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Paper short abstract:

This paper engages the times and spaces of reproduction by and among food-delivery workers of several mainstream platforms in urban Spain. The intense blurring of labor and life prompted by the rider economy constitutes a key site for practices of care within and beyond the domestic sphere.

Paper long abstract:

Labor contracts, conflicts and work arrangements have been regular topics in research on riders. Embracing an intersectional approach to precarity and mobility, this presentation engages riders´ everyday practices of care. Four ethnographers, all well-aware of their care commitments, brought their feminist understanding of precarity to their field, as part of a multi-sited research project called RIDERS I+D+i focused on the food-delivery sector in urban Spain. We center upon questions of gender, race, dis/ability, migratory status, and other axes of social hierarchization in our analysis.

Specifically, we have identified spaces of encounter and informal hang-outs among delivery workers in a Spanish urban landscape that speak to the possibility of collective care beyond domestic space. During our ethnographic visits, we noticed how specific street benches in the downtown area act as gathering points for riders. Observation after observation, the same anonymous public seating places, become sites for resting and gathering, beyond strictly waiting time between orders. This set of street benches in strategic central plazas of the city, constitute spaces where labor journeys intersect with the needs and joys of caring practices.

This preliminary analysis is based on our ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Zaragoza, using mainstream techniques such as in-depth interviews, and developing a series of methodological tools adapted to this fluid and ubiquitous field: riders´ everyday urban itineraries. We briefly review ad-hoc methods which turned out to be very productive in terms of providing unexpected insights, such as "itinerant perception" and "photographic urban tours".