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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the dynamics of Amazon.com package delivery platforms and work, emphasizing how the transnational corporation exploits racialized and nationalized hierarchies of social protection.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores themes of precarity, social protection, and citizenship in the work of delivering packages for Amazon in Mexico City and Barcelona. It draws on eight months of fieldwork split between the two cities, and interviews with more than 30 participants. The research demonstrates that Amazon strategically deploys diverse recruitment schemes, from formal employment to platform work and informal subcontracting, to externalize costs and responsibilities while retaining control over operations. Drawing on the concept of global citizenship apartheid, the essay argues that the racialized and nationalized hierarchies structuring differential access to legal recognition are instrumentalized for corporate profits. It then explores how such corporate practices in a global apartheid are spatialized and embodied, illustrating the ways that individual and collective well-being are sacrificed for the accommodation of Amazon's practices in these different cities. The paper provides insight into technical standardization and social differentiation through an ethnography of platform-mediated work by exploring aspects of the contrasting national regulatory frameworks and social conditions of a single application, Amazon Flex. The study concludes that state monopolies on employment recognition, combined with transnational corporate practices, create conditions where the world system accommodates capital accumulation while denying full recognition and protection to the workers whose precarity underwrites it.