Full metadata
Title
Delivering Precarity: Food Delivery Gig Workers, the Façade of Flexibility, and the Future of Work
Description
This thesis argues that food delivery gig workers are the canaries in the coalmine for understanding the future of work and point to the proliferation of a more exploitative capitalist system. While exploitation in the workplace is not new, the way in which choice, freedom, and autonomy are used to repackage old forms of exploitation through digital platforms indicates a new iteration. This thesis draws on extant literature in order to analyze twelve in-depth interviews with gig workers working for food delivery platforms, as well as online forums dedicated to food delivery workers. The study finds that food delivery gig workers perceive this new labor system as advantageous in terms of flexibility, autonomy, and finances. Although this new job niche mitigates precarity for some individuals, the food delivery corporations constrain the very control that gig workers value and ultimately exacerbate worker precarity. Gig work is both an economic relief and exploitative, flexible, and unreliable, and emancipative and restrictive. Food delivery gig workers’ experiences highlight tensions for those who want both autonomy and control, alongside better working conditions and protections. Despite some workers being aware of their exploitation, conditions outside of the gig sector in the traditional economy are increasingly unable to meet their needs, so they are willing to accept and even defend a job that actively undermines their stability. Food delivery gig workers help to reveal the contradictions within the current labor market and point to opportunities for changing it.
Date Created
2021
Contributors
- PAYRAUDEAU, MURIEL CECILE CLAIRE (Author)
- Adelman, Madelaine (Thesis advisor)
- McQuarrie, Michael (Committee member)
- Perkins, Tracy (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
184 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.168520
Level of coding
minimal
Cataloging Standards
Note
Partial requirement for: M.S., Arizona State University, 2021
Field of study: Social Justice and Human Rights
System Created
- 2022-08-22 04:19:51
System Modified
- 2022-08-22 04:20:17
- 2 years 3 months ago
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