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- Convenors:
-
Luisa Steur
(University of Amsterdam)
Kristin Monroe (University of Kentucky)
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- Discussant:
-
Don Kalb
(University of Bergen)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Music Building (MUS), Lecture Room 101
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on the urban delivery workers who provide both essential services and the labor needed for the increased circulation of value characterizing contemporary capitalism. It thus examines issues of labor, capitalist transformation, class, and resistance in comparative perspective.
Long Abstract:
Since the pandemic, the increased consumption of home delivery services has often brought attention to issues of labor supply and logistics. Meanwhile more fundamental transformations in global capitalism continue to unfold as accumulation relies increasingly on speeding up the circulation of goods and increasing the number of exchanges (Harvey 2017), giving rise to a host of technological innovations and digitally-mediated exchange platforms that cater particularly to urban consumers. This panel focuses on the delivery workers providing much of the labour that is necessary for the increased circulation of value, be it as DHL couriers, Glovo "riders", Swiggy "boys", etc. These workers have, as an outcome of the pandemic, become ever more essential. An interesting paradox characterises their position: delivery work is amongst the most exploited and precarious forms of labour today and a sector from which new forms of resistance emerge. Indeed, delivery workers commonly have a migrant background and/or are highly racialized, labour under hyper-flexible, physically dangerous and subcontracted conditions and/or are "self-employed", and are subjected to aggressive algorithmic control and relentless evaluation. On the other hand, the work also offers certain forms of autonomy that can facilitate innovative forms of organising and acting, spatial contestations, and successful attempts at unionisation. By inviting papers on delivery workers connected to different platforms and in different cities across the world, this panel seeks to contribute insight into an important question for the anthropology of labour, that is: what are key registers of class formation under the new capitalist offensive?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Josh Widera (University of Southern California)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from work-based ethnography, ride along interviews, and cognitive maps, this paper shows how bicycle couriers make choices en route that are not algorithmically prescribed or profit-oriented to increase and celebrate their agency and solidarity despite their physical and financial precarity.
Paper long abstract:
From “telegraph boys” to messengers in urban financial districts, bicycle delivery workers have always existed in some form (Kidder 2011). Similarly, today’s couriers are the by-product of the economic context of value circulation, technological-spatial fixes, the “gig economy,” and venture capital. At this nexus, this paper highlights the various ways in which bicycle delivery workers today foster agency, appreciation, and solidarity through playful and subversive tactics.
Most delivery apps are operating at a loss, relying on investors. What was once a simple equation of surplus value—a delivery from one place to another while earning less than the price of that delivery—seems to have become secondary to data collection and speculative market value. But the practices and demands at its heart remain unchanged: workers deliver goods and information in cities for low pay, in volatile employment conditions, and involving physical danger.
Downey’s study of telegraph boys (2002) shows the value in treating delivery workers as both: a technology and a human subject. Taking this dual trajectory to heart, this paper shows how couriers, within their algorithmically scaffolded work, make a variety of choices en route that are not driven by profit-oriented concerns and that allow them to increase and celebrate their own agency. Drawing from the author’s multi-sited and work-based ethnography in Melbourne, Helsinki, and Los Angeles, as well as in-depth ride along interviews, and cognitive maps, this paper furthers the understanding of bicycle couriers’ complex situation and their formation of class and identity despite financial and physical precarity.
Kaveri Medappa (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper, informed by 12 months of ethnographic research in Bangalore, India, is an examination of the contextual factors, including platforms’ spatial organisation of work and remuneration patterns, which act as impediments and frustrate workers’ efforts towards collective mobilisation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the collective mobilisation efforts of Swiggy and Zomato workers in Bangalore, India, and discusses some of the significant factors which have impeded sustained collective mobilisation. This paper draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in several localities in Bangalore from June 2019 to July 2020. Despite the physical proximity and everyday acts of mutual support which food delivery workers experience and share with one another, why have they struggled to create enduring solidarities, protests largely resembling ‘spontaneous’ acts which dissipate in a matter of days? I problematise simplistic understandings of the transformation of workers from a ‘technical’ category to a ‘political’ category by paying attention to the socio-political factors, as well as the very organisation of platform work, which has shown to hinder such a transition in Bangalore (and in other Indian cities). By paying close attention to the operational logics of Swiggy and Zomato, I show how the spatial organisation of work, remuneration patterns and sub-contractualisation of work have all played key roles in fragmenting the workforce. These strategies of platforms were very effective in amplifying already existing socio-cultural fractures, and discouraged and frustrated workers’ efforts to collectively mobilise. Identifying the factors which constrain effective collective mobilisation is perhaps the first step in equipping ourselves to look for tools to blunt platform efforts at fragmenting workers. This could then lead to the providers of ‘essential services’ finding a common language with which to assert their value as enabling the social reproduction of urban life.
Katrine Duus Terkelsen (Aarhus University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper situates the urban delivery workers’ experiences of and hopes for work in the concurrent political discussion on digital platform work that took place during my fieldwork in 2018. By engaging different understandings of work, I attempt to outline the moral economies they relate to.
Paper long abstract:
Digital food delivery platforms mediate between delivery workers who seek out the flexible work of bicycle delivery, hungry customers, and restaurants that want to increase their takeaway business. The mediation of the digital delivery platforms makes it possible for the delivery worker to work without having a human manager. Instead, they work through apps being managed by algorithms. The apps facilitate experiences, understandings, and imaginaries of work that can be difficult to marry with the current labour market legislation in which social security is closely tied to regular employment.
Taking my outset in the delivery workers’ experiences of and hopes for work, this paper will present the different understandings of digital platform work that I encountered in my ethnographic fieldwork on digital platform work in Brussels in the first half of 2018.
By engaging the different understandings of work among the interviewed delivery workers and situating these understandings in the political discussion of digital platform work that took place during my fieldwork, I will attempt to give an outline of the moral economies at play.
Cosmin Popan (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Paper short abstract:
The simultaneous use of multiple apps by gig workers is hailed as an entrepreneurial tactic which helps maximise their incomes. This practice reveals the growing pressure to earn a living in increasingly precarious working environments.
Paper long abstract:
A food courier carrying an Uber Eats or Stuart bag as they deliver your meal ordered on Deliveroo at the door is certainly a puzzling encounter, but not an extraordinary one. Doing food deliveries while working on multiple platforms at the same time is a common phenomenon amongst couriers, to the point that it has its own moniker: multi-apping. Workers themselves extol the opportunity to earn better money, and also the skills needed to do so, by using two different apps to pick up two different meals from two different restaurants and deliver them at two different addresses. When not openly encouraging it, platforms are turning a blind eye to the practice since this allows them to argue in court battles that their workers are entrepreneurs who they do not control. This entrepreneurial mindset has nevertheless drawbacks for couriers whose accounts can be immediately deactivated if they are late delivering some orders or if clients report them. The risk of traffic accidents also increases with the intensification and speeding up of tasks at hand. This paper aims to investigate the coping strategies deployed by food couriers to deal with the pressures of multi-apping and the further precarisation of work that this phenomenon entails.