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

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Delivering in the Lagoon. Critical Reflections on the Flexibility of Platformised Food Delivery in Venice

Giorgio Pirina

1 Introduction

In recent years, the gig economy has emerged as a transformative force in urban labour markets, driven by digital platforms that promise flexibility and autonomy for workers. The concept of “uberisation”, which involves breaking down work into small, discrete tasks using digital platforms, has emerged in this context. This paper investigates the intricate dynamics of gig work, focusing on the experiences of migrant students employed as walkers for food delivery services like Glovo in Venice, Italy. Central to this exploration are the concepts of “algochronos” and “binding-flexibility”, which together illuminate the nuanced realities of algorithmically managed work. The notion of algochronos integrates algorithmic management with the temporal aspects of gig work, highlighting how digital platforms exert control over workers’ schedules, tasks and performance metrics. This concept draws on Thompson’s (1967) reflections on time and work discipline, Lefebvrian’s rhythmanalysis (2004), as well as contemporary studies on the impact of algorithmic management on labour practices.

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_G. _Pirina ₍B₎

Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

e-mail: giorgio.pirina2@unibo.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\_4

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Parallel to this, the concept of binding-flexibility examines the dual nature of flexibility in gig work. While platforms like Glovo advertise the freedom to choose work hours and manage schedules, underlying constraints—imposed by algorithms, market demands, and regulatory frameworks—limit this flexibility. Migrant students, in particular, encounter additional layers of restriction due to visa regulations and language barriers, which funnel them into specific types of gig work with stringent operational conditions.

Building on the wider discussion about precarity in the gig work, this article delves into the working conditions and daily routines of migrants’ workers in the food delivery via apps in Venice. In the context of Venice, the entanglement of binding-flexibility and algochronos captures the unique challenges faced by walkers navigating the city’s complex urban environment, where geolocation systems often falter, and the physical landscape complicates efficient delivery routes. This assertion is corroborated by the analysis of empirical data, which reveals a close intertwining between the organisation of daily activities, job performance, academic pursuits, and the acquisition of Italian language skills. In addition, when examining the relationship between the work and living conditions of migrants in the urban gig economy, it is imperative to consider the legal and regulatory frameworks that shape these arrangements. Such factors may include labour laws that facilitate non-traditional employment arrangements. Temporality and rhytms (Lefebvre, 2004) are crucial aspects, as couriers must be constantly on time (and online) to ensure the best order assignments. Regarding migrant labour, it is also necessary to consider another temporality: the residence permit, which, for example, determines how much time migrants can work and can exacerbate their vulnerability or restrict their opportunities.

Venice constitutes a novel and compelling subject for the investigation of food delivery work, owing to its bifurcation between the mainland, consisting of Mestre and Marghera with a conventional urban framework, and the historic centre, where mobility is restricted to pedestrian. This unique urban configuration profoundly impacts the execution of food delivery work. Consequently, delivery workers in this context are designated as “walkers” and “runners”, rather than riders.

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The findings presented here stem from a qualitative research conducted between January and June 2022. The empirical data were collected with a participant observation as walker, supported by 12 semi-structured interviews with couriers, and several informal conversations.

2 Gig Work as a New Step of the Casualisation of Labour

The de-qualification, degradation, fragmentation, and casualisation of labour are not unique to the platform economy but rather have been present throughout the evolution of the capitalist labour process, with acceleration during its neoliberal phase. It is now recognised that the term “gig” did not originate with the platform economy but rather in a sector characterised by occasional work performance and connotations of creativity, particularly in the music industry (Woodcock & Graham, 2019). The process of impoverishment of labour has been reinforced by regulatory frameworks promoting the proliferation of contractual typologies and job relationships that have allowed for the spread of temporary work. This is due to the widening of the modalities of labour supply and the reduction of labour costs by enterprises (Kalleberg, 2009), making temporary staffing an infrastructural element of the job market (Peck & Theodore, 2012). In the academic literature, there is now a consensus on defining precarious employment as the result of the loss of work or the fear of losing it, in which there is a shortage of alternative employment in the market, with the risk of losing acquired skills (Kalleberg, 2009; Standing, 2014). One of the principal consequences of this phenomenon is an increase in insecurity, instability, and economic inequalities.

A substantial body of literature has sought to elucidate the factors motivating temporary workers to work as hard as they do. At least three reasons have been identified: consensus, coercion, and surveillance (Kojima, 2015). Buroway (1979) was one of the first scholars to delve deeper into this topic, identifying external incentives that motivate individuals to produce more. The pressure exerted by management on workers to be more productive, for example, using piecework, is resisted by workers who adopt game mechanisms to obtain economic and cultural rewards. These gamification dynamics also form the basis of platform work. Buroway (1979) framed these dynamics as creative agency, due to the conscious choice of the workers. Other motivations are coercive and surveillance-related, related to management’s power to exert a form of (in)direct control over workers, where the fear of dismissal and unemployment comes into play. At the root of these motivations is the power asymmetry between worker and employer, linked to entrance surveillance, i.e. the evaluation of the worker’s (still potential) profile and work performance, which induces workers to self-discipline and work hard (Kojima, 2015).

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The aforementioned dynamics apply to platform work, with different nuances due to algorithmic management, increased isolation, and the nature of the workplace. The core narrative of platform economy firms involves the entanglement of flexibility and autonomy of the workers, and a more horizontal organisational model. This narrative is informed by the self-entrepreneurial view and the individual capacity to succeed. However, the literature on labour process theory applied to gig work has debunked this narrative by analysing the concrete dynamics of this work and the lived experiences of the workers. It has been foregrounded how the algorithmic management of digital labour platforms, under a technosolutionist umbrella, increases the polarisation of power between labour and capital, in favour of the latter, and tends to reduce the workers’ room for agency. This polarisation is achieved through an asymmetrical distribution of information (Rosenblat, 2018; Tassinari & Maccarone, 2020) and by black-boxing the algorithm.

It is widely agreed that the “misrecognition of digital labour plays a crucial role in the platform business model, making labour cheaper, exiting traditional IR systems, and managing a wide workforce that operates with high levels of turnover. By using self-employment, platforms avoid the recognition of social rights associated with wage labour” (Quondamatteo & Marrone, 2023, p. 257). The (mis)classification of workers as self-employed or independent contractors instead of employees cannot be separated from the algorithmic management of work ondemand via apps, as it allows digital platforms to disguise the de facto employment relationship by discharging digital platforms from employment responsibilities. In this regard, “Algorithmic management and worker (mis)classification are therefore key to making the platform workforce cheap, precarious and interchangeable – and therefore, ‘on-demand’” (Gebrial, 2022, p. 5).

This organisation aims to make an increasing share of the “relative surplus population” (Ivi) disposable on-demand in a technocratic way.

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This group includes peripheral workers, as defined by Castel (2003), who lack sufficient cultural and economic capital and are therefore more vulnerable and precarious, including women, elders, and migrant people. In line with platform urbanism scholars, the power of digital platforms derives from the “strategic deployment of ‘conjunctural geographies’ – a way of being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the space-times they mediate. These geographies ultimately allow platforms to concentrate and exert power” (Graham, 2020, p. 454). This means that their place of operation may differ from their fiscal headquarters and, together with the rhetoric of being mere technology companies, the conjunctural geography provides digital platforms with significant room for manoeuvre across normative frameworks. Yet, digital platforms do not move in a flat space; they have to deal with the frictions (Tsing, 2004) of the local socio-institutional arrangements.

3 Migrant Gig Work(Force)

The general trend briefly outlined above should be tied with the dynamics involving migrant workforce. Some scholars have tied the general dynamics of racialisation in capitalism in the platform economy’s rationale, claiming that worker (mis)classification is a racial process (Gebrial, 2022). It is now recognised the co-constitutive relationship between urban gig economy and migrants (Abkhezr & McMahon, 2022; Altenried, 2021; Piasna et al., 2022; van Doorn, 2023). The nexus between migrant workers and low-skilled platform-based work is underscored by the control exerted by capitalist mechanisms over the migratory workforce. As pointed out by van Doorn, the gig economy become «active ‘infrastructural’ agents in the reconstitution of labour relations and the nature of work» (2023, p. 902). Indeed, digital platforms function as pivotal infrastructures, assimilating migrant work through stratified and racialised modalities, thereby relegating them to low-wage labour markets (Orth, 2023; van Doorn & Vijay, 2021).

A major explicatory factor of the intersection between migrants and gig work is linked to the low entry-barrier of the latter. For example, the literature on the relationship between temporal borders and border regimes has emphasised how temporary residence permits punctuate migrants’ experiences and how they contribute to the momentary inclusion of migrant work in capital’s productive structure. This punctuated temporality «differentiates temporary migrants from migrants with continuous permits and even more so from nondeportable citizens» (Maury, 2020, p. 101). The topic of temporality and visa/residence permits is crucial also on the grounds that «temporary migrant workers provide the lion’s share of the labour power in the platform economy across the world» (Baratt et al., 2020; Lata et al., 2023, p. 3). Moreover, precarious migrants may be undocumented, vulnerable or forced (Nedelcu & Soysüren, 2022), and they can use self-employment or independent contractor work relationships to circumvent visa or residence permit restrictions (Abkhezr & McMahon, 2022; Lata et al., 2023). In this context, Animento (2024), gig work reduces the entry barriers of the local (urban) market, making migration smoother, affording migrant workers immediate engagement and a supplementary income, notwithstanding their constrained social assimilation and paucity of social capital (Animento, 2024; Saucedo, 2018; van Doorn et al., 2023; van Doorn & Vijay, 2021). Evidently, the allure of platform employment emanates from its formal work flexibility, minimal linguistic and bureaucratic impediments, and expeditious selection protocols vis-à-vis alternative sectors.

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Against this background should be considered the mobility of extra Eu student. More specifically, the temporary student permit represents «an extension of the global border and visa regime and focuses on the temporal effects rooted in the student permit that materialise in the student-migrants’ everyday lives» (Ivi, p. 102). Visa or residence permits not only limit the time one can spend in a particular territorial entity, but also limit one’s opportunities to find a job.

4 From the “Mythical Autonomy” to a “Binding-Flexibility”

The literature has problematised «the on-screen representation of the perfect meeting of supply and demand through the platform (…) focusing on the material practices through which goods are constituted via contingent arrangements of buyer and seller» (Richardson, 2020, p. 620). According to this research, putting the spotlight on the material practices of the marketisation allows to foreground «the algorithm’s role in building contingency by putting specific demands on space and time, which paradoxically allow for and indeed enable flexibility» (Ibid.). This arrangement, which encompasses a variety of contingent calculations that couriers need to do in relation to the algorithm’s decision-making process, has been frame as coercive flexibility (Ivi).

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Against this background, we put forth the concept of “bindingflexibility” as an alternative to “coercive flexibility”. The latter risks overshadowing the subjectivity of workers in the decision-making process. In accordance with Burawoy (1979), contemporary management is dedicated to achieving consensus among workers to enhance productivity using gamification, rather than resorting to coercive measures. This condition appears to be well-suited to addressing the app-based food delivery sector, particularly in consideration of the “illusion of choice” that algorithmic management provides in the performance of the job. In other words, the range of choices available to couriers is constrained by (bound to) the possibilities offered by the digital platform. Furthermore, the term “binding” allows for a more comprehensive and diverse range of elements to be included in the analysis. While the term coercive flexibility effectively identifies the concrete forms of app-based food delivery work and the asymmetrical power relationships between the actors involved, bindingflexibility helps binding together aspects that, at first glance, appear to be unrelated to food delivery work and couriers’ decision-making processes.

However, gig workers can use tactics to partially reduce the digital platforms’ disciplinary control, which involve trade-offs: «Temporal tradeoffs help the workers make time better fit their needs and to construct meanings around their temporality without posing structural challenges to the dominant temporal order» (Chen & Sun, 2020, p. 1564).

The concept of “binding-flexibility” can be understood in relation to the idealistic discourse of the sharing economy (Schor, 2020), that is, the narrative promoted by digital platforms regarding horizontal organisational relationships and the possibility of working as a self-entrepreneur, according to a mythical autonomy (Lata et al., 2023). The categorisation of workers as either supplementary earners or platform-dependent earners (Schor, 2020) is useful to comprehend the concept of binding-flexibility as well. The former refers to those who embrace the idealistic discourse because they are not directly dependent on the activities associated with it and are more satisfied by this “independence”. The latter group, on the other hand, derives most of their earnings from the sharing economy and is subject to the performance pressure resulting from rankings and the need to constantly search for tasks to perform. Additionally, there are those who fall somewhere in between these two groups. Besides, a full deployment of binding-flexibility can be reached tying it to the concept of “sticky labour”, as it emphasises the subjugation of the workers to the digital platforms’ managerial model of control (Sun et al., 2021). This encompasses the constant monitoring of workers through data produced while being logged and online with the smartphone, the induced necessity to work in the so-called diamond hours.

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