(WPO3) Digital Technologies, Work, and the Platform Economy

New digital technologies have facilitated the emergence of the platform economy, transforming work in sectors including delivery services, retail, ride sharing, and data annotation. While work in some platform economy occupations at times seems to offer a degree of autonomy for workers, platform work simultaneously constructs conditions of precariousness, thereby generating new workplace struggles. Set in a context of rapid technological innovation, the proliferation of precarious employment, and new forms of technological surveillance and management, this session explores both the impacts of digital technologies on the organization of work and the emergence of platform worker resistance, in Canada and internationally.

Organizer: Mark Thomas, Department of Sociology, York University; Chair: Mark Thomas, Department of Sociology, York University

Presentations

Jen Kostuchuk, University of Victoria

Navigating Urban Infrastructure and Solidarity: Experiences of App-Based Food Delivery Workers in Canada

The growth of the gig economy and its precarity is well-documented in Canada. It is an employment sector known for its lack of job security, exclusion from health benefits, and poor working conditions (Christie and Ward, 2019; Popan, 2021; Stewart and Stanford, 2017). The sector is also highly gendered and racialized. While many gig workers appreciate the sector's entrepreneurial freedom, the barriers and opportunities for solidarity among gig workers have yet to be meaningfully examined (Reid-Musson et al., 2020). Through 50 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this research explores the experiences of individuals in Canada working on app-based food delivery platforms like UberEats, Skip the Dishes, and DoorDash. For some, app-based work is their primary source of income, and for others, the pay is merely supplementary. Participants in the project navigate urban infrastructure in unique ways while delivering by vehicle, bicycle, and electric scooter. Two research questions guide this project: what are the barriers and opportunities for solidarity among food delivery workers in Canada's gig economy? To what extent do modes of transportation constrain and enable solidarity across gig workers? Preliminary findings underscore health and safety issues associated with navigating urban infrastructure, particularly in car-centric cities. Barriers to gig worker solidarity include a lack of mutual understanding of gender-specific workplace conditions, perceptions of competitiveness and lack of collegiality, and the independent and isolating nature of the work. App-based platforms do not support opportunities for workers to establish mutually beneficial relationships. Furthermore, mobility can simultaneously constrain and enable solidarity in urban and digital spaces where workers congregate. Some gig workers perceive this type of food delivery service to be competitive, while others believe there is space for more camaraderie than competition. Nonetheless, opportunities for solidarity are present through digital communication on social media and connecting with fellow couriers while on shift waiting for pickups. More findings are forthcoming. This research has the potential to inform public policy on protecting gig workers by ensuring workplace health and safety and better understanding the gendered implications of this sector.

Rawan Abdelbaki, York University

The Uneven Dynamics of Algorithmic Management: Amazon Warehouses in the GTA

Following Burawoy’s argument that the wider ‘politics of production’ are what determine firms’ labour processes and regimes, this paper offers empirical and theoretical analyses of the ways in which Amazon’s deployment of digital Taylorism shapes micro-processes of class composition within its warehouses by situating Amazon within the broader racial segmentation and flexibilization of the Canadian labour market. Part of Amazon’s rise as a logistics giant is its mobilization of a ‘culture of meritocracy’ through a ‘culture of injury:’ upward mobility as a reward for hard work by requiring repetitive tasks and intensifying levels of mental and physical stress that are exacerbated by undisclosed performance goals (the need to ‘make rate’) dictated by algorithms. Finally, while accounting for the impact of digitality, I argue the use of these technologies in the workplace neither neutralizes nor transcends existing social relations. Thus, the use of algorithms and digital technologies to manage the labour process is a socially grounded phenomenon. Work performed under digital Taylorist regimes is constituted by racialized and gendered divisions of labour that inflect the uneven experiences of algorithmic management.

Lutfun Lata, The University of Melbourne

Gig work, algorithmic control and resistance: A case of Uber drivers in Dhaka

The ‘gig’, ‘sharing’ or ‘platform’ economy has recently attracted increasing scholarly attention, particularly in how intermediary platforms build, connect and reconstruct the social relations among labourers, consumers and companies (Anwar and Graham, 2021; Lata et al., 2023; Rosenblat, 2018; Schor et al., 2023). There are several debates centred around the gig economy and its operation. On the one hand, researchers have pointed out the endless potential of the gig economy in solving any wicked problems that the 21st century cities are struggling with such as employment, transport and housing (Schor and Vallas, 2021). Scholars also claim that the gig economy can offer ample employment opportunities for lower-income groups offering them jobs in transport and courier sectors (Cannon and Summers, 2014; Holtum et al., 2022). On the other hand, several studies reveal social and economic inequalities are exacerbated in various features of the gig economy (Rosenblat, 2018; Holtum et al., 2022; Schor and Vallas, 2021). For example, the high proportions of highly educated part time (versus full time) workers on these platforms get the advantage of better earnings than their counterparts – those without college degrees, who used to previously dominate cleaning and driving sectors (Schor and Vallas, 2021). Critics have further pointed out the problematic features of algorithmic management that has shifted managerial responsibilities from humans to machines (Aloisi, 2017; Aloisi and De Stefano, 2022; Wood et al., 2019; Veen et al., 2022). New platforms such as Uber, Pathao, Didi, Deliveroo, Menulog, and DoorDash utilise digital surveillance to monitor workers through their smartphones and mobile devices. While the price contours of algorithmic regimes vary according to the type of platform, in all cases, this management strategy has reduced the gig workers’ agency to resist or challenge the rules established by these firms (Holtum et al., 2022). Despite criticisms of the gig economy, across the Global South governments have encouraged digitalisation and the spread of the gig economy with the hope that it would generate more employment opportunities for workers (Rani et al., 2022). This is particularly important given the fact that the vast majority of workers are engaged in the informal sector in the Global South (OECD, 2023). Despite the challenges gig workers face while working in the gig economy, like other Global South countries, Bangladesh has stepped into using digital platforms. The ridesharing business in Bangladesh has amassed 260 million USD to the digital platform economy with 6 million rides in each month (Khatun et al., 2021). With the rise of the platform capital, the gig economy in Bangladesh has gained an exponential growth in the last decade. Bangladesh’s platform-based gig economy got its momentum in 2016, with the arrival of Uber. However, like other countries, the ‘contract workers’ model is predominant in Bangladesh. Recently, the ride sharing drivers have started protesting ride sharing platforms’ policies including low wages by forming an online workers’ union known as Dhaka Ride-Sharing Drivers Union (DRDU). Within this context, this paper explores how Uber drivers in Dhaka exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods. Uber drivers not only experience extortion by Uber, but they also face various challenges, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic control of their activities. All these factors constrain Uber drivers’ autonomy and bargaining power. Consequently, Uber drivers have fewer opportunities to exercise their agency, especially in a country like Bangladesh, where many workers are involved in the informal economy and low paid jobs. The regulatory practices are not in favour of Uber drivers either. Within this context, drawing on in-depth interviews with 27 Uber drivers and one Focus Group Discussion with members of the Dhaka ride sharing Drivers’ Union, this paper contributes to the literature on gig work and resistance showing how Uber drivers are able to utilise both covert and overt resistance strategies to protest against ride-sharing platforms like Uber.

Asmita Bhutani, York University

Social reproduction of AI: Lived experiences of home-based workers on data annotation platforms

This paper is part of a broader ethnographic study examining women workers’ conditions of work and social relations in transnational data annotation platforms, focusing on gendered and racialized dynamics in this platform work. The proliferation of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry and machine learning companies fundamentally rely upon human labour of data annotation. The potential of platform technologies occupies the heart of debates on digitally mediated work and the disruption of traditional norms about workplaces and employment. The paper focuses on the experiences of women who form a substantial part of the data annotation workforce. Although most data annotation platform companies operate from the US and Europe, the labour force for this low-wage, piece work is primarily home-based workers in Global South countries, and India has emerged as a significant location for this work. As a feminist scholar, I center my attention on women’s lives and experiences, revealing the gendered and racialized dimensions of platform work and challenging typical notions of freedom, inclusion, and an available workforce. The paper draws on Marxist feminist framework and ethnographic methods. Specifically, I present how women navigate their paid and unpaid work across their labouring time within the family and on platforms. Focusing on the role each of these institutions play, I discuss how these reproduce racist and patriarchal relations and impact women’s political and economic positions across paid and unpaid “workspaces”. Presenting a range of data collected from semi-structured interviews and home visits of women workers in different parts of India working as home-based workers, I argue that the family and the platform companies play a key role in reproducing feminized platform work, normalizing intensive working conditions for women and naturalizing racism in the highly globalized AI platform labour market. Platforms actively create time zone hierarchies, racial wage codes, accent racism and menial work for racialized workers rendering them politically vulnerable and under-employed while individualizing the risks and responsibilities to workers themselves. Family setups of these home-based workers on the other hand, normalize unequal power relations, perpetuate the devaluation of their identities, all of which routinize highly controlled and divisive labour. These setups shape the spatial and temporal conditions for the production of capitalist commodities and, in their heterosexual form, force women to perform “life-choking” work (Lewis, 2022). These family setups also reproduce gendered worker subjectivities that reinforce the proliferation of casualized arduous and exploitative working conditions prevalent in precarious on-demand platform work. Overall, these patriarchal and racist social relations shape women’s ideas of themselves as workers, their political subjectivity on the platforms, and their imaginaries of resistance against families and paid work. I conclude my presentation with the discussion of responses from gig union organizers in India regarding the challenges of mobilizing this workforce but also women’s responses who have managed to develop informal social media-based collectives as part of their resistance. In discussing these responses, I offer a critique of the existing state of and concerns around platform organizing from a feminist perspective and the possibilities of expanding the organizing agenda for platform work towards a more collective working-class struggle against capitalist political economy.