Becoming “Platform Workers”: A Biographical Exploration of Temporary Visa and Worker Subjectivities in the Gig Economy

Abstract

As studies worldwide have highlighted, place-based platform work is predominantly carried out by migrant and/or racialized workers. By tracing the migration trajectories of Chilean and Argentinian gig workers on Working Holiday Visas (WHV) in Germany, we shed light on how platform-mediated work fits into the larger life trajectories of these migrant workers. Applying a lens of time and temporalities, we conceptualize migration as a process of becoming that involves the temporalities of particular visa regimes, wider scales of institutional and social temporal ordering, and progression through an individual's life course. We find that the temporal horizons of the visa and the transient nature of platform work foster distinct worker subjectivities that make platform work acceptable despite its precarity. We therefore argue that the temporariness of the WHV is a crucial factor in explaining why highly educated young people engage in low-status and low-waged platform work.

Introduction

Digital labor platforms vary widely in type and function, offering diverse job opportunities across sectors (see e.g., Kenney, Rouvinen, and Zysman 2019). This article focuses on a specific subset of platforms that mediate service jobs in material space. This type of platform work can be highly visible, such as food delivery or ride-hailing, or relatively “hidden” in private homes, such as cleaning and childcare (Gilbert 2023; Mateescu and Ticona 2020). It is traditionally “gig”-based, that is, the work is typically one-off and on-demand. ¹

Extant research has shown that place-based platform work exhibits key characteristics of precarious and contingent work as defined by Vosko (2011) and others: platform workers typically operate under short term, nonstandard contracts or are classified as independent contractors, ² and thus lack the security of long-term, stable employment relationships. Many platform companies claim to simply “connect” clients and workers (Ravenelle 2019), effectively shifting social and economic risks onto the workers under the guise of offering flexibility. At the same time, however, platform companies employ various technological tools and techniques to manage these workers, collecting data and closely monitoring them in what is known as algorithmic management (Mateescu and Nguyen 2019). A wealth of studies has highlighted the effect of automated decision making on workers, including the pressure to always be available to work (see e.g., Ravenelle 2019; Stingl and Keller forthcoming). This literature has made important contributions by showing how platforms’ refusal to act as employers, combined with algorithmic management techniques, transforms the labor process and (re)produces precarious working conditions (see e.g., Doorn 2020, 2022; Surie and Huws 2023).

Yet, we join a growing number of scholars who argue that a narrow focus on the labor process within platform labor studies risks missing out on a broader perspective on the “future of work” that foregrounds (dis-)continuities of labor exploitation in the low-waged sector and the wider context of workers’ lived realities (Azzellini, Greer, and Umney 2022; Doorn and Shapiro 2023; Orth and Baum 2024). These include their private and family lives, their housing situation, their engagement in unpaid reproductive labor, and their aspirations for the future.

In this article, we therefore adopt a life-course perspective on platform labor and situate workers’ decisions and experiences into their individual biographies and larger life trajectories. This approach yields new insights into why, and at what points in life, people take up platform work, how they experience and sustain this type of work, and under what biographical circumstances platform work is continued or terminated (Riemann et al. 2023, 14). In our efforts to understand the wider context in which platform work occurs, we focus on one particular aspect, namely how the experience of migration underpins workers’ engagements in the platform economy.

Understanding how the experience of migration folds into worker subjectivities is highly relevant: studies from across the world have documented the overrepresentation of racialized and/or migrant workers in the gig economy (see e.g., ILO 2021; Piasna, Zwysen, and Drahokoupil 2022). Building on emerging conversations on how different legal immigration categories and the subjective experience of migration shape digital work (Lam and Triandafyllidou 2021; Mancinelli and Germann Molz 2024), this article explores how a visa category affects the temporalities, hopes, and desires of migrant workers and in turn their experience of digitally mediated work.

Conceptually, we foreground time and temporariness for two reasons. First, the gig economy is governed by investor capital-driven growth cycles and thus highly volatile and fluctuating. These boom and bust cycles result in companies’ rapid growth with hundreds of jobs opening up in a matter of days as well as companies closing operations in entire countries within a week's notice. Gig jobs are thus structurally temporary and, as researchers have shown, highly transient with workers cycling in and out of gig jobs within a few months (Doorn 2022; Newlands 2024). In addition, platforms also form specific timespaces that affect workers’ lives: from adjusting their private lives to fit platform time rhythms (Duus, Bruun, and Dalsgård 2023; Repenning 2024; Stingl and Keller forthcoming), to long periods of waiting for work (Maury 2020). Second, we are interested in how these temporal horizons within the gig economy interact with migration temporalities, as time has been shown to be a constitutive element of migration experiences (e.g., Cwerner 2001; Robertson 2021; Stingl 2021; Wang and Collins 2020).

Against this background, the article asks how the temporal logics of digitally mediated labor regimes interact with immigration regimes that are increasingly marked by “regulated” temporariness (Triandafyllidou 2022). To understand the co-constitution of temporariness in migration and the fleeting nature of gig work, we explore a particularly salient visa category among platform workers in Europe: the Working Holiday Visa (WHV) (Doorn 2020; Floros and Bak Jørgensen 2023; Orth 2024). WHVs are a form of youth mobility scheme that allows adults (18–30 years) to come and work in another country for a limited amount of time. Even though widely regarded as cultural exchange visas, WHVs produce highly flexible workforces for the economy (Reilly et al. 2018; Tan and Lester 2012; Vosko 2023). The in-depth analysis of this visa category and how it relates to new forms of work, is not only interesting for academic debates surrounding the future of work; it is also politically relevant as the European Commission plans on expanding WHV schemes to address labor shortages (EU Commission 2022). ³

Forms of contingent labor and racializations in the platform economy are historically and geographically specific (Gebrial 2024). Therefore, this article is grounded in an analysis of one specific place, the German capital Berlin, and draws on 23 semistructured biographical interviews with gig workers conducted between 2021 and 2023. The research participants were young working holidayers from Latin America who engaged in place-specific forms of platform work in the fields of cleaning, childcare, and grocery delivery.

In what follows, we first situate the WHV within the existing literature on temporary migration regimes and present our conceptual perspectives which inform our analysis of the link between migration and platform work. Next, we explain our methodological approach of biographical interviewing and introduce our sample in more detail. We then present our empirical findings along three thematic episodes that challenge a linear understanding of geographical mobility and the pursuit of career progression. Our analysis reveals how the temporal horizons of migratory experiences shape workers’ subjectivities and their relationship to work. In our conclusion, we reflect on these findings and suggest avenues for future research.

The Working Holiday Visa and Temporary Migration Regimes

Established as a bilateral scheme between Britain and Australia in 1975, the WHV allowed British middle-class youth to travel to the far corners of the previous British empire (Wilson, Fisher, and Moore 2009). Getting to know the culture of another commonwealth country was the main aim; yet, the duration of this “holiday” and the expense of long-distance travel usually necessitated finding casual jobs along the way (Clarke 2005). As WHV schemes are based on bilateral treaties, the specifics of each partnership agreement vary. Yet, they typically share two temporal limitations.

First, only young adults between the ages of 18 to 30 (in some countries up to 35) are eligible. Second, WHVs are of limited duration, usually 1 year, in some countries up to 2 years––and they do not lead to pathways for permanent residence. Therefore, WHVs usually do not allow the applicant to bring any dependents with them. In some countries, such as Canada, the duration of the visa can vary by nationality, while Australia allows visa extensions for people working in specific sectors (Vosko 2023). In contrast, the German WHV does not differentiate between the nationalities of the 12 countries ⁴ that currently have a WHV partnership agreement. Similarly, there are no sectors priortized for visa extension in the German context. In other words, the visa remains temporary for all applicants: it is only granted once per applicant and can under no circumstances be extended (German Embassy Buenos Aires 2023).

As the WHV has proliferated — to date, there are around 60 countries that offer WHV schemes — researchers have analyzed the WHV as part of a turn toward temporariness in international migration policy (Hugo 2014; Triandafyllidou 2022; Wright, Groutsis, and Kaabel 2022). For governments, these temporary and circular migration schemes provide just-in-time, flexible, and expendable workforces demanded by volatile and service-oriented economies (Robertson 2015, 46; Triandafyllidou 2022, 3848–9). The temporal restrictions can be interpreted as a form of biopolitics within the framework of a labor visa, which only permits young, healthy, and able-bodied adults of working age to enter and work (Robertson 2014, 2016). Numerous studies on a variety of temporary visas have shown the long-term effects on migrants’ professional trajectories and wellbeing (Anderson 2013; Axelsson, Malmberg, and Zhang 2017; Goldring and Landolt 2011; Robertson 2014; Söhn 2019; Stingl 2021). When migrant workers depend on employers for the renewal of visas and work permits (Anderson 2013, 9) or face status-based restrictions in their ability to change jobs and/or locations of work (Seo and Skelton 2017, 162; Strauss and McGrath 2017, 200), temporary visas can lead to exploitative working relations. These common challenges faced by migrants on temporary visas have also been documented for WHVs (Wright, Groutsis, and Kaabel 2022).

This being said, the WHV remains an immigration category fraught with tension, as migrants experience its inherent temporariness not only as a disciplining factor (Robertson 2014). As has been documented for various temporary immigration categories, temporary visa, and employment relationships may represent an acceptable, or even desirable, opportunity for specific life-cycle choices (Axelsson, Malmberg, and Zhang 2017, 171; Goldring 2014, 218–9; Robertson 2021). Accounts of working holidayers that focus on the “rite of passage” that the visa can represent (Wilson, Fisher, and Moore 2009) tend to focus on how migrants leverage it to gain emotional and economic independence from their family of origin (Marchetti et al. 2024) or to avoid extended periods of professional stagnation in countries with high levels of youth unemployment (Kato 2013; Kawashima 2010; Yoon 2015).

Therefore, it is not possible to neatly categorize WHVs as either precarious low-skill labor visas or as care-free youth lifestyle mobilities. Both analyses are valid, leading researchers to understand working holidayers as “middling migrants” (Conradson and Latham 2005; Robertson 2021). The term describes migrants with middle-class aspirations and backgrounds that leverage international mobility not as a move “upward” the career ladder or “downward” into precarity but rather “sideways” (Marchetti et al. 2024).

Conceptualizing the Experience of Migration Through Time

To explore how research participants use and experience the WHV and how this relates to platform work in our case study, we follow a strand of literature in migration studies that is concerned with the temporal complexity of migration processes and experiences (e.g., Griffiths, Rogers, and Bridget 2013; Levitt and Rajaram 2013; Robertson 2014). Cwerner (2001) stresses in his seminal work on the times of migration that the multiple temporal aspects of migration ought not to be treated in isolation. Rather, migration is generated across multiple temporalities, including the temporalities of particular visa regimes, wider scales of institutional and social temporal ordering, progression through the life course, and the pace and rhythms of everyday and intimate life (Robertson 2021, 23–6, 33–5; Wang and Collins 2020).

Migrants’ decision making, aspirations, and experiences therefore do not represent singular moments in the present but need to be contextualized in relation to the past and the future (Boccagni 2017, 1; Collins 2018, 967; Griffiths, Rogers, and Bridget 2013, 1; Shubin 2015, 358–9; Stingl 2021, 3). These multiple temporalities and their function in co-constituting migration must then be viewed as part of larger constellations of temporal, spatial, social, material, and historical relations (Collins 2018). Just as these relations are always in flux, migrants’ aspirations, and their temporal horizons are continually reconfigured in the course of, and as a result of, migration (Cwerner 2001, 17; Triandafyllidou 2022, 3847; Wang and Collins 2020, 576).

Migration thus represents a constant process of becoming, indicating the transformative nature of migration, both in terms of migrants’ subjectivities, as well as the places they move through and the people they move with (Collins 2018, 964). Drawing on this understanding of migration temporalities, we examine the interplay between the regulated time of the WHV, which imposes restrictions on migrants through quantitative time (the limitation of the legally permitted stay to 1 year or the age limit of 30 years to apply for the visa), and the lived time, which is part of migrants’ biography and sense of self (Triandafyllidou 2022, 3854).

To understand migrants’ aspirations and decisions in the context of their past experiences and their dynamic visions of the future, we apply a life-course perspective based on biographical interviewing. This approach allows us to understand not only how life and work are experienced at a particular moment in time; but, as we outline in the next section, it also shows how subjectivities change and evolve throughout research participants’ life trajectories.

Analyzing Platform Work and Migration Through Biographical Methods

This article draws on empirical data from two research projects, both of which use biographical interviewing to explore migrant workers’ experiences in performing platform-mediated work in Berlin. Biographical interviews aim to reconstruct research participants’ life trajectories (Iosifides and Sporton 2009, 101–2). They are characterized by a high degree of openness and a strong focus on research participants’ experiences and their subjective interpretations and attributions of meaning to certain events (Ní Laoire 2007, 377–9).

In line with our conceptual framework, the open-ended nature of biographical interviewing encourages research participants to narrate their movements, decision making, and experiences that cut across and connect different geographical and temporal settings (Collins 2018, 966). Workers’ actions can thus be located in their perceptions of the past, the present, and the potential future (Stingl 2021). In addition, the method can reveal empirical discrepancies between individuals’ expectations of migration and the actual experience thereof (Lawson 2000, 174), and make visible how subjectivities change over time (Wang and Collins 2020).

The empirical material we draw on in this article was collected between March 2021 and May 2023. ⁵ It includes 23 narratives of people who, at the time of the interview, were performing platform-mediated work on a WHV in Berlin, or had done so in the recent past. Research participants worked for a variety of platforms in the fields of cleaning, childcare, and grocery delivery, with many combining or moving through different types of platform work.

We recruited these workers through social media advertizing, referrals from organizers and community members, and snowball sampling. At the time of the interviews, research participants were between 22 and 36 years old. Fifteen of them identified as female, seven as male, and one as nonbinary. The availability of the WHV as a visa for only 12 partner countries of course results in a limited variety of national backgrounds of working holidayers in Germany. In our case, the sample is limited to two of these countries — Chile and Argentina — reflecting the sample composition observed in other studies on platform workers in Berlin (see e.g., Gruszka et al. 2024). Even though we did not specifically sample for country of origin, we have a roughly even sample with 12 research participants from Chile and 11 from Argentina. Most of the research participants held a tertiary degree and belonged to the middle or upper class in their country of origin.

The decision to focus solely on individuals on a WHV, rather than offering a broader analysis of migration trajectories into the platform economy as others have done (Holtum et al. 2022; Lam and Triandafyllidou 2024; Orth 2024), allows us to explore the relationship between legal status and platform work in greater depth. The WHV is particularly well-suited for this analysis because it has emerged as one of the most prominent visa categories among platform workers in several European countries (Doorn 2020; Floros and Jørgensen 2023; Orth 2024), and remains understudied in Germany. Moreover, the enforced temporariness of the WHV allows us to examine the role of time in shaping work decisions and experiences. While this approach thus offers important insights, we acknowledge that it also limits the scope of our findings. What we present in the following sections applies to a specific subset of platform workers, who may differ significantly from other groups, such as undocumented migrants or migrant workers in industries such as meat processing and construction.

Findings

In the following sections, we present our findings, organized around the migratory trajectories of the research participants. We begin by exploring why and how they arrived in Germany and what led them to take up platform work. Next, we examine their experiences with platform work and how these evolved during their stay in Germany. Our findings demonstrate that migratory pathways are neither linear nor one-directional, a dynamic reflected in the participants’ decisions to engage with or disengage from platform work over time.

Becoming Platform Workers

Looking at the reasons why the participants in this study originally moved to Germany, we find that for many of them, the WHV itself — that is, the (temporal) opportunity to spend 1 year in a city like Berlin — provided an important incentive to migrate. Many came to Berlin simply to pursue an adventure, to undertake a gap year after university, or to take time out from their professional careers as graphic designers, health professionals, doctors, lawyers, or pharmacists. Many had no expectations that this sojourn would have a positive impact on their professional future but were rather driven by a vague desire to experience something new and different. These study participants initially expected to return to their country of origin after one year or assumed an indefinite timeline in the sense of “arrive and see.” During the initial phase of the migration experience, the enforced temporariness of the WHV did not appear to be a serious drawback:

I think it [the WHV] is amazing because it's a way that everyone can experience life here [in Berlin] without a problem. One year it's all yours. For people who don’t have a European passport, that's a great opportunity. You can work, make some money, but it's not just staying in Berlin. You can travel around Europe, you can get in and out of the country [Germany] as many times as you want. I think it's great. (Hugo O. ⁶ , 27 years old, from Argentina)

The narratives of many of the study participants reflect a strong appreciation of the visa, as expressed by Hugo who frames it as a possibility to stay in Germany for more than 90 days — the length of time citizens of Chile or Argentina can spend in Germany as tourists through the Schengen zone's Visa Waiver Programme. What Hugo also alludes to is the prevalence of Argentinians who have Spanish and Italian citizenship owing to ancestral citizenship laws in these countries (Mateos and Durand 2012). Without access to European citizenship, the WHV was seen as the best option to travel.

Research participants often learned about the WHV through friends or acquaintances who had used the WHV in the past, currently resided in Berlin or elsewhere on this visa, or were in the process of preparing for a similar stay. This underlines Collins’ (2018, 968, 977–8) finding that (co-national) migrants can act as active producers of movements, possibilities for migration, and desires. They therefore represent, along with other actors such as recruiters and brokers, key constituents of migration pathways, as the following story by Flavia highlights:

So in 2019, in Chile we had a difficult situation with social unrest, with many protests, and I lost my job. Right after, Covid started and I decided to go stay with my cousins in [name of German city] for three months in August 2020. But while I was there, I thought, I’m close to my thirties, so it is my last year for the Working Holiday, and all my friends were here in Berlin. They told me: ‘Berlin is more fun, Berlin is more multicultural, so you have more possibilities here’. And so I took my bags on a train and moved to Berlin. I stayed with a friend at first, slept on the floor for two weeks, and then I travelled to Cyprus to get my WHV. I was in Cyprus for one month waiting for my visa. (Flavia R., 31 years old, from Chile)

This quote also illustrates that individual or collective imaginaries of particular places are another important component of migration decision making (Collins 2018, 971–2; Robertson 2021, 35; Salazar 2011). In our sample, Berlin was imagined as an exciting cultural hub, an international city where one can get by speaking Spanish or English. With its location at the geographical center of Europe, Berlin was also perceived as a convenient location to travel to other destinations from.

Concerning research participants’ aspired outcomes of migration, we share Collins’ (2018, 967) assertion that migration movements are by no means exclusively driven by economic rationalities and the desire for social upward mobility. As Flavia's story highlights, sometimes people's decision to migrate to Germany emerged over time as a combination of the political and economic situation in the country of origin, social relationships, as well as temporal aspects — seeing the WHV as a once in a lifetime opportunity that can only be pursued in young adulthood before the age of 30.

Similarly, other research participants emphasized the WHV as a way of realizing longer-term plans, wherein the WHV in Germany is not necessarily the first migration-inducing visa, as Flavia's trajectory highlights. In her case, a tourist visa presented the first step toward getting out of a political situation and a forced career break; it was only after she arrived in Germany and spent time with her family that she decided to apply for a WHV to make longer-term plans in the country. For many other research participants, the WHV was indeed the first step toward a longer-term process that is likely to involve multiple, overlapping, and nonsequential changes of status (Robertson 2021, 39).

Within such longer-term processes, the first phase of arrival played a crucial role in taking up platform work. Many research participants describe how, upon arrival, they were eager to find work quickly to soon “start to belong to everyday life in Berlin” (Simonetta G., 31 years old, Argentina). In many cases, however, this desire collided with the German requirement to be registered at a local address before one can access a range of services. For example, migrants need a registered address to open a bank account, obtain a German tax number, sign an employment contract, register for mandatory health insurance, or obtain a mobile phone contract or even a pre-paid SIM card. As they were struggling to secure housing during their first weeks in Berlin, the lengthy process of finding an apartment in Berlin's tight housing market collided with the short time frame they had assumed they needed to find work. Often, they recounted a fear of quickly using up their savings while they could not work.

During this time, fellow migrants and users of Facebook groups dedicated to newcomers in Berlin advised working holidayers on how to deal with this problem. For example, users in these groups advised each other on particular banks that allow clients to open an account without having a registered address. Similarly, they encouraged each other to take up platform work highlighting that migrant networks not only play an important role in generating migration aspirations but also shape postarrival decisions and mobilities (Lam and Triandafyllidou 2021).

Research participants viewed platform work as a “safe path” and a “quick fix” to some of the bureaucratic obstacles they faced as migrants upon arrival. This was particularly true for the domestic work platforms in our sample: while delivery platforms in Germany usually require full legal documentation, domestic work platforms still function on a per-gig basis. This means they do not require documentation of an official registration at a local address to issue a work contract. Research on the German cleaning platform Helpling, for example, reveals that only 1 in 10 worker profiles on the platforms have uploaded all formally required documentation (Bor 2021, 155) and that many workers report not having had to upload a valid work permit or visa to start working (Gerold et al. 2022, 32). Research participants learnt about this regulatory blindspot through friends and acquaintances, and view it as a loophole to start working quickly.

Working without a tax number or health insurance can be read as work under semicompliant conditions (Ruhs and Anderson 2010, 195), a situation many research participants found temporarily acceptable. This was especially true for those who had originally planned to return to their country of origin or leave Germany after 1 year. In this case, different temporalities intersect: the enforced temporariness of the WHV, along with the notion of a temporally limited stay in Berlin and the urgency to settle quickly while minimizing the use of savings, collides with the seemingly slow pace of the Berlin housing market. As these conflicting temporal horizons and demands converge, platforms that are perceived as “a fast track to paid work” become an acceptable, if not attractive, option for many research participants:

I think the whole thing was intrinsic: when you come to a country, you don’t know the language and you need money, then you need easy money. You don't know how long you are going to stay and if it is going to work out. These conditions led me to [name of the platform]. Also, this work has this freelance feeling of not being long-term. (Mariana T., 31 years old, from Argentina)

Many research participants had a clear image of what they called “typical migrant jobs,” referring to service jobs in gastronomy, hospitality, or the warehouse logistics sector. They compared platform work favorably to these jobs because platform work offered comparatively higher hourly wages and was more flexible than a job at a café. Even though scholars have documented that platform jobs are a lot less flexible than they are advertized to be, research participants recounted a relatively high degree of choice in terms of when to work and choosing their clients. This fitted well with the plans of several participants to explore Berlin and other parts of Europe.

In addition, the fleeting relationships with clients and the perceived low level of responsibility toward them and the platforms matched well with many participants’ desire to take a 1-year break from their more serious lives and societal expectations at home. In this way, the working arrangements on platforms corresponded to the imaginative freedoms associated with the figure of the Working Holidayer (Tsai and Collins 2017). Moreover, platforms usually do not require long-term investments from migrants, such as learning German, and thus align with the limited temporal horizon of the WHV that makes long-term investments risky. Nevertheless, working on platforms was not an easy or entirely pleasant experience for research participants, as we will discuss in more detail in the next section.

Experiencing Platform Work

Research participants often described the contingent jobs available to working holidayers, including platform work, as “jobs that are not really done in the country where you are from because you have the possibility to study, to work in something else” (Javier G., 31 years old, from Argentina). Similarly, many emphasized their distance from nonprofessional work:

C.: I really would not do this job in my country, probably for the same reason German people don't do these kinds of [platform] jobs because you have standards and a degree.

A.: Yes, in Chile, these jobs are done by Venezuelans or Colombians but they live worse than we [as immigrants] do here. (Arturo V., 29 years old and Carlos M., 28 years old, from Chile)

Across interviews, these comparisons between themselves and migrant workers in their home country were very common. Some even compared their domestic work in Germany with the fact that their own families employed domestic workers. As a result, they recounted how they had perceived this work as particularly dangerous and degrading, as Mariela explained:

Taking up cleaning was intense for me because in Chile, if you have a bachelor[‘s degree], you would never clean. Only people that have no education beyond primary school do it. It is the least skilled job someone can do. (Mariela M., 36 years old, from Chile)

Like Arturo and Carlo, Mariela framed her experience of platform-mediated cleaning with how she imagined this job to be in Chile. Similar to Arturo claiming that Venezuelans and Columbians engaged in platform work because it was simply an “immigrant job,” the geographic distance to their countries of origin allowed working holidayers to compare the same work favorably across different contexts. Often, they emphasized their pay for platform work in Germany was comparatively much better than in their home countries. In Germany, platform work was also perceived as safer and as less degrading as Mariela highlighted:

After I had started, I noticed that the culture is better. For example, in Chile when someone pays for cleaning, the house is really horrible. You have to work really hard and clean really… people's shit, and here, people were almost very careful, you don’t have to work as a slave. (Mariela M., 36 years old, from Chile)

Research participants thus inhabited multiple presents (Robertson 2021, 46), in which they could simultaneously emphasize their vocations as professionals but also engage in contingent work. This seemed especially important for Chilean participants who had undergone additional years of education to not only get a regular degree, but a “professional” degree accredited by the Chilean government.

However, the process of becoming platform workers also resulted in a real loss of professional prestige and earnings. The ensuing tensions between their professional identities and the reality of doing low-prestige, low-paid, and sometimes even dangerous work were often downplayed by working holidayers as Hugo's narrative illustrates:

People [back home] say: Why are you cleaning bathrooms? You are a lawyer! But I don't care about that. For me it's temporary, I am going back [to Argentina], I know I'm not cleaning houses for the rest of my life. I wouldn't like that. I'm sure of that. It is temporary. (Hugo O., 27 years old, from Argentina)

This highlights the crucial role of the temporal dimension in workers subjectivities: not only can they hold on to a social position and identity elsewhere, the temporal aspects of the visa form specific time horizons: first, the temporariness of the visa without possibility for extension mean that Hugo is sure he will return to Argentina, a context in which he expects to neatly fit in with his old professional life as a lawyer. Second, as the visa is only open to people under the age of 30, Hugo can still easily imagine a very long “rest of his life” without cleaning bathrooms.

Unbecoming Working Holidayer, Unbecoming Platform Worker?

As discussed in the previous section, emphasizing the temporary nature of their stay in Germany and maintaining another professional position in their home country fulfills an important function for research participants in dealing with platform work. Yet, research participants’ narratives show how the temporal horizons and aspirations of migrants change in the course of, and as a result of, the migration experience (Cwerner 2001, 17; Triandafyllidou 2022, 3847; Wang and Collins 2020, 576). Although the visa regime under which they resided in Berlin designated them as temporary migrants (Robertson 2014, 1918), the majority of research participants did not want to return to their country of origin when their WHV expired or was about to expire.

Even people who originally aspired to a 1-year adventure developed desires to stay abroad that were often more structurally anchored than their initial motives for undertaking a working holiday stay as María explained:

In Argentina, I don't know if I can get home with an Uber or a taxi after 11 pm because it's really difficult and not safe. Especially being a woman. So I think I prefer to be here [Berlin/Europe]. Well, doctors’ salaries are really bad in Argentina too. So I think I will stay here in Europe. I don’t know where yet, because [to stay in Germany] I have to speak German and do a lot of courses. But I think it will be here [Germany], I don't know, or in Spain maybe. In the future. But it's far away. (María P., 27 years old, from Argentina)

As the example of María and others shows, their future-related views are subjected to “reality checks” (Boccagni 2017, 2), which continually prompt migrants to re-assess their future and adjust their migration plans (see also Stingl 2021; Wang and Collins 2020). In addition to material reasons, such as persistent economic crises, high unemployment, low wages with high inflation rates, and political corruption in their countries of origin, many research participants emphasized gender-specific insecurities and violence in their home country as problems they gained a new perspective on (see also Dewey and Fozdar 2023). Migrants re-evaluated their previous lives based on both new experiences they made but also with regard to changing conditions in their home countries while they are abroad, such as Argentina's particularly high inflation rates in recent years (Bianco and Otaola 2023).

When participants reconsidered their previous intention to return home, it became clear that the regulated temporariness of the WHV does not longer fit their (newly formed) migration aspirations. While fulfilling these aspirations was still in the future for most at the time we interviewed them, some had already managed to forge longer-term mobility projects: several research participants had successfully applied for EU citizenship, acquired through marriage to an EU citizen or through an application for ancestral citizenship. Some had already returned to their country of origin to do the paperwork of applying for work or student visas to return to Germany, some moved to a neighboring country in Europe on a WHV to have more time to come up with a long-term strategy, while others overstayed their WHV in Germany.

Some individuals who were still living in Berlin on a WHV at the time of the interview were unsure about their future plans after their visa expired. Some also imagined and worked toward multiple and sometimes contradictory futures (Robertson 2015: 54, 2021: 46; Shubin 2015). An example of this is Hugo, who at the time of the interview was about to return to Argentina, where he wanted to start working as a lawyer. At the same time, he was applying for a student visa in Germany, unsure what he would do if he was granted one.

Overall, there is a sense of unpredictability and uncertainty about longer-term prospects in research participants’ narratives (see also Collins and Shubin 2015; Wang and Collins 2020, 579–80). Similar to María, who contemplated moving to Spain in the previous quote, many express that migration is likely to continue and that they will probably move somewhere else in the future (see also Robertson 2021, 41).

The different paths taken by research participants before and after their working holiday stay in Berlin show that migration desires and movements are strongly dependent on individual positioning. This includes, for example, the needs and migration perspectives of partners and — with regard to the possibility of acquiring EU citizenship by ancestry — also the historical migration experiences of family members, which can condition an emotional and legal attachment to particular places in the present. Moreover, research participants’ migration pathways were rarely linear and sequential, but involved detours, repetitions, and simultaneities (see also Gemi and Triandafyllidou 2021; Griffiths, Rogers, and Bridget 2013, 9). They demonstrate that migration processes, even in highly regulated arrangements, can deviate significantly from the migration patterns that migration systems seek to designate (Collins 2018, 968).

Similar to the migration paths undertaken by research participants, their decisions and prospects to stay or leave platform work were also heterogeneous, multidirectional, and often characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability: Some research participants worked on platforms until shortly before their visas expired and then left to travel. Some of the people who lived in another country with a WHV before or after their stay in Berlin also worked for similar platforms there. Others took another job already before their visa expired, for example, in a café or bar, often because they appreciated working in a team with other people.

Individuals who had managed to obtain permanent residency reported feeling less pressured. Since obtaining EU citizenship, they have made efforts to slowly move away from platform work and toward their previous professional jobs or toward something completely new that is more aligned with their interests. During this transition process, they often remained active on platforms, but engaged less frequently with them. For example, Simonetta, who has acquired Italian citizenship, describes a cleaning platform as a “safety net” to which she often returns when she needs quick money to visit her family in Argentina, mirroring the findings of other platform studies (e.g., Doorn 2022).

Discussion

Our findings suggest that the WHV has two overlapping temporal horizons: first, in a regulatory sense as a temporary, limited-term visa, and secondly, as a liminal space because it is a youth mobility visa only available during a person's young adulthood. Neither the visa nor an individual's youth and transitioning through their life course can be extended. Yet, the research participants are not passive subjects defined entirely by temporary visa schemes but actively challenge and negotiate these temporal horizons. By forging patchwork solutions for new visas and pathways to EU citizenship, they navigated structural constraints to pursue longer-term mobility projects. Working holidayers thus blur the lines between dominant categories of migration such as temporary/permanent and foreigner/citizen (see also Robertson 2014; Triandafyllidou 2022).

While the visa-inherent restrictions, therefore, do not overdetermine working holidayers migration trajectories, our data indicates that the temporariness of the WHV plays a significant role in how migrants relate to platform work. Our findings suggest two central aspects that help working holidayers cope with the reality of engaging in low-status and low-paid platform work: First, research participants often foregrounded the temporary nature of their stay and the transient engagement with this work. The lack of career progression was tolerable since the 1-year visa either way limited the duration of any job, both within and outside the platform economy. Secondly, they emphasized that they would not consider doing platform work in their countries of origin while perceiving it as part of “living the experience of the WHV,” as Javier called it. Within the relatively short timeframe of the WHV, research participants were able to continue to frame their class positions in relation to elsewhere. Combined, these two strategies allowed some of them to not feel immediately threatened by what appears to be downward social mobility.

As Robertson (2014) has noted for working holidayers in Australia, research participants in Berlin also tended to be from middle or upper-middle-class backgrounds and were usually highly educated. This class position was not threatened by a temporary engagement with platform work despite the widely decried working conditions in this sector. Researchers have shown that it is common for working holidayers to move from professional jobs or university studies to contingent forms of work (Marchetti et al. 2024). This sideways move is perceived to be temporary and fits their life course stage as working holidayers “occupy multiple and intersecting spaces of the in-between” (Robertson 2021, 73).

Overall, the temporal horizons of research participants’ migratory experience shape their subjectivities as workers. These findings strongly resonate with studies on youth mobility and temporariness, such as Au-pairing (Anderson 2009) or university experiences (Maury 2020). For platform economy research, our findings show that the temporal limitation of the WHV mediates tensions between migrants’ former professional identities and their present reality. Platform companies benefit from this arrangement as the “externalisation of the costs associated with international mobility” (Orth 2024, 481) further obfuscates the true costs or reproduction in the platform economy (Orth, Jahre, and Schmiz 2023). Furthermore, our research highlights how the platform economy and the WHV program contribute to the expansion of outsourced care work, such as cleaning, to a new group of workers — typically young, without dependents, and with limited prior experience in the sector. Unlike traditional care migrants, these workers do not leave care gaps or send remittances to their countries of origin (cf. Hochschild 2000).

Conclusion

This article contributes to the future of work discourse by situating platform work within the broader context of migrant workers’ lives, offering a more comprehensive understanding of their motivations and experiences. Our life course perspective has shed light on the broader context in which migrants make decisions about work and their lives beyond. This approach renders counter-intuitive decisions, such as leaving well-paid professional jobs to accept precarious temporary work, legible as part of a time-bound choice at an intermediate stage in workers’ biographies — far from the societal expectations of their home country, where a different professional life awaits their return.

Our analysis highlights that to more fully understand migrant workers within the platform economy, and the reasons they engage in gig work in large numbers, requires considering more than just economic factors. It is essential to account for various influences, including the temporality of visa regimes as well as a broader range of temporal, spatial, social, material, and historical factors. These may include perceptions of specific places, the temporality of housing markets and labor market segments, and emerging forms of work, alongside the experiences and practices of friends and acquaintances. Moreover, research participants’ mobility projects were shaped by their partners’ occupational and migration prospects, as well as the historical migration experiences of family members, which continue to shape emotional and legal connections to particular places in the present.

While our findings pertain to a specific demographic in a particular context, we believe they can spark many new avenues for research. Relating to the WHV, our research was limited to participants from Argentina and Chile. Despite the German working holiday system not tying visa duration to country of origin, our study shows that home country conditions — such as economic factors and income levels — do influence the decision to undertake a working holiday and shape work experiences. This is particularly true for migrants’ changing decisions on whether to return or remain. Therefore, future studies could compare working holidayers from different national backgrounds to understand their, perhaps, differing migration and work trajectories in Germany. Similarly, understanding the effect of other categories of immigration and different class backgrounds within the gig economy workforce could offer valuable insights into how varying backgrounds shape the engagement with platform work.

Furthermore, future research could explore the long-term trajectories of Latin Americans with ancestral claims to naturalization in Spain or Italy and compare those with Latin American migrants who navigate multiple short-term visas. In our experience, both groups often share similar social and professional backgrounds and face comparable challenges as new arrivals in Germany, such as limited work experience and language barriers. However, while one group benefits from EU citizenship including unrestricted access to the German labor market and indefinite leave to remain, the other group experiences the insecurity of short-term visas. Comparative studies could illuminate how platform work motivations and future prospects differ based on positionality, migration history, and professional outlooks. Our research has highlighted that all of these differences matter for fully understanding how migration underpins and shapes platform economies.