Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the impact of platformisation on migrant workers in the UK's domestic care and delivery sectors. It explores how digital platforms offer opportunities for those with no or precarious legal status while perpetuating exploitation.

Paper long abstract:

The rapid platformisation of labor markets has significantly transformed the domestic care and delivery sectors, particularly impacting migrant workers with precarious legal status (Doorn and Vijay 2021; Piasna et al. 2022; Kowalik et al. 2023). This paper examines the complex intersection of gig work, irregular migration, and labor within the United Kingdom, focusing on how online platforms have emerged as accessible entry points for vulnerable groups.

Our research reveals a dynamic where platforms simultaneously provide opportunities and perpetuate precarious working conditions for migrants with no insecure legal status. Food delivery platforms like Deliveroo and Uber Eats, while promoting flexibility, rely heavily on an underpaid, racially minoritised, and often undocumented workforce. Similar patterns are observed in the domestic care sector, where emerging platforms offer low-threshold entry points but exacerbate precarity for migrant workers in cleaning and childcare services.

Drawing on collaborative multimodal ethnographic research conducted in Birmingham involving a participatory group of ethnographers, migrant workers, and activists within these sectors, we explore the factors driving migrant participation in platform-based work. These factors include bypassing barriers to direct negotiation, accessing on-demand income, and using gig work as evidence for legal regularisation.

Additionally, we explore how shifting political interests, union struggles, regulatory frameworks, and recent judicial decisions have paradoxically produced 'asymmetrical infra-alliances' between parties with opposing political interests. The paper particularly examines how unions are adapting their strategies to address the increasing deregulation of the platform-based gig economy, which is undermining recently gained rights, such as the abolition of the 'family work exemption'.