‘Customer is king’: gig work in a small South African city and the varieties of digital control and workers’ responses

Abstract

The digital revolution typified by pervasive intrusion of digital technology into our everyday practices raises questions concerning the impact on the organisation of work and workers’ experiences. Drawing from workers’ subjective views, this article examines how the intervention of digital technology in the gig food delivery sector in Kimberley, South Africa, shapes the organisation of work and patterns of workers’ experiences and responses. The article, informed by labour process theory, highlights the platforms’ diverse business models and how they embrace digital technology informs the nature of the labour process, employment relations and workers’ response. For example, the ‘paradoxical’ nature of customer rating systems, and a culture of tipping, which, while allowing workers to ‘extract surplus value outside the direct control of the platforms’ serves to control and manage workers’ performance. This individualisation of income determination further isolates workers from each other and ‘undermines their sense of collective solidarity’. This affirms the on-going importance of human interaction in the digital labour process and the ways in which these technologies intersect with racial inequalities, perpetuating discriminatory service delivery practices. The organisation of gig delivery work is not just about controlling the labour process to maximise capital accumulation. It is embedded in practices aimed at (re)configuring both the workers and societal norms, values and culture, and, in the process, produce new traditions of work and worker subjectivities. However, workers do not blindly surrender to this logic but have the capacity to subvert this by forging means which propels them to exercise some form of control in how their work is organised.