Platform couriers' self‐exploitation: The case study of Glovo

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of self‐exploitation among platform couriers, using the company Glovo as a case study. The research, based on a qualitative approach with interviews from 22 different stakeholders, highlights the ways in which precarity, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and gamification intersect to create what are referred to as postdisciplinary control mechanisms. These mechanisms shift the locus of exploitation from the employer to the workers' inner selves, which are compelled to follow implicit guidelines due to their precarious situation. The use of algorithmic management by platform companies like Glovo plays a major role in this architecture marked by overwork, exposure to hazardous conditions, and economic dependence. The article urges policymakers to look beyond platform workers' employment status debate and address the design of algorithms and broader forms of labour precarity, so that policies that successfully improve workers' experience are designed.

What's Talent Got to Do with It? The Collective Labourer and the Rise of Barcelona's Digital Economy

“…It is work which is contesting the very “‘nature’ of a ‘job’” through the casual insertion of a mass of “polymorphous self‐employed workers … into flexible labour processes” (Richardson and Bissell 2019:282). Given the pressures of precarity, gamification, and the grinding physical and emotional toll common to such forms of algorithmically managed work, and typified by Glovo's courier‐labour process (Vieira 2023), those labouring in this “grey zone” (OECD 2019) are increasingly engaging in widespread struggles over pay and conditions as workers , often in open defiance of their formal self‐employed or sub‐contractor status. Glovo's couriers, for instance, have struck regularly across Spain since 2017, including a first formal strike in Barcelona in August 2021 (supported by the two main Spanish unions), and many are active within the national Rider X Derechos (Riders 4 Rights) campaign to push for tighter regulation of quick‐commerce platforms’ employment practices.…”