Women’s Solidarity, Communicative Space, the Gig Economy’s Social Reproduction and Labour Process: The Case of Female Platform Drivers in China

Abstract

This article draws on a study conducted over a period of 17 months, including chatnography and semi-structured interviews with 30 female platform drivers working in China’s hail-riding industry, and makes three important contributions to the labour process and the social reproduction process scholarship. First, it fills a gap in the burgeoning literature on the gendered experience of gig work and of work–family flexibility in an on-demand economy. Women’s surplus production, as a means of subsistence for oneself and the family, is contradictory to childcare commitments in the labour process. Second, it theorises that the communicative space is a space for social reproduction in which labour-power is replenished outside the household. Labour productivity is not solely determined by algorithmic logic and platform control, but rather is organised by the social reproduction process. Third, it discusses how female platform workers negotiate technological insecurity and resist the platform’s control over and sexual exploitation in the communicative space. This sheds light on how the social reproduction process creates a potential for women’s solidarity. Women fight against sexual harassment and gender-based violence by utilising communication technologies, such as WeChat and TikTok. The social reproduction process organises labour resistance in a time of individual and collective crisis.