Coordinamento:
Massimo De Minicis
INAPP
Francesca Della Ratta
INAPP
f.dellaratta@inapp.org
Marco Marucci
INAPP
marco.marucci@uniroma1.it
Call for papers
A recent focus in the sociology of work has been on the association between platform mediated employment, precarious labour conditions, and especially the digital repackaging of low-skilled “gig” work (Kahancova, Meszmann, and Sedlakova 2020; Schor et al. 2020). Extant scholarship indicates that platform-based gig work is one of the “accelerants of precarity” (Vallas and Schor 2020, 279), which results in further labour destandardisation, commodification and casualisation (Standing 2016; Kalleberg and Vallas 2017; Zwick 2018). Platform-based food-delivery work, which is an important sector of the platform economy, has produced what may be considered ultra-precarious labour conditions for workers (Cant 2019; Goods, Veen, and Barratt 2019; Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020; Huang 2021, Launde and De Minicis 2021). This dynamic produce in the international contest million of migrant workers making a living and crafting their lives in the boing online food-delivery industry (Lei 2021; Huang 2022). The aim of this session is to investigate the precarious lives of food-delivery rider in the international contest. How their precariousness is produced and reproduced requires an understanding of the role of the state, especially with respect to how the state denies to migrant workers citizenships rights, as well as the role of management using subcontracting and algorithmic technology that shapes the labour process. These determinants combine to produce low-paid, insecure, uncertain, and dangerous working conditions which food-delivery rider have limited individual and collective power to resist. The session proposal is aimed at collecting and discussing qualitative and quantitative international theoretical contributions on different dimensions of analysis on the relationship between Precarity and the Platform Labour Regime focused on studies concerning:
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How a majority of platform workers are drawn from marginalised social groups such as ethnic minorities, females, students or migrants;
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On the ways in which precarity is produced and reproduced within platform labour regimes:
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How the management’s use of algorithmic technologies enables a high degree of work automation and atomization which accelerates the deskilling and degradation of work;
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How data-driven game-based tactics (such as rankings, ratings and badges) are used to evaluate workers’ productivity and encourage workers to willingly engage in their own exploitation;
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If the lack of willingness on the part of states to regulate and limit the use of platform work as well as legislate to protect platform workers is symptomatic of the adoption of neo-liberal policies that fundamentally aim to enhance the power of capital at the expense of labour;
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If the use of workers from subordinate social groups, especially migrants who do not enjoy full citizenship and associated social protections are conditions to intensify labour exploitation and to constrain potential organized labor resistance.