Free to Enjoy a Precarious Ride - On Entrepreneurial Game Playing in the Platform-Based Food Delivery Sector

Abstract

How do digital platforms operating in the gig economy control their workers, given that they do not hire subordinate employees but instead assign “gigs” to autonomous freelancers? Going against the dominant view that digital platforms redefine pre- or post-Fordist modes of control with the help of digital technology, this study places the labor process of the gig economy in its own, unique, political economy. Building upon ethnographic research on the operations of Uber Eats and Deliveroo in Amsterdam, I show that these food delivery platforms do not strip their couriers from as much autonomy as possible but rather grant them with a set of carefully confined decision-making opportunities that allows them to navigate the internal food delivery market themselves. This managerial system gives rise to a dynamic in which (semi)autonomous, yet severely underpaid delivery couriers continuously employ strategies to maximize their gig income. As their success is partly dependent on their ability to understand and act upon market logics, they are forced to play what I call an entrepreneurial work-game. Platforms maintain in control of the labor process by creating the conditions for and heavily regulating the rules of this work-game. In the short run, the game yokes couriers’ interests with those of the platforms by carefully regulating when (evening) where (around restaurants) and how (as fast as possible) couriers work. When the interests of both do not appropriately align, platforms do not dictate couriers’ behavior directly but, instead, modify the conditions under which couriers are forced to play (contingent piece rates, incentives, continuous recruitment). In the long run, the game helps to disguise the highly exploitative capital-labor relation that underlies the couriers’ new employment construction, thereby hollowing out the sociological basis for workplace resistance to occur. My findings develop labor process theory by theorizing how market logics are used and manipulated to regulate the labor process and enrich ethnographic research on workplace practices by introducing a new type of work-game.