“The Food Delivered is More Valuable Than My Life”: Understanding the Platform Precarity of Online Food-Delivery Work in China

Abstract

This article investigates the precarious labour conditions of Chinese food-delivery drivers in the platform economy. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork where the author worked as a food-delivery driver in Shanghai, the three key forces producing precarity in the platform labour regime are explored: (i) the platform circumvents its employer responsibilities for drivers by outsourcing the labour services of food delivery to third-party labour-hires companies; (ii) predatory algorithmic management is leveraged by the platform to control the labour process for excessive exploitation; and (iii) the institutional deprivation of citizenship rights of the rural migrants converts drivers into urban denizens with a vulnerable socio-economic labour environment. These determinants combine to produce low-paid, insecure, uncertain, and dangerous working conditions which food delivery drivers have limited power to resist both at individual and collective levels. Building on these findings, this article argues that the peculiar intersection of bogus triangular employment relations, predatory algorithmic control, and the subservient citizenship of rural migrants, produces precarity in the platform labour regime. The article highlights the role of the state and management in producing the precarity experienced by Chinese food-delivery drivers and contributes to understanding the work precarity of the platform economy in the digital age.