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

Like those in low-end manufacturing, also having to confront threats of skill-based displacement and exclusion are migrant workers/entrepreneurs in the informal service sector, for example, street vendors, end-ofnetwork distributors for small brands. As Swider (2017) shows, these small businesses often required minimal investment and operated on a small-profits-quick-returns model. If migrant entrepreneurship as such could previously generate sufficient profit to support migrant workers’ livelihood and family, the opportunities they could offer to migrant workers were increasingly undermined, in both industrial heartlands and small cities at the periphery, thanks to the rapid penetration of ecommerce as well as the swift expansion of logistics networks and related services. Both e-commerce—in various guises like shopping website, livestreaming e-commerce new retail, and more recently, internet-based local life service—and logistics are strategic areas in STER, as the Chinese government increasingly resorted to improving its logistics and circulation systems to boost productivity and domestic consumption. E-commerce, for example, has since expanded quickly. In 2019, China’s national online retail reached 1.063 billion yuan, accounting for 20.7% of the national total (Qian, 2020; Wei, 2019). These have in turn significantly squeeze the space of locally based, community business of small scales.

A 46-year-old A’xiong was the owner of a cloth shop in Shenzhen’s industrial town of Guanlan. He and his wife sourced from local manufacturers and sold at a slightly higher price. Before 2015, they could earn a good 15.000 yuan per month. However, the fast expansion of ecommerce not only undercut his business but rendered his business model obsolete: ‘young people are ICTs-savvy … we are no match… We don’t even know photoshop and livestreaming …’. Without even the basic skills required to survive e-commerce, A’xiong and his wife downsized their store in 2017. Now his wife ran the store, and he took up Didi as the main source of family income. While A’xiong still tried to carve out a life in Shenzhen, A’li, who was in his 30 s worked as a sales representative in a 4S store, opted for returning to his hometown Shaoguan, and became a food courier, citing reasons of marriage and taking care of the family. When asked his experience of seeking skill upgrade, he told me that he was not eligible for any skill training programmes offered by Shenzhen’s Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security (HRSS), simply because he did not have a local hukou and had not paid enough for a local social welfare account that is too expensive for him.

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Even for younger migrants with higher levels of education, the new skill landscape of the labour market was not always easy to navigate. 32-year-old Jian came to Shenzhen after high school and worked as a warehouse manager in a downstream supplier for larger manufacturers. His daily job involved matching the factory’s logistics demand with local capacities to deliver orders in time at lower costs. Over the years he had relied on an extensive network of local logistics companies and truck drivers that he carefully built and maintained. In 2016, upstream manufacturers began to adopt digital supply chain systems, which automated the matching process, rendering his network useless. As a result, his role was reduced to quality check and his wage had been frozen since then. He tried hard to turn himself into a warehouse logistics engineer but was constrained by his limited literacy and lack of resources and time. In early 2019, as his daughter started primary school, he decided to move to a Didi for its higher income:

it is more than learning to operate new machines. Digital systems change the logic of warehousing … requires systematic knowledge … not what a high school graduate can handle … I do not have time … I have to bring money home every month.

Apart from the HRSS bureau systems, the state also invested proactively in vocational education to resolve the skill gaps resulted from techdriven industrial upgrades. In this process, vocational schools received fundings to boost training capacity and forge partnerships with employers to secure employment opportunities. Students alike received tuition waivers and subsidies, sometimes regardless of their hukou status. Yet even vocational school education largely failed to prepare migrant workers for the new economy. Woronov (2016) found China’s vocational education is fraught with problems of obsolete materials, low social recognition and a mismatch between highly theoretical course design and purposes of practical skill training. Chan et al. (2016) revealed how schools colluded with governments to turn the supposedly skill-enhancing internships into a source of low-cost and flexible student labour for local enterprises. The experience of Guiwang, among other migrant vocational school graduates, echoed both observations. He had a degree in mechanical engineering from a vocational school in Jiangxi. Yet in the final year, he was sent to a local factory to tighten screws for internship. Feeling disillusioned, he escaped to Shenzhen. When he tried to find an engineering job there, he was rejected all the time, not only because such positions often require a bachelor’s degree, but because he is not familiar with the increasingly digitalized and automized systems. As Guiwang put it,

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Can you imagine that the machines we used for experiment in the 2010s were actually the 1990s model? None featured computer numerical control, not to mention programming. How come we can adapt to the new system?

Economic Restructuring as Masculinity Crisis and Gender-Based Differentiation

Economic restructuring in time of crisis has not only changed the skill landscape of the labour market, which in turn gives rise to the skill-based mode of differentiation; it further engendered a masculinity crisis among male migrant workers, making gender an especially important factor in work-related decisions among them. Gender-based differentiation here is rooted mainly in hegemonic gender norms in China where men should be the breadwinner of the family; they should be youchuxi⁷ in order to get married and pay for bride price; and that men should do jobs that allow them more control over the situation. Such gender norms not only play an important role in channelling migrant workers to informal platform jobs, but also help sustain overwork and hyper-exploitation as the emerging norm in these sectors, from which they painstakingly suffer.

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⁷ Have one’s own career and power.

An important aspect of migrant workers’ masculinity crisis concerned their gendered family role as men, which they defined, in line with the hegemonic gendered norm in China, as the ability to adequately provide for his family, support their children and parents, and bring the family a better future (Choi & Peng, 2016). Economic restructuring in recent years increasingly challenged their ability to fulfil this role, notably by destabilizing their jobs and rendering their skills obsolete. Didi and Meituan, thanks to their relatively large space of profit, open employment relations design, and its quasi piece-rate payment system, allowed migrant workers to resolve this masculinity crisis by working as hard as they can.

Laowang told me that his wife used to work in Shenzhen. In 2015, his wife went back to He’nan to take care of their children and the elderly. Since then, his pressure to bring home an adequate wage had been rising, especially as his salary became unstable while life costs soared. For him, Didi provided a solution to this pressure. Despite his serious back pain, he worked on average 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. As he explained,

We do not want our kids to become gangsters … my father is ill in bed … as a man, my responsibility is to earn more money, keep them fed, support their education and get them treated. Costs go up every year, but my salaries do not. I must do something … back pain is no big deal … Did is for me a practical choice. Taxi in Shenzhen is more expensive than in He’nan so you can earn more. And at Didi, the more you work, the more you earn. As long as you work hard, you get well paid.

In my post-pandemic visit to Shenzhen and Dongguan, among both drivers and riders at both the centre and the periphery, a new term frequently invoked by them to describe their work is that of “aoshijian”, waiting it out. Many told me that the rate per task declined significantly after the pandemic, as more and more people became unemployed when the much-anticipated post-pandemic economic recovery did not materialize after measures of pandemic control almost put the economy to a halt. Having spent most of their savings, changes in post-pandemic Chinese economy only reinforce their gendered reliance on platform work. A’xiong and his wife lived in Shenzhen in a rented flat with their two children, both studying in a local middle school. Before the pandemic, he worked only during the morning, evening and night peaks to exploit the higher price to balance higher income with enough rest. But in post-pandemic times, this was no longer possible, and his working hours increased from 10 to 15. Recently, he was diagnosed with prostatitis and sexual dysfunction, which were popular among drivers. When asked if he was worried about his health and conjugal harmony, he became emotional:

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it saves a lot and life would be easier if we sent our children back. but growing up left-behind … I can’t see them repeating my tragedy. I hope they can live a better life so that our family can move forward… my own health and sexual desire? … You can’t have your cake and eat it too…

While married migrant platform workers faced growing pressure to provide for the family, their younger, single counterparts aspired to save adequately to set up their own families. In the post-reform era when gender imbalance in the population is swelling, to get married for male migrant workers is a complex and demanding project. Bride price and wedding ceremony aside, they are expected to provide housing for the new family (Lin, 2013). More recent studies show this standard is rising quickly (Choi & Peng, 2016). As Xiaoliang, a 27-year-old food courier from Wanzhou, Chongqing explained,

my will-be father-in-law asked me to buy a new flat in Wanzhou… he expected me to earn more and work for myself, which means to start my own business… this, for them, means a young man is youchuxi (having one’s own career)… only when you youchuxi are you good husband material who can give his daughter a good life… I think this is reasonable… it is my responsibility as men to do so… this is why I worked so hard nowadays…

For Xiaoliang, working in the low-end manufacturing or service will never make one youchuxi. Food delivery, on the other hand, can help him achieve the goal because he could earn more to save enough so as to start his own business back in his hometown.

It is interesting to note that some of the interviewees further link gender to freedom and flexibility when explaining why they sticked to digital platforms. While they are fully aware of the exploitation and control by the platforms—many lamented the degradation of platform work, and told me that they were ready to take actions against the platform to restore the flexibility in the early phase of their development, the riders and drivers I interviewed still preferred platform work over jobs in manufacturing, construction or service sectors. This is because platforms still allows them more freedom and flexibility, mainly the freedom from inhuman and arbitrary insults and punishment from the management, and the flexibility to control over the time, place and length of their own work. These basic freedoms and flexibilities had long absent from their work experience, and having these make them feel more like a real man and give them a sense of dignity restored and under control. For Liyan, this is an important reason why he still stayed with food delivery platforms, despite the mounting risks and dwindling income.

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Hukou-Based Differentiation and the Longingfor a Good Future Life

A final mode of differentiation is hukou-based. For those who are familiar with China issues, this should come without surprise, as it is now established consensus that the hukou system has long played a limiting role shaping migrant workers’ working conditions and community life (e.g. Solinger, 1999; Xiang, 2004; Young, 2013). And it does so by creating de facto dual, hierarchical citizenship statuses within one country, with urban residents at the top and rural residents at the bottom, each entitled with different civil rights to work and live in urban areas and different access to social welfare and public service provisions. The distinction between urban and rural residents is sharp to the extent that scholars and commentators often compare the hukou system to the Apartheid system in South Africa and the caste system in India. At the beginning of the reform, under the hukou system, rural residents were secondary citizens who were denied legal rights to work and live in cities, but were required to get themselves a visa-like residential permit to do so, which cost around one month’s wage (Chan, 2001; Fan, 2008). They were further denied access to work-related protection, social welfare and public service provision in the city. This is reminiscent of Guy Standing’s characterization of immigrants in Europe as ‘denizens’ (Standing, 2014), and effectively created a dual labour market where rural-to-urban migrants were denied access to public sector jobs, while in private sectors, employers could take advantage of their denizen status to squeeze their labour at incredibly low rate and with despotic managerial practices (Peng, 2011; Wu, 2017). In other words, hukou as a mode of differentiation, because of the constraints it posed on migrants in terms of citizenship rights and entitlements, have long locked China’s migrant workers in extreme precarity, in situations similar to clandestine immigrants in Europe, despite that they were in their own land.

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Since the Hu-wen era, the hukou system, along with the related social welfare and public service systems, have undergone substantial reform, to restore some level of redistributive justice (Howell & Duckett, 2019). Yet by no means does this mean that hukou as a mode of differentiation for migrant workers has entirely vanished. This becomes clear when we look closer at how the reform unfolds: in rural areas, universal social welfare and public service provision system is established; in small cities, ruralto-urban hukou transfer becomes easier, meaning rural migrants now can enjoy equal social and civil rights—for example, the right to work and live in urban areas—with urban locals; in megacities like Shenzhen, conditions for hukou transfer remain prohibitively high for migrant workers, but they can now access local social welfare scheme through individual or employer contribution, which in turn give them access to public education and healthcare services, although benefits are marginal and education and healthcare are of low quality compared to urban locals. Additionally, private capital is encouraged to provide these services through the market. Hence, despite the reform, the hukou system remains a relevant mode of differentiation, but the reform has produced a change in the specific mechanism of differentiation, from citizenship-based differentiation to differentiation based on a mix of citizenship status and class status, reflected in growing importance of one’s market capacity in accessing quality education, healthcare and housing services.

For many of my interviewees, the reform indeed provided baseline protection. Yet it failed to relieve them from the heaviest of burdens, namely, health and education. Instead, as the hukou system is increasingly mixed with a class system in cities, pressures to provide for the family are intensified. The situation is further complicated by the various problems within the medical insurance system, especially corruption, the uneven distribution of medical resources and local protectionism. This intensified pressure drove them to excessive overwork, however flexible and free the employment relation is.

Laotang was a case in point. He worked for 14 hours a day, because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to afford his father Tangba’s medical bill. Tangba spent his life as a construction worker, an industry notorious for informal contracting (Swider, 2015). As a result, he had long suffered from hypertension and severe low back pain and was further diagnosed with lung cancer in 2016. Without a formal contract, Tangba was not covered by any protection schemes until joining the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) in 2015. After receiving two surgeries in 2017, Laotang’s pressure became all the more intensive. And NCMS was not meaningfully helpful, because of the limited benefits it provides and because doctor earnings are linked to medication fees:

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NCMS provides reimbursement. But doctors nowadays tend to recommend more expensive medication because it is linked to their income. So what we pay is not necessarily less. Additionally, for serious diseases like my father’s, NCMS only cover 60% of surgery fees. Even after reimbursement, the spending is still catastrophic and sucked up my savings.

Local protectionism further undermined the effect of NCMS. Because NCMS is locally financed, permission from the local government is needed for one to get reimbursed for treatments done elsewhere. And because many local governments, especially in underdeveloped areas, suffered from massive debts, they rely heavily on private capital to provide medical service, which is at best of moderate quality. As private hospitals often collude with local governments to make trans-local reimbursement difficult, it is more difficult and costly—if not impossible—for migrant workers to get quality treatment. When Rizuo’s mother was rushed to a local hospital in 2017, he was faced with the dilemma of whether to stay with the hospital or transfer his mother to a top hospital in the neighbour city, which meant extra 50.000 yuan spending:

rumors of misdiagnosis and mistreatment by that hospital widespread … I cannot risk my mother’s life. Talking to the government is not useful, unless you have guanxi. They all know each other.

Even more acute is the pressure to provide their children with quality education. Murphy (2020) observed that rural migrants’ hope for their children to study out of drudgery increased since 2010 due to the expansion of the labour market, mass compulsory education and higher education. The STER further reinforced this hope. Many migrant drivers lamented how it is increasingly difficult to make a living without higher education as technologies advance. As the hukou system began to relax, many hoped their children could secure a good future in cities through education. A’xiong is among them. Having contributed to his local social security account for 5 years, his children were eligible for compulsory education in Shenzhen. This saved him 20.000 yuan per year, equivalent to 3–4 months of his income. Yet he was still worried that his children might ‘lose at the starting line’, since they were channelled into a minban, privately run, schools where the quality of education was widely believed to be lower, by a point-based system. The system linked access to quality public school education to one’s hukou, employment and housing status, favouring local property owners with formal employment. To better prepare their children for the labour market and future life in the city, A’xiong sent them to extra-curriculum cram schools, which cost over 20.000 yuan per year. In addition, because without local hukou his children were not eligible for high school in Shenzhen, he had further plans to buy a flat and settle down in Dongguan, where it was easier to get local hukou and where housing price was significantly lower. For him, this is worth it,

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Now the policy is more relaxed, giving us peasants an opportunity to become city man. We all know that key to a good city life is to receive good education. Although it takes a lot of money, I will try my best.

Back at home, migrant platform workers faced no less pressure in securing quality education for their children. The challenges came mainly from the school district policy, which stipulated that to attend public schools, one needs to hold ownership or tenancy of commercial housing within the school district. Local governments across China have in recent years actively embraced this policy to boost land finance and the real estate market. Zhan transferred their agricultural hukou to Fancheng, a small county in He’nan in 2015 to prepare his two children for middle school. In 2016, the local government launched the school district policy. Previously he had no plans to buy a flat, but it took only two months for the price to double after the policy was released. He finally decided to mortgage from the bank. Now he had to save 3.000 yuan each month to repay it:

It is loads of stress … some chose to buy a position from corrupt officials. But I do not want to commit a crime. What can I do? Nothing but work, work, work …

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6 Migration and Worker Solidarity

The discussion so far has identified three modes of differentiation that lock migrant platform workers in China in precarity. But as laid out earlier, precarity simultaneously creates possible rallying points for resistance and harbinger novel strategies and discourses for re-embedding the economy in society (Waite, 2009). Related to migrants, Ness (2005) shows how ethnic links among immigrant Mexicans, west Africans and south Asians in New York underlay their solidarity and organized struggle for living wages, humane working conditions, and respect. Similar trends can be observed among migrant platform workers in China.

While some argue for the detour of the development of class consciousness among platform workers in China (Liu & Friedman, 2021), in fact, just like ethnic minorities in New York, migrant platform workers in China also actively organized various forms of collective actions to negotiate and talk back to the unfair and harsh conditions they have to confront. When they have to overwork, if the first-generation of migrant workers largely attributed their lack of choice to their own lack of education or ability, migrant platform workers were well aware of the role played by platform and capital in this process. The disposition to act in solidarity to change the situation was thus commonplace among them, partly thanks to their previous experience labouring and resisting in manufacturing sectors. In addition, in my visits to megacities in China, I also constantly heard stories of collective actions among riders and drivers, although such actions were often nipped in the bud—especially in large cities—after the pandemic. As I pointed out earlier, existing studies often understand these actions in terms of labour process factors. In this section, I build on this understanding to highlight how being a migrant contribute to solidarity making and collective mobilization processes.

In the ride-hailing sector, three main reasons drove migrant drivers to action. First, the reduction in price, which directly adversely affect drivers’ income. This can be rather significant, for example, RMB 400–500 yuan per month less at the same working hours. Second, the surge in driver numbers due to the rapid expansion of VLCs, which both drives down the rate, and dilutes the market. Now more drivers complete for relatively stable numbers of riders at lower price. Third, the proliferation of scams and fraudulents due to lack of proper regulation and oversight in the otherwise exploding car-rental market, for example, VLCs refusing to refund deposits or secretly colluding with microloan companies to entrap drivers in debts etc.. These scams become even more unbearable for drivers given the dwindling income, not to mention the daily grievances generated by despotic algorithmic management, and the discrimination and unreasonable requests by consumers. Therefore, two main targets of drivers’ action include platforms like Didi and VLCs. But how do drivers form solidarity and coordinate action when their work process is geographically dispersed and socially individualized? Existing literature, in explaining this, often highlight (1) geographical arrangement of ride-hailing work; (2) the availability of free space; and (3) the role of social media in this process (e.g. Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020; Wells et al., 2021). My observation echoes these findings. These structural conditions are indeed important for solidarity making among platform drivers in China. Yet these structural conditions alone will not automatically produce solidarity. And my findings further suggest that being a migrant under the skill, gender and hukou-based modes of differentiation contributes to their solidarity and collective action in several ways.

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