis of the relationship between migration and platform workers’ precarity and solidarity, while offers the possibility to delineate some temporal trends. Most of the interviewees aged between 20 and 50 who originally came from different provinces. Many were married with 1–4 children. The majority of them previously held rank-and-file or lower managerial positions in manufacturing and service sectors, ranging from assembly line workers and supervisors, small vendors and retailers, to those in sales and catering, all typical precariat migrant groups in China (Swider, 2017). This is consistent with the demographic pattern of Didi drivers in China as identified in corporate and NGO reports.

Full verbatim transcripts of interviews and extensive field notes were prepared for detailed analysis of the ways in which migrant drivers were locked in precarity, the structural conditions and circumstances leading to their predicament the impact of these issues on their well-being, as well as their feelings and responses.

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4 The Rise of the Gig Economy and the Restructuring of Migrant Precarity in China

Before analysing specific modes of differentiation and how they link to platform workers’ precarity and solidarity, I first briefly sketch the organization of the two sectors China, and provide the context of their rise and expansion. Specifically, I mainly contextualize their rise and expansion within the macro-level economic crisis since 2008 and state-led efforts to pull China out of it, highlighting key industrial policies, employment policies and changes in the ideological sphere. I also point to changes in social policies, especially those related to migration, as they play important role in channelling workers to gig platforms and fix them in precarity. These, I hope, can provide the larger context for the analysis to follow.

The development of platform-based gig economy gained momentum in China amid entrenched domestic contradictions and the recent global financial crisis in 2008. By the late 2000s, the old export-oriented growth regime increasingly faced a profitability crisis, while social, labour and environmental unrest abound (Li, 2015). In response, from the early 2010s, the Chinese state pursued a new economic restructuring strategy that centres around digital and high technologies, to reorient the growth regime to one of capital and innovation-intensive and domestic consumption-driven, and rebalance the economy along sectoral, regional and rural–urban lines (Lei, 2023; Naughton, 2018).

In this recent round of economic restructuring, two central policies include Made in China 2025 and Internet+ . Made in China 2025 aims to upgrade China’s manufacturing capabilities through technological innovation, automation and informatization. And Internet+ seeks to restructure selected areas of the economy through digital platforms to improve efficiency and productivity, including ride-hailing and food delivery sectors that this chapter focuses on. While, to use Lei (2023)’s framing, creating these new birds, the state was also careful to deal with the old birds, especially the labour-intensive manufacturing sectors. On the one hand, the supply-side reform was carried out to reduce overcapacity, especially in low-efficiency state-owned sectors. On the other hand, inland government, especially those in underdeveloped central and western regions, actively seized the opportunity to take on the transfer of labour-intensive manufacturing sectors from the industrial heartland to boost local manufacturing and service sectors. In rural areas, a state-led campaign is leveraged to establish modern agricultural systems. All these contribute to the state’s overall goal to promote economic growth by accelerating urbanization and boosting consumption.

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In the past decade, the implementation of these policies, like in other liberal democratic market economies, has been fuelled by market and financial means. For example, in ride-hailing and food delivery sectors, financial capital, both domestic and international, provides extensive investment throughout their establishment, market expansion and monopolization, and research and development, which further shape platforms’ labour use. But in China, as Lei (2023) has demonstrated, the state plays a more proactive role, not just in policy making to set the agenda and pathways for economic restructuring, but in policy implementation. Because to promote economic restructuring has been variously built into the performance evaluation of local governments, local officials were motivated—and to some extent had no choice but—to mobilize all possible resources and capacities—including but not limited to direct fiscal fund support, favourable industrial and tax policies, administrative support, relaxation of restriction on the operations of financial capital, de-regulation in substantial areas and social, as well as strategic discursive framing—to promote this development, especially by nurturing national champions across sectors.

Almost a decade into the restructuring, economic crisis and industrial restructuring produce large unemployment and structural change in labour market demand. In response, employment policies and labour protection aim to create more labour market flexibility to keep companies afloat. Labour dispatching is legalized (Kuruvilla et al., 2011), while the active labour market policy—notably Mass Innovation and Entrepreneurship—encourages entrepreneurship and actively embraces flexible forms of employment popularized by gig platforms (Zeng, 2014). Finally, vocational education is promoted unprecedentedly to meet the new demand for skilled labour (Central Government, 2010). As migrant workers form the backbone of China’s work and consumer forces, important changes also take place in the hukou and social welfare provision systems. In general, limits on rural-to-urban hukou transfer are relaxed, and migrant workers are now granted more civil and social rights in cities and better protected in rural areas. Yet because of local needs for economic growth and population control, reform was largely stagnated in megacities like Shenzhen. Besides, the new provision system is deeply unequal and neoliberal, favouring the formal sector and those with higher individual contributions. Where public resources fall short, private capital is encouraged to supplement through market provision (Duckett, 2020).

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It is precisely in this transitional context that platform-based ridehailing and food delivery began to emerge and establish itself in China. In both sectors, several leading companies have since 2012 underwent a process of gradual ascent, intense competition, and the establishment of market leadership. In this process, the organization of labour process in the two sectors similarly underwent substantial changes to become increasingly informal and precarious.

The food delivery sector started with platform direct employment, but gradually a mixture of crowdsourcing and outsourcing/subcontracting were developed and become the norm to balance labour power security and flexibility. In the crowdsourcing model, riders directly enter into relations with the platform and were subject to direct algorithmic management/ technological control by the platform itself in their daily work; in the outsourcing/subcontracting model, a subcontractor is responsible for the platform’s operation in a designated area and is sandwiched between riders and platforms along an evaluative chain. In their daily operation, a subcontractor usually further divide the area into several stations, operating under the zhanzhang (station manager) responsibility system and performance-based tiered management.⁶ In the case of ride-hailing, the turning point was 2016, when state regulations of shuangzheng,double certificate, was promulgated after several cases of female passenger murders sparked public outrage. The new regulation required both cars and drivers to get licensed for a fee, while imposed strict restrictions on the specs of cars and driver experience and in some cities, their hukou status. As a result, many existing drivers and cars were no longer qualified. This gave rise to a shadow car-rental market where vehicle leasing companies (VLCs) rent cars to drivers on a monthly fee comparable to that of the traditional taxi sector. Like subcontractors in food delivery, these VLCs carry out daily management over the drivers and control them through deposit, rent and debt. In both sectors, the market is more fragmented in big cities at the industrial heartlands (Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Nanjing), while less so in small cities at the industrial periphery, measured in terms of the number of independent subcontractors/VLCs in a given geographical area.

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⁶ In real-world operations, platforms and subcontractors have great autonomy over how these mechanisms of management and control are designed and implemented. The reality is far more complex that what the space allows us to describe here, and can vary from place to place. But the general structure can be grasped as what has been described here.

In sum, China’s state-led, tech-driven economic restructuring (STER) project results in the dispossession of rural subsistence and new forms of labour market informalization and differentiation, leading to the double crisis of employment and social reproduction. It reinvents the hukou system, subjecting migrant workers to neoliberal looking social welfare and public service provision while luring them to aspire for a better future in cities. A decade into economic restructuring, the level of unemployment remained high, especially after the pandemic. It is in this context this chapter examines the relationship between migration and precarity/ solidarity among platform workers in China.

5 Three Modes of Differentiation and Migrant Platform Workers’ Precarity

In this section, I identify three main modes of differentiation found among migrant platform workers’ experience of precarity, namely skillbased, gender-based and hukou-based, and explicate how they, in their unique ways, link to migrant platform workers’ precarity.

Tech-Driven Industrial Upgrade and Skill-Based Differentiation

Skill-based differentiation refers to instances where migrant platform workers are rendered to a disadvantaged position in, or entirely excluded from, certain segments of the labour market because of their lack of certain skills, due to constraints related to educational attainment, resources and time to acquire these skills. In the context of China’s STER, the institutional basis of this skill-based differentiation lies in the fact that when the state lent enormous support to industrial upgrade, its efforts in ‘skill upgrade’ are sluggish, for it largely fails to provide migrant workers with related opportunities and resources. For one thing, rural-to-urban migrant workers are typically less educated, and they have always been excluded from skill training provisions by the state due to their nonlocal hukou status, making it unlikely that they can possess the literacy needed to acquire new skills demanded by the restructured economy. For another, even when they do possess such literacy, many were either excluded from state provision of skill training due to their non-local hukou status, or because of the lack of time and income to sustain their lives when receiving training. Given the widening gap between wage increase and living expenses, many migrant workers are living a handto-mouth existence, which is further exacerbated in the aftermath of the pandemic. Unable to skill upgrade, migrant workers were hence channelled to platform-based service sectors like ride-hailing and food delivery, for the relatively high income these sectors can offer.

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The story of 50-year-old Laowang, originally from He’nan, was illustrative of this emerging skill-based mode of differentiation. In our interview, he summed up his reasons to take up Didi in 2017 in terms of ‘low-requirement jobs are too bad, but I am not qualified for good ones’. Before 2017, he held a lower management position in a small factory in Dongguan. When the factory was relocated to the inland province of Hu’nan in 2016, he rejected a senior position in the new factory. Yet when looking for new jobs in Shenzhen and Dongguan, he found himself left with little choice: most low-skill jobs were offered on a temporary basis, while stable jobs of higher income required substantial skills like moulding or operating advanced machines. He then took up a line supervisor position back in He’nan. Yet not only was his wage discounted, but no social security was offered. Knowing that labour conditions could only be worse, in 2017, he returned to Shenzhen and became a Didi driver, mainly for the higher income.

Laowang’s experience is typical among migrant workers in low-end manufacturing sectors I interviewed. Having been the epi centre of the world factory since reform, Shenzhen and Dongguan were in the recent decade at the forefront of STER. As part of the Made in China 2025 plan to upgrade the manufacturing sectors, the local policy of tenglong huanniao sought to promote industrial upgrade by introducing higher value-added, high-tech industries, by boosting the service economy and by automating labour-intensive manufacturing. In the context of dwindling orders, the policy and its implementation by local governments, echoing Lei (2023)’s findings in The Gilded Cage, destabilized the manufacturing sector and increased their cost, to which factories responded with relocation, putting out and a flexibilization of labour use, including dispatched workers and student interns. In this process, migrant workers like Laowang became ‘old birds’ who were systematically marginalized. Having spent their lifetime performing repetitive tasks, without opportunities to develop skills, and typically of low educational attainment, the new labour market condition had meant for them declining job quality and the threat of imminent displacement. Statistics showed that in the early months of the crisis, about 23 million migrant workers lost their jobs (National Bureau of Statistics, 2009). In this context, platform-based service sectors like food delivery and ride-hailing, however informal and precarious, provided migrant workers with a steady stream of income higher than factory jobs.

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