The Platform Precarity of Online Food-delivery Work in China’s Platform Economy

Abstract

This article investigates the labour conditions of Chinese food-delivery drivers in the platform economy. Drawing from one-year of ethnographic fieldwork as a driver in a giant food-delivery platform in Shanghai, China, this article identifies three key forces producing precarity in the platform labour regime. First, the platform capitalism circumvents its employer responsibilities for drivers by outsourcing the labour services of food-delivery to third-party labour companies. Second, predatory algorithmic management is leveraged by the platform capitalism to control the labour process for labour exploitation and intensification. Third, the institutional deprivation of citizenship rights of the rural migrants converts drivers into urban denizens with vulnerable socio-economic labour environment. 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, renders ‘platform precarity’ in China.