Gender, Class, and the Gig Economy: The Case of Platform-Based Food Delivery

Abstract

Drawing on original survey and interview data on platform-based food delivery workers, we deploy an intersectional lens to analyze the ways in which the white working-class women who predominate in this sector of the gig economy interpret their work experience. With a focus on the gender–class nexus, we explore the reasons why these workers, especially mothers and other caregivers, self-select into this sector. These include: scheduling flexibility, which facilitates balancing paid work and family care; the opportunity to use previously unpaid food shopping skills to generate income, a neoliberal form of “wages for housework”; and the emotional rewards of serving elderly and disabled customers who cannot easily shop for themselves. Although these workers embrace the traditional gender division of labor and normative femininity, at the same time they express strong class resentment of both the companies they work for and the class and gender entitlements of their most privileged customers.

Collective regulation and the future of work in the digital economy: Insights from comparative employment relations

“…Sociologists have begun to document these intersections with regard to segmentation and inequality in digitally enabled production models (e.g. Milkman et al, 2021). CER scholars can apply an institutional lens to understanding how they are influenced by different welfare states and industrial relations systems, as well as their role in changing union strategies.…”

“…Decisions around technology adoption and deployment are guided by a range of considerations, including existing sunk costs, potential sources of profit, and possibilities for not only accessing skills but also reducing labour costs. On the one hand, the successful strategies to suppress wages that have occurred in the Global North over the past several decades, combined with a growing concern over short-term profits, may make investing in new technologies that further automate work less attractive (Moody, 2022). On the other hand, digital and AI-based technologies are often used as tools to further fragment or externalize jobs and control workers – and thus may serve to replace good jobs not with fewer jobs, but with worse, more precarious jobs (Holtgrewe, 2014).…”

The global ‘hot shop’: COVID‐19 as a union organising catalyst

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Hunger for profit: how food delivery platforms manage couriers in China

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