Strikes and resistance movements by Sans-Papiers couriers in Paris' platform food delivery industry


Émile Baril, York University

There has been a drastic rise in food delivery services since the start of the pandemic. Platform food delivery workers have been scrutinized both by academia and the media. In France, undocumented riders, and their recent strikes and protests, have not received as much attention as other issues regarding platform labour such as misclassification, algorithmic control and surveillance. Building on interviews with riders and on work by critical urban studies, migration studies and science and technology studies, this chapter explores sans-papiers riders’ resistance to exploitation. In December 2023, the French parliament passed an immigration reform, making it harder for regular immigrants in France to bring over family members, access welfare benefits and access citizenship for children born in France to foreign parents. Urban labour platforms, especially food delivery platforms, have seen an over-representation of racialized immigrants working for them. Some protests and strikes by migrant riders against major food delivery platforms made headlines in the last couple of years. The first part of the paper will discuss strategies, limitations and spaces of resistance (digital and physical). Three cases will be featured: a) 2020 strikes at Frichti, b) 2021 strikes at Stuart and c) 2022 strikes at UberEats. Interviews with riders that resisted mass deactivation and disciplining methods will highlight how the platforms tried to take advantage of their precarious status before releasing them. The subletting of accounts, the complicit role of the state, the hypocrisy of employers and the interdependency with the ‘regularized’ are all deterrents to social mobilization and are important factors that can put undocumented couriers in hyper-precarious situations. The second section notes connections between traditional unions and grassroots movements and the role of the French state in creating and reproducing precariousness. Interviews with key actors from traditional unions and grassroots organizations will show their participation in the sans-papiers’ movements. Labour laws, misclassification and migration policies are at the center of migrant workers’ struggles. The paper concludes that there is a need for integrating migrant couriers’ perspective in the study of urban labour platforms. Food delivery platforms compete in urban markets for clients, restaurants and workers. Considering migrant workers’ perspective to platformized exploitation, through a case study of food delivery resistance in Paris, will help re-centering some of the on-going debates on global platforms toward the ‘bottom end’ of the labour markets. It also brings in the realities of migrant workers – and their capacity to self-organize in advanced capitalist countries – to top-down studies and reforms that often ignore hyper-precarious lives and unequal power relations within racial capitalism. As one rider mentioned to Le Media in the Summer of 2020: “If we – Paris’ sans-papier colony – decide to withdraw our labour from the food delivery industry, app-companies won’t be able to keep providing meals because most people don’t want to bike around the city for hours to deliver.”

This paper will be presented at the following session: