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This article examines how on-demand service workers on digital platforms make and live their time in the case of China’s food delivery industry. Using ethnographic data, the study elucidated multiple facets of couriers’ temporality in their struggle to meet the exacting delivery time imposed by platforms while moving through biased urban spaces as marginalized temporal subjects. It is argued that a new temporal order, referred to as temporal arbitrage in this study, has been normalized in the recent platform economy. It shifts the customer’s cultural expectation to on-demand service at the expense of an increasingly hectic tempo for the workers. We demonstrate the mundane, and sometimes opportunistic, tactics deployed by workers to reconstruct their temporality. The article connects the workers’ temporality to the urban spaces, digital work process, and socioeconomic structures. It fills an important research gap by addressing the under-explored yet essential temporal dimensions in the expanding “just-in-time” labor force.

Despite considerable scholarly attention to the proliferation of gig work on digital platforms, research tracing the broad trends of labour relations is scant. Analysing interview and survey data on food-delivery workers in China between 2018 and 2019, this article demonstrates a trend of de-flexibilisation for workers, which contradicts the purported flexibility of platform-mediated work. It is argued that de-flexibilisation is achieved through intertwined labour management tactics, technological engineering, and the cultural normalisation of platform-dependent precarious jobs. Platform companies and third-party staffing agencies have jointly deployed algorithmic systems and communicative techniques to cultivate what we refer to as ‘sticky labour’. The study contributes to the current debate on working in platform capitalism by weighing the compound effects of labour management strategies, social impact of technological engineering of the work process, and the cultural normalisation of platform work.

The impact of digital platforms upon the employment structure and work conditions has attracted widespread scholarly attention. However, research on workers' agency and subjectivity in the platform economy is relatively under-explored. Using fooddelivery workers in China as a point of departure, this article provides an empirically grounded and theoretically informed account of delivery workers' agentic performances. We utilise the notion of contingent agency to capture the expedient, ongoing, and variegated measures developed and manoeuvred by workers to exercise agency from their structurally vulnerable position in the labour process and employment relations. While agency in practice is always contingent and never static, we conceptualise the notion by unpacking the multiple factors that have shifted the ground for workers and hence contributed to the contingency, to shed light on the interplay between workers' agency and the unstable and elusive character of platform capitalism. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of workers' contingent agency for labour politics.