In this paper we examine how commodification and labour control unfold within a digital labour platform, focusing on the connections between the platform, its users and workers.Based on a qualitative study covering couriers, clients, restaurants and the management of a food delivery platform in Belgium, we shed light on the complexity of commodification, explaining how the platform simultaneously empowers and disempowers all participants. We illustrate how the platform fosters commodification by granting access to transactions and fuelling competition, while at the same time increasing dependency through withholding information from users and workers. In so doing, we contribute to understanding how platforms exert control and create, extract and capture value by connecting users and workers with each other through the use of digital technology.

This article explains how digitally mediated provision of domestic care services perpetuates the invisibility and informality of such work through individualising risk, which we operationalise by one of its dimensions, that of unpaid labour. We understand unpaid labour as the cost of the risk borne individually by workers at the intersection of the social (inter-personal) and economic (monetary) spheres. Drawing on the experiences of domestic care workers providing their services through platforms, the study shows how platforms have made their way into the labour markets and welfare structures of two mature economies, Belgium and France. Via their (digital) rules, they pursue ‘regulatory compliance’ and ‘disruption’ as distinct strategies for establishing platform dominance, albeit with country-based differences. Platform-mediated employment outcomes remain generally unrecognised, undocumented and informal, with unpaid labour characterising the cost of the individualisation of risk.

Much is known about how labour platforms use ‘algorithmic management’ to implement rules which govern labour by matching workers (or service providers) with clients (or users). But little is known about whether and how platform workers engage with these rules by manipulating them to their own advantage, and how this accounts for wider ‘regime dynamics’ across (and within) different types of platforms (for example, on-location and online). Based on a comparative analysis of two food delivery (Deliveroo and Takeaway) and two freelancing (Upwork and Jellow) platforms in Belgium, we discuss the rules platforms use to govern labour and examine what role workers have in shaping a ‘space’ of control over the conduct of their work. Drawing on labour process theory, we argue that this space is shaped by the way in which platforms shift risks onto workers by rules governing access to work through rewards, penalties as well as labour deployment reflecting various contractual statuses. Hence, we explain how workers also shape such spaces by organising consent around these rules, pointing to a ‘social space’ for food delivery workers and a ‘market space’ for self-employed freelancers. These spaces refer to different regime types, that is, ‘pay-based control’ and ‘time-based control’ for food delivery, and ‘customer-based control’ and ‘task-based control’ for online freelancers. These types are shaped by the control and consent dynamics within labour platforms, reflecting the platforms’ labour governance strategies and workers’ attempts to ensure control over these strategies within the distinctive political institutional realm.

This qualitative study illustrates how the commodification strategies of a food delivery platform in Belgium contribute to labour control and subordination by simultaneously supporting and constraining both users and workers. We label these strategies ‘empowerment’ and ‘disempowerment’ cycles, which connect individual clients, restaurants and workers and expose them to market relations of competition. Thus, we explain how the platform deploys control through the use of digital data in order to increase efficiency in labour allocation and individual clients’ and restaurants’ decision-making.

This article examines how platform workers providing food delivery and domestic services in Belgium engage in contentions over unpaid labour time. Drawing on theories of organisational misbehaviour around the ‘wage–effort’ bargain, we explore how workers reclaim some control over their income by contesting their exposure to unpaid labour time. Based on a qualitative analysis of two labour platforms, the article illustrates how platforms’ systems of time control expose workers to unpaid labour time through work extensification (that is, food delivery) and work intensification (that is, domestic work). It also indicates how workers contest platforms’ control over unpaid labour time by developing various practices around platforms’ systems of control. Food delivery couriers increase their income by cutting down on unpaid idle time, while domestic workers try to improve their access to clients, jobs and pay which sometimes entails intentionally prolonging their unpaid labour time. Thus, we argue that examining workers’ contentions over unpaid labour time contributes to a better understanding of how workers can develop a sense of agency in a context of exploitative platform work by actively navigating and purposefully using their exposure to unpaid labour time to regain control over their income.