Abstract
On-demand delivery platforms have become a common feature of urban economies across the globe. Noted for their hyper-outsourced, “lean” business models and reliance on independent contractors, these companies evade traditional employer obligations while still controlling workers through complex algorithmic management techniques. Using food delivery platform Deliveroo as a case-study, this paper investigates the diverse array of practices that on-demand workers carry out in order to enact this new platform labor arrangement in different spatial contexts. One of us conducted an auto-ethnographic project, working as a Deliveroo Rider in Nijmegen and Berlin for a period of nine months. Additionally, we interviewed 13 fellow platform workers. The findings reveal the motley, contingent, and conditional ways in which on-demand labor comes together on the ground. The paper concludes with discussing the uneven distribution of these practices across locations and social groups, and the sometimes contradictory impacts they have on the structure of platform labor.
Highlights
One Friday night in Berlin, I am out making deliveries when a double order takes me to a gated condominium on the edge of Friedrichshain
The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of the so-called platform economy (Srnicek 2017b)
This paper focuses on a specific type of lean platform that has proliferated since the early 2010s: on-demand delivery companies
Summary
One Friday night in Berlin, I am out making deliveries when a double order takes me to a gated condominium on the edge of Friedrichshain. Like Airbnb, allow users to monetize their existing housing, while others, such as Uber, connect workers to a task to be done at a specific location and time. These companies can be described as “lean platforms” for their strategy of outsourcing as many operational aspects as possible. This includes labor, as most workers are classified as “independent contractors” (Srnicek 2017b)
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