This article analyses crowdwork platforms where various forms of digital labour are outsourced to digital workers across the globe. The labour of these workers is, among other things, a crucial component in the production, development and support of artificial intelligence. Crowdwork platforms are an extreme example of new forms of automated measurement, management and control of labour allowing, in turn, for the creation of hyperflexible and highly scalable workforces. Particularly on so-called microtask platforms, work is characterised by decomposition, standardisation, automated management and surveillance, as well as algorithmically organised cooperation between a great number of workers. Analysing these platforms as a paradigmatic example of an emerging digital Taylorism, the article goes on to argue that this allows the platforms to assemble a deeply heterogeneous set of workers while bypassing the need to spatially and subjectively homogenise them. These platforms create a global on-demand workforce, working in their private homes or Internet cafes. As a result, crowdwork taps into labour pools hitherto almost inaccessible to wage labour. The second part of the article investigates this tendency by looking at two sets of workers: women shouldering care responsibilities, who now can work on crowdwork platforms while performing domestic labour, as well as digital workers in the Global South. While there are clear specifics of digital crowdwork, it is also an expression of broader transformations within the world of work, concerning, for example, new forms of algorithmic management just as the return of very old forms of exploitation such as the piece wage.

The article takes the surprising exit of the food delivery platform Deliveroo from Berlin as a starting point to analyse the relationship between migration and the gig economy. In Berlin and many cities across the globe, migrant workers are indispensable to the operations of digital platforms such as Uber, Helpling, or Deliveroo. The article uses in-depth ethnographic and qualitative research to show how the latter's exit from Berlin provides an almost exemplary picture of why urban gig economy platforms are strongholds of migrant labour, while at the same time, demonstrating the very contingency of this form of work. The article analyses the specific reasons why digital platforms are particularly open to migrants and argues that the very combination of new forms of algorithmic management and hyper-flexible forms of employment that is characteristic of gig economy platforms is also the reason why these platforms are geared perfectly toward the exploitation of migrant labour. This allows the analysis of digital platforms in the context of stratified labour markets and situates them within a long history of contingent labour that is closely intertwined with the mobility of labour.

In recent years, the last mile of delivery has become a crucial focus of logistical operations in urban contexts due to the rise of online shopping and the spread of platforms including Amazon to Foodora, Deliveroo and others. This article claims that the increasing importance and time-sensitivity of delivery reconfigures both urban spaces and labour relations. Through an analysis of labour relations in different segments of last mile delivery it argues that we are observing profound changes driven most importantly by digital technologies and the hyper-flexible employment relations facilitated by online platforms. Labour on the last mile is increasingly characterised by intense time pressure, standardisation, algorithmic management and digitally enabled surveillance on the one hand, and platform-driven precarisation and flexibilisation on the other. These developments can also be observed in other areas of logistical labour and across different industries. Hence, labour on the last mile might be understood as a specific but important expression of a broader tendency of the transformation of labour in digital capitalism. At the same time, the new importance of the last mile also signals changes in the production of urban space in the context of platform-driven forms of production, circulation and consumption, that are discussed as an emerging logistical urbanism.

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