Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork with migrant delivery workers in Bogotá, this paper examines how platform work is reconfigured from below through workers’ everyday spatio-temporal practices. Using a popular economies framework, it rethinks what counts as platform work and the forms of politics emerging from it.

Paper long abstract

Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with predominantly Venezuelan migrant platform delivery workers in Bogotá, this paper situates platform delivery work within an urban popular economies framework. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at a central gathering place used by workers, which I call El Mall, it foregrounds the everyday practices through which platform work is reconfigured from below. From this perspective, a popular economies framework invites a rethinking of both what counts as platform work and the forms of politics emerging from it.

First, approaching platform labour through a popular economies framework allows workers’ experiences to be understood not only in terms of what this labour regime lacks, but also in affirmative terms ( Cielo, Gago and Tassi, 2023). Platform delivery work thus appears as a generative and expansive site of community and life-making, shaped through practices such as waiting, socializing, resting, collaborating, and sustaining social ties within the interstices of algorithmic time and in quintessentially neoliberal spaces such as shopping malls.

Second, this framework allows a rethinking of what counts as politics. Rather than purely oppositional, workers’ practices reflect a pragmatism oriented toward sustaining life, through which they carve out spaces of autonomy within algorithmically controlled time and space and conditions of heightened neoliberal exploitation (Gago, 2018).

Third, the paper shows how these spatial, temporal, and moral practices blur the boundary between production and reproduction. As labour organization and coordination are deeply entangled with community and care, what counts as work in platform capitalism is expanded and pluralized.