Abstract
Platformised services allow affluent others to socially reproduce themselves while reinforcing the barriers to reproduction for migrant workers. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with male migrant food couriers attempting to make a living in Helsinki, the article examines how the social reproduction of migrant platform workers’ labour power is shaped in the interstices between food delivery platforms and bordering processes. Through the notion of life's work, the article analyses how the couriers construct their lives around gig work, highlighting their agency in handling their life, labour and legal status. The argument put forth is that migrant platform workers’ social reproduction is not merely barred but reshaped in the intersection between, on the one hand, being subjected to the labour platform and welfare state bordering and, on the other, the subjective efforts through which migrants manage their life-making practices, revealing a mutual but contentious interdependence between labour platforms and migrant workers. The article enhances current understanding of the structural factors impacting migrant workers beyond just the platform itself, around which struggles emerge and which enable the extractive operations of platform capital.
Introduction
‘My effort, my everything, has gone to charity’, Hashim, a migrant food courier in his 50s, says when talking about his experience with platform labour. The description of an all-encompassing labour effort – partly paid, partly extracted for free to enable the functioning of the platform and the amassing of data – suggests that life in its entirety has become subsumed by the demands of platform capital. For many migrants struggling to stay economically afloat and to preserve a legal status while managing transnational family ties, small business ventures, or studies, platformised food delivery may offer potential autonomy from the rigid employment contract and the opportunity to temporally and spatially juggle the demands of everyday life. Such bricolage living is articulated as struggles to ‘have a life’ (Narotzky, 2022), denoting the centrality of social reproduction as well as the social, political and legal obstructions faced by migrant workers. Analytically, the migrant platform workers’ experiences call for adopting a gaze that extends beyond an exclusive focus on the ‘gig’, the ‘platform’ and the citizen-worker figure to include a wider range of activities and social structures that comprise platform capitalism.
A rapidly expanding body of literature at the intersection of migration and platform labour studies has indicated how the platformisation of labour aggravates precarity and how exploitable migrant labour is produced through various forms of differential inclusion (e.g., Altenried, 2021; Orth, 2023; Van Doorn et al., 2023). Platformised services allow affluent others to socially reproduce themselves, while reinforcing the barriers to reproduction for the migrant workers themselves (Andersen et al., 2024). Building on the social reproduction perspective, this article focuses on the life-making efforts of migrant platform workers to better illuminate their overall struggles to reproduce their labour power, drawing on participant observation and interviews with male migrant food couriers in Helsinki. I employ the notion of life's work (Mitchell et al., 2004) to examine how the couriers construct their lives around the everyday hassles of performing gig work, highlighting their agency in handling their life, labour and legal status. The inquiry is driven by the following question: How is the social reproduction of labour power shaped in the interstices of food delivery platforms and welfare state bordering, and in what ways are struggles over life's work brought to the fore by the male migrant platform workers?
In contrast to previous scholarly insights concerning self-organised communities and support structures formed to sustain social reproduction in the platform economy (Kwan, 2022; Medappa, 2023; Ray, 2024), the platform-generated lack of time for social reproduction (Zampoukos et al., 2024) and the theoretical contention that platform capitalism captures value produced within the sphere of social reproduction (e.g., Chicchi et al., 2022), I place analytical focus on the subjective efforts by which migrant platform workers manage to socially reproduce their labour power during and in-between gigs. Food couriers’ struggles to meet their basic needs, their struggles to ‘have a life’ in the Finnish welfare state and the sense of agency they seek in relation to the labour platform and the border regime are all manifestations of such subjective efforts, foregrounding social reproduction as vibrantly lived and stubbornly material (Katz, 2008). Thus, I maintain that migrant platform workers’ social reproduction is not merely barred but reshaped in the intersection between, on the one hand, the labour platform and welfare state bordering and, on the other, the subjective efforts through which migrants manage their life-making practices, revealing a mutual but contentious interdependence between labour platforms and migrant workers.
The analytical focus on the materialities of reproducing one's labour power as a migrant platform worker demonstrates that neither exploitable labour nor activities and relations subject to extraction simply exist or appear as an obvious outcome of the legal structure itself but instead require the workers’ active engagement with the platform structure and bordering institutions. Such activity contributes to the reproduction of a legally and socially constrained migrant worker dependent on an income in an economic landscape shaped by converging processes of racialisation (Maury, 2025) and ongoing encounters with welfare state bordering (Bendixsen and Näre, 2024), both of which enforce a constant orientation towards the present (Maury, 2021). Further, it highlights migrants’ active effort to ‘make things work when they are not doing gig work’ (van Doorn and Shapiro, 2024: 14) and the structures enforcing an individualised social posture (Chicchi, 2020) in relation to platform labour and the border regime.
The article further demonstrates that since options for reproducing life are restricted due to their migratory status in Finland, platformised food delivery work done under the guise of self-employment may offer migrant workers enhanced control over their life's work and thereby play a vital role in their struggles against the eroding of opportunities for a dignified existence. Due to the platform strategy of ‘contentious compliance’ (Valdez, 2023), the contemporary Finnish welfare state may consequently serve as a hotbed for platform companies to thrive in precisely because of policies designed to protect workers and their efforts at reproduction, but which, through the welfare state bordering of mobile labour, achieves quite the opposite. Hence, despite the seeming contrary objectives of platforms and migrants, a contentious co-dependence between labour platform companies and migrant labour is shaped against the backdrop of welfare state bordering practices. Importantly, the fact that migrants may find platformised self-employment a means to retain control over their lives and to manage transnational family relations does not unmake the exploitative features of platform labour. Rather, it is the differentiated status of the migrant subject in the welfare state that makes platform work, done via the status of being a self-employed person, so appealing, even as the workers themselves at the same time express an ambivalent relation to the freedoms and unfreedoms of platform labour and are keen on fighting for better conditions in the platform economy.
The focus on migrant platform workers’ active efforts to sustain a certain quality of life advances a situated perspective on globally operating labour platforms by making it possible to pinpoint the impact of the global border regime in shaping labour mobility from the Global Souths and Easts (Krivonos et al., 2025) and the specific social reproductive struggles related to location-based platform work in a Nordic welfare state. Moreover, highlighting the intricate relations between welfare state bordering and social and legal differentiation makes it possible to come to grips with the situated ways in which the extractive operations of platform capital, which simultaneously alter the social dimensions of exploitation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2018), materialise in a Nordic welfare state, how such operations are coupled with migrant workers’ agentic reasoning and, ultimately, how the frontiers of labour struggle span the life's work of migrant platform workers.
The article first reviews platform labour research through the lens of social reproduction and theoretically outlines the notion of life's work. Thereafter, the research is situated in the context of the Finnish welfare state, followed by a data and methods section. The analysis comprises three sections on migrants’ struggles to meet their basic needs, the racialised patterns of labour affecting them and their active efforts to create and sustain a meaningful life, followed by conclusions on couriers’ struggles in the labour-life continuum.
Platformisation through the lens of social reproduction
Due to the triadic structure of workers, clients and platforms, platform labour does not comprise a conventional employment relationship. However, it does constitute a type of labour relationship in which platforms both generate dependence and determine the rules that shape worker agency. Thus, platform labour is aligned along a spectrum, with traditional self-employment at one end and conventional employment at the other (Wood and Lehdonvirta, 2019). Food delivery, as one type of location-based platform labour, is a gendered and racialised form of exploitative low-income service work in which ‘inequality is a feature rather than a bug’ (Van Doorn, 2017: 907). Despite resonating on a certain level with past forms of organising labour, the platformisation of work is reshaping capital accumulation and the organisation of labour beyond the salary institution, through which value is appropriated from the sphere of social reproduction (Chicchi et al., 2022). Thus, exploitation cannot be analytically limited just to the point of production or to paid work, as new spaces for the valorisation of labour emerge along with ever-expanding working time, making it necessary to establish analytical links with the techniques of extraction (e.g., Benvegnù and Kampouri, 2021; Chicchi et al., 2022; Maury, 2020; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2018; Van Doorn and Shapiro, 2024).
The number of platform labour studies has expanded greatly of late, with a smaller stream of literature adopting a social reproduction perspective. Notions like the ‘digital housewife’ (Jarrett, 2015) and the ‘Big Mother’ (Sadowski et al., 2024) address recent techno-political shifts in the means of social reproduction in the domestic space, while short-term rental platforms like Airbnb increase social reproduction needs within the household (Roelofsen and Goyette, 2022). Regarding online gig work, family members play a central role in making workers ready for work (e.g., Posada, 2022), which amplifies the overlap between productive and domestic spaces of social reproduction, bringing about a feminisation of work, as the work increasingly resembles traditional forms of precarious work done by women (Casilli et al., 2023). Moreover, with reference to the ‘Global South’, Casilli et al. (2023) argue that the socioeconomic structures of platforms dis-embed workers from their networks of family, friends and community, while socially re-embedding them through digital platforms, thereby blurring the boundaries between ‘personal relationships, political self-organisation and business opportunities’.
In the context of location-based platform labour, social reproduction represents a form of commodified reproductive labour (Huws, 2019), since the services bought via a digital app support the consumer's social reproduction. An expanding body of literature deals with domestic platform workers as performing reproductive labour and care, thereby reaffirming reproductive labour as racially feminised (e.g., Kluzik, 2022; Van Doorn, 2017; Yin, 2023).
On the other hand, labour platforms outsource social reproductive responsibilities to the worker (Van Doorn, 2017). The present article thus analyses the reproduction of the labour power of racially feminised platform workers rather than the commodified reproductive labour mediated via the platform. Previous research on this topic has demonstrated that because of a constrained labour market position, platform workers struggle to ‘get by’, as Abílio (2017) has noted in a study done in Brazil; hence, they are constantly looking for opportunities as they move between formal and informal types of work combined with available social programs to generate more income. Particularly, the systematic deprivation of time in the platform economy hinders the gig workers’ own efforts at social reproduction (Benvegnù and Kampouri, 2021; Zampoukos et al., 2024). Benvegnù and Kampouri (2021) studied male drivers and food-delivery workers in London and Paris, demonstrating how reproductive labour weighs on platform workers. They concluded that ‘caring masculinities’ – those who attempt to combine work with childcare – emerge in the ‘process of [a] feminisation of labour that erodes the borders between work and care’, a situation that female workers historically have always faced (Benvegnù and Kampouri, 2021).
With reference to the social reproduction of platform workers, researchers have likewise pointed to the self-organised support built around systems of community, kinship, caste and family, as demonstrated in research on platform drivers in India (Ray, 2024), or organised online to fight sexual harassment, as in the case of Chinese female platform drivers (Kwan, 2022). Mutual support, understood as unpaid social reproductive labour, partly shields workers from the risks of platform work, as Medappa (2023) demonstrated when studying app-based cab drivers in southern India. Thus, platformised service work hardly alters existing gendered, racialised and classed divisions; class divisions are merely redrawn between racially feminised (Van Doorn, 2017) and exploited unpaid labour to satisfy the social reproductive needs of customers occupying positions in the affluent class (Huws, 2019; Medappa, 2023; Zampoukos et al., 2024). Furthermore, research suggests that normative gendered divisions of labour are reproduced precisely because the need for food delivery workers to always be available depends on a division of labour in the worker household, which reduces the costs of consuming home-cooked food (Lalvani, 2021), while at the same time sexual exploitation, inequality in pay and decreased flexibility due to care responsibilities largely permeate the gig economy (Anwar, 2022; Kwan, 2022).
Given the number of studies highlighting the impact of labour platforms in reducing the time allowed for social reproduction, I examine the daily struggles in handling life's work that nevertheless must take place and unfold during and in between gigs in the urban space, escaping the bounds of domestic space, which has often been at the heart of social reproduction analyses. To this end, I mobilise a broad definition of social reproduction as life's work, which emphasises the constitution and maintenance of labour power and people's methods of surviving, sustaining themselves and finding pleasure in day-to-day life (Mitchell et al., 2004). It calls attention to ‘the interpellation of subjects as life workers – the rendering of permanently mobilised bodies in new kinds of technologies of power’ (Mitchell et al., 2004: 417). Moreover, the social reproduction lens offers a vital perspective for understanding how both life and the social relations of (platform) capital are renewed (Mezzadri, 2019). I analyse the spatiotemporal circumstances in which the social reproduction of the male migrant couriers’ labour power unfolds during their workday, coupled with the understanding that while women often have overseen reproductive work, analytically the reproduction of living labour must be approached as ‘a constant struggle by all working people to subsist’ (O’Laughlin, 2022: 1830).
Moreover, I stress the individualised efforts of fulfilling basic needs by connecting those struggles to an analysis of the migrant's repetitive and individualised relation to ‘welfare state bordering’ (Bendixsen and Näre, 2024). By placing agency center stage, I point to the ways in which self-employment, as modelled via platforms, may both enable life-making in Finland and at the same time combine everyday life in the pursuit of capital with experiences of unfreedom. Such an emphasis transcends a reductive agency–structure divide, which overlooks the constitutive role of acting subjects and approaches agency with a liberal emphasis on the singularity of the autonomous subject (Lugones, 2005). Consequently, such a viewpoint avoids relations of power that define subjects as ‘nonsensical’ and instead extends beyond a ‘modern western notion of agency’ to consider ‘creative activity under conditions fertile for resistance to multiple oppressions’ (Lugones, 2005: 86). Further, I situate the embodied and material struggles of the male migrant platform workers’ life's work along a continuum of struggles over life-producing labour (Mies, 1986: 47), that is, I relate it to a genealogy of work deemed non-productive (e.g., Federici, 2012). Hence, I pinpoint the distinct ways in which social reproduction is made available for the extractive operations of capital; questions of social reproduction permeate contemporary capitalist accumulation and simultaneously alter the social dimensions of exploitation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2018), generating new frontiers of platform labour struggle that span the life's work of labouring migrants.
Platformised service work in the Finnish welfare state
The platform, as a socio-technical intermediary business arrangement, curates connectivity, conditions networks and mediates the value created through user interactions (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). Thus, platforms are not self-contained but operate dynamically in relation to regulatory frameworks, depending on the geographical and socio-legal context (Vallas and Schor, 2020), often while simultaneously contesting regulations as a form of ‘contentious compliance’ (Valdez, 2023). In Finland, food delivery workers are currently classified as independent contractors, and legal disputes regarding whether this represents a form of disguised employment are ongoing. Self-employed couriers typically utilise available delivery apps – Wolt and Foodora – in combination with paid invoicing platforms to manage paperwork and taxation. In Finland, platformised food delivery work is predominantly carried out by migrant workers (Maury, 2024a; Maury et al., 2024; Mbare, 2023), reflecting a global trend (e.g., Andersen et al., 2024; Katta et al., 2024; Van Doorn et al., 2023), always though with specific situated characteristics (Gebrial, 2024; Orth, 2023; Zhou, 2024) and occasionally interspersed with non-migrant workers from marginalised backgrounds (e.g., Ray, 2024).
Migrant workers are affected by welfare state bordering, that is, by the impact of borders not only in relation to sovereign states but also with reference to the practices of social welfare provision, which affect the European Union (EU), European Economic Area (EEA) and third-country nationals alike (Bendixsen and Näre, 2024). Welfare state bordering produces hierarchical effects among migratory subjects, for example by stipulating that non-EU nationals must renew their temporary permits regularly (Maury, 2021) and that EU citizens’ access to social protection is limited and dependent on income (Bendixsen and Näre, 2024). Thus, welfare state bordering accentuates the temporality of the border regime (Maury, 2021), as the migratory subject must constantly renew permits or be able to prove sufficient earnings to maintain their legal residence or social rights in the country, especially since an undocumented status offers them little leeway in a highly regulated state. This ongoing and individualised relation to the border regime compels an orientation towards the present, hampering future planning. Moreover, the converging processes of racialisation, stemming from social action and administrative and legal procedures and through which racialised, graded differentiation is generated, serves to reinforce divisions of labour (Maury, 2025). In practice, migrants in Finland must often ‘reskill’ into low- or mid-skilled occupations, leading to a divide between well-regulated jobs and less desirable secondary labour market jobs in the service sector (Ndomo and Lillie, 2023). Altogether, such hierarchical structuring engenders friction vis-à-vis the imagery of the Finnish state as a universal women-friendly welfare state allowing for a good work-life balance and broad access to state-supported social reproduction (Eräranta, 2015). Consequently, an examination of the ways migrant workers’ foreground social reproduction in their experiences of platform labour will shed light on the complex and agentic entanglements through which the relationship between migrant labour and labour platforms is shaped in a Nordic welfare state.
Data and methods
To examine the social reproductive efforts of migrant men to economically improve their lives through gigs performed for two large-scale food delivery platforms in Finland, I draw on multi-sited qualitative methodologies, including thematic interviews conducted in English (N = 15), qualitative shadowing (McDonald, 2005) and online participant observation (Hennell et al., 2020) with migrant platform workers between September 2021 and August 2023. The interviewed research participants had different migratory backgrounds and aims. Most research participants held some kind of time-limited residence permit or status (based on studies, work, entrepreneurship or as an asylum seeker), while three had permanent residence and two EU citizenship. The research participants, within the age range of 25–50, came from diverse regions: southeastern EU countries (2), east Asian countries (1) western Asian countries (5), south Asian countries (3), west African countries (3) and North and South America (1). By foregrounding the experiences of subjects with geographical backgrounds in the Global Souths and Easts, the article contributes to ‘building theory from lived experiences and entanglements otherwise viewed as minor to global social theory’ (Krivonos et al., 2025: 2).
Multi-sited online-offline co-presence was built together with the research participants. It included shadowing workers during their workdays (without the author engaging in platform work) in the Helsinki metropolitan area, holding informal discussions in between gigs and online participant observations. The dataset consists of pseudonymised interview transcripts, a fieldwork diary that includes notes on discussions with some twenty workers in addition to those formally interviewed and screenshots shared by research participants, such as their communication with the platform company, ratings, earnings calculations and company regulations. The collected data were analysed using qualitative content analysis, foregrounding the research subject's own understandings and analysis of social and political phenomena and categorisations. The research was conducted according to established ethical standards, including informed consent, the option of withdrawing from the research at any time and the non-use of monetary compensation, the aspects of which also applied when authoring the research.
In this article, I focus on three research participants’ experiences that best capture both the breadth of the data regarding geographical backgrounds and the variety of legal statuses of people undertaking food delivery gigs. Their experiences reveal the common struggles of migrant workers engaging in life-producing labour as self-employed individuals, thus making it possible to capture the salience of digital labour platforms in engineering couriers’ lives.
Jakov, an Eastern European EU citizen, is in his 30s and came to Finland to study 5 years ago. Equipped with a master's degree, he has been looking for work in his field but without much success. He lives alone and works in a poorly paid start-up company, while delivering food by car for both delivery companies on the side. Arash is a west African citizen in his 40s. He has a temporary residence permit based on work, a partner and small children and has been working via one of the food delivery platforms for three years, currently delivering by car. With the income gained from platform work, he also supports his mother and siblings abroad. Hashim, from a south Asian country, is in his 50s and has lived alone in Finland for the past 7 years, after his divorce. He has multiple university degrees in different fields from his home country but has not managed to find work in those fields in Finland. He received a residence permit for entrepreneurs based on a small business of owns and operates, but currently he works full time in the food-delivery business for both platforms.
When contacting potential research participants online, I framed my research via my interest in altering distressed working conditions on platforms, supporting labour struggles and making use of my long-standing engagement with migrant struggles to confront legally constrained situations. Thus, my ethical and theoretical situatedness in critical migration studies, in which migrants’ subjectivity and the ‘right to escape’ are placed centre stage (Mezzadra, 2004), shaped my entrance into the field. Due to the framing of the research through vistas of struggle, the research situations centred around building a mutual understanding of the tensions produced in relation to work and the border regime, while shared experiences of the global university system, (transnational) childcare and struggles to attain life goals also informed the discussions. The dataset discloses the heterogeneity of struggles around life-making in Finland and the varying options available when navigating the constrained space of labour and rights at the intersections of the border regime and platform labour.
Everyday struggles over basic needs
The airbag warning light is on as we are driving in a small car to pick up a sushi order. We park at an odd corner where other couriers have also parked and leave one thermo-bag in the window signalling that the car is only temporarily parked in a sidelong position. Jakov, who is driving the car, tells me that he is stuck ‘in that startup immigrant category’, meaning that he considers himself a severely underpaid, highly educated person working for a Finnish tech start-up. Food delivery is his second job. He talks non-stop about his food delivery work for two different companies, about its positive but predominantly exploitable features.
After a few trips back and forth between the mall and middle-class suburbs, we park in the same spot on our way to pick up more sushi. ‘Actually, we should be running’, Jakov tells me as we walk through the 100,000 m2 mall. We arrive at the restaurant on time, only to find several other couriers waiting to pick up their orders. After 25 min, a dozen couriers are caught in the ‘work of waiting’ (Attoh et al., 2024) in the same restaurant, highlighting the incomparability of the time calculated by the app and the labour process of restaurant workers making the food, before being handed over to the courier. Several of the couriers use this waiting time as an opportunity to visit the toilet, Jakov explains to me, nodding at persons taking a detour across the mall only to return shortly.
While a voluminous body of research has disentangled varying aspects of the everyday reality of food delivery, such as unpaid waiting time (e.g., Attoh et al., 2024), the need to speed up the delivery process (e.g., Orr et al., 2023) and the impact of algorithmic management (e.g., Griesbach et al., 2019), the couriers with whom I interacted also divulged the difficulty of fulfilling basic needs (see also Gebrial, 2024: 1181), replenishing their bodies when working. As the back-and-forth movement in the mall reveals, accessing the toilet as a food courier is one such difficulty. The couriers talked about restaurants not letting them use the bathroom, often with a racist undertone. The separation between paying customers and food couriers at the restaurant is occasionally reinforced via an architecture of direct pick-up apertures from the kitchen to the street, signalling denied entrance to the restaurant for couriers. Arash described the difficulty of accessing toilets as embarrassing: ‘sometimes I am about to explode; I cannot take it anymore, really. I have to drive so far away just to pee, then come back [to the city centre] to work’. Trapped navigating their way between the app, the restaurants and urban space, the couriers struggle to find the time and means for using the bathroom. Thus, the workings of the labour platform and urban architecture effectively direct the couriers’ movements and the spatio-temporalities of life's work, while reproducing the geographies of racialised labour in Helsinki.
Eating is another basic need that causes distress in relation to the number of gigs needed to make a living. Hashim describes it as follows: Because I want to earn something, the challenge targets are not letting me to compromise with these things. So, I sometimes didn't eat, and I started my work, and there is not any break when I can have a, like, pulla [sweet pastry] that my stomach can get well. […] So, I had surgery now because of this irregular eating. I have four holes here [points to his stomach], so this is what irregular eating has done with my health, and irregular eating also reduce my energy as well. So, a lot happening with the health because, when I work 12 h minimum, then I can reach the financial targets.
Hashim also describes the effort of making a living through platformised food delivery, which makes maintaining healthy eating patterns difficult, which has led to surgery, while back pain and cramping hands as a result of holding the steering wheel so tightly reduce his quality of life. Moreover, long working hours, generated either by full-time food delivery work or making deliveries in addition to holding another job, affects the quality and the spatio-temporalities of sleep. A recurring view expressed in the streets is that food couriers are sleeping at the wheel in between gigs: ‘my friend sometimes sleeps in the car, he feels so tired’, Arash explains. Medappa (2023: 399) has made similar observations concerning the social reproduction of drivers engaged in ride-hailing work in India: some of the drivers sleep in their car, not returning home to evade to costs of driving home and in order to remain available for gigs so they can reach their financial targets.
The struggles to satisfy one's basic needs – alimentation, bathroom breaks and sleep – signal that platform capitalism thrives on the reduced options for life's work. Although the production of labour power consists of maintaining the capacities of the living individual according to historically defined needs (Marx, 1990: 274–275), the labour platforms operate in the interest of capital, which is, to quote Marx (1990: 376): ‘purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.’ Thus, food deliveries consume ‘the bodies of workers and compromise the reproduction of living labour’ (O’Laughlin, 2022: 1838), while capital ‘snatches’ time and energy from the workers’ everyday struggles with life's work in the urban space, thereby pointing to a partial distancing of the act of replenishing the male worker from a normative gendered division of labour in the worker household (see also Benvegnù and Kampouri, 2021: 743) . The snatching of time and energy from life's work highlights the contradictory situation of living labour, of reduced vitality, as fuel for the digital platforms positioned as technological intermediaries for food delivery.
Constrained possibilities to fulfil basic needs are not unique to platform workers, but rather concern the general service sector, from bus drivers to restaurant workers and shop keepers. However, the impact of digital platforms in shaping the social reproduction of labour power is salient, as platforms assist in reducing labour costs and subsuming the value produced through socially reproductive activities (Chicchi et al., 2022; Medappa, 2023). For couriers, it signifies paid work being reduced to the time of movement from receiving the food to delivering it, while the workers assume responsibility for all the costs and efforts of accomplishing the task and making themselves ready for the next delivery, constructing a major part of the couriers’ labour as a resource free for capital to appropriate (Federici, 2012). Consequently, as platformised services decrease the consumers’ unpaid social reproductive work, the racially feminised male migrant workers’ unpaid working time increases exponentially to successfully meet the demands of the algorithmically managed work. Simultaneously, the workers struggle to reproduce their labour power by the means available in between and during the gigs, intensifying the inseparability of space and time for production and reproduction. Crucially, the struggles to manage life's work become central for migrant platform workers, which stem from their life-making efforts in Finland being deeply impacted by the repetitive and individualised relationship of migrant workers with welfare state bordering.
Racially bordered struggles to have a life
The question of social reproduction is not only critical from the standpoint of the capitalist extraction of value beyond the paid tasks, but more so for those whose labour is being appropriated. As the couriers’ experiences suggest, platform labour not only reinforces migrant divisions of labour, but also increasingly reinforces differences in terms of the time and space allotted for life's work, thus raising the question of how to ‘have a life’ in Finland.
Hashim described the difference between Finnish citizens and non-citizens through the time allowed for restorative breaks: Finnish people are going after two hours [for] the smoking tauko [break], then at midday they go for lunch and after that again kahvitauko [coffee break], and after six hours they go home and then they just enjoy their life. You know, you have this one Finland, of Finnish equality where everybody gets, you know, a decent living, democracy and the welfare state. And then you have this other Finland, with a plethora of immigrants with less [of a] safety net, or, like, not even knowing how things go. And, like, then there is this whole other economy based on this other Finland, and, like, let's say, if this other Finland didn’t exist, what businesses would be possible?
According to Arash, platform companies ‘squeeze as much as possible from them [the workers]’. He then offered the following observation: Like everybody I know works seven days a week, 10–15 h every day, and not having a day off and never a hobby, no time for family or nothing. […] Like, people have no life, really, they are just outside. But people, you know, they don’t have many choices.
The differentiated positioning of the couriers in the landscape of economic life generated via the intersection of their status as non-citizens and converging processes of racialisation produces a situation in which the couriers are not socially, legally or temporally free to make choices about their life and labour. The varying legal statuses correspond to the standards of comportment necessary to maintain a legal status in Finland, often based on satisfying certain economic preconditions, such as paying 6,720 euros a year for a student permit or providing proof of enough earnings and a registered company for a permit based on entrepreneurship or proof of a regular income as an EU citizen, all generally accompanied by temporal constraints, such as deadlines and expiry dates (Maury et al., 2024). The law thus produces forms of subjugation as people accept harsh working conditions just to uphold their right to stay in the country (Rigo, 2022).
In the case of platform work, where the formal task is reduced to a minimum length at the same time as unpaid work undergirds value accumulation (Maury, 2020), the harsh conditions of the work materialise in the difficulties of finding enough time to fulfil basic needs, to replenish themselves and, indeed, to ‘have a life’. Therefore, just as the socially and legally differentiated position of migrant food couriers in Finland limits the possibilities for social reproduction, the migrant workers must also attune themselves to the small instances between gigs when they can socially reproduce their labour power, which is closely connected to the concern about reproducing the social relationship to the border regime that hinges on satisfying certain economic conditions. This orientation towards the individualised self as a legally legible migrant subject is reinforced by the individualised concern about getting enough tips and good reviews, necessary to increase earnings and enhance their chances of receiving economically better gigs via the labour platform. Moreover, it demonstrates how the exchange between labour and payment not only mediates access to labour for a certain amount of time – the gig – but also signifies the command and control over migrant workers’ lives (Rigo, 2022), exposing a form of subjugation produced at the intersection of the workings of the labour platform and the socially and legally differentiated status of the migrant worker.
Ambivalent struggles over platformised (un)freedom
Working as a self-employed food courier demands care for oneself and one's means of production before logging onto the app and starting to work, as opposed to merely showing up the next day at the factory gate (Marx and Engels, as cited in Strauss and Meehan, 2015: 3). For example, the service agreements include specific duties, such as regulations concerning use of the app and demands concerning appearance: logo-tagged clothes and ‘good personal hygiene’, as noted in one of the platform company's service agreements – factors that can potentially impact the ratings, reviews and tips received for a gig. Additionally, working as a courier requires making sure at least one phone is charged and that one can do the work with the chosen vehicle, including having enough gas or exchangeable batteries for an electric vehicle. Managing transportation, such as taking a loan for buying a car and spending money on fuel, or developing tactics for renting a scooter to navigate the cityscape in the cheapest viable way, demands strict economic calculations and the work of ‘caring for one's debt’ (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017).
The centrality of life's work to platform capitalism highlights a discrepancy in experiences of autonomy: while many migrant workers perceive self-employment as offering more leeway, the combined impact of the labour platform and welfare state bordering and the individualisation of social reproductive struggles as a continuation of the atomisation of platform labour, both of which place increased emphasis on personal performance metrics and the algorithmic analysis of worker ratings (Griesbach et al., 2019), are often shaped by racialised perceptions of the worker (Maury, 2024a). Platform workers have organised against the atomising forces, for example through strikes and unionisation to collectively address platform workers’ rights (e.g., Maury et al., 2024; Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020) and engender community support for addressing social reproductive needs (e.g., Kwan, 2022; Ray, 2024).
Despite such collective action, though, individualising social forces permeate the platform, generating ambivalent experiences of work. While valuing the leeway offered via platformised self-employment, descriptions of ‘always being at work’ and food delivery as ‘slavery’ occur repeatedly in the data. Hashim is one of many delivery workers who described the working conditions as a form of ‘slavery’. His analysis of the platform companies’ business models centres on the simultaneous violation of labour rights and human rights, as he puts it, achieved via non-transparent payment practices and unilateral service agreements as well as the seeming authority of such companies to dictate the rules of contemporary working life. Hashim noted that because of their methods of navigating legal loopholes and national regulations, food delivery platforms achieve dominance in the political sphere of the labour market, a scheme that further drives the ‘platform's capacity to cultivate and capture value’ (Langley and Leyshon, 2017: 22). Hashim also suggested that without legal measures to secure the health and safety of and a liveable income for the ‘independent contractors’, the quest for economic profit and capital accumulation will continue to be at the forefront of any such work practices, since capital ‘asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power, unless society forces it to do so’ (Marx, 1990: 376, 38). Moreover, Hashim's framing of platformised food delivery as a question of human rights reveals the difficulty of drawing a clear line between work and non-work. Thus, labour rights do not recognise the battles faced by self-employed workers nor the magnitude of work devoted to managing the gigs. Hashim's story exemplifies the cost of failed and unpaid deliveries, long waiting times and the overall extra effort involved, including the ‘donation’ of unpaid labour-time (Cini, 2023: 886), necessary to manage food deliveries, thus disclosing the general struggle with life's work as a core component of platform capitalism.
Describing himself as businessman, Arash depicts the peculiar relationship of freedom and unfreedom in platform labour as follows: You know freedom is very important. When you go to a job, you feel like you’re in a prison, you’re forced to do it, but for that thing freelance is something that you choose to work. But there should be a guideline right now, [because the food delivery company] is literally putting slaves to work.
The simultaneous agency-depriving and agency-enabling dimensions of platform work have been analysed as a form of ‘liminal agency’ (Weidenstedt et al., 2024). With reference to Sweden, Weidenstedt et al. (2024) has described how (especially highly educated) migrant platform workers might use gig work to support their language acquisition, cultural knowledge and geographical savviness as well as to advance towards preferred professional work sectors. However, a focus on mere human capital and the rational activity of subjects in a neoclassical imaginary of equal markets is analytically limiting, particularly since other research has demonstrated that neither language acquisition nor formal education provide a guarantee of advancing in the social hierarchy of the Finnish labour market (e.g., Ndomo and Lillie, 2023), and since welfare state bordering and the existing legal framework shape non-citizens’ position already before they as individuals enter the nation-state and the labour market (Maury, 2021). Rather, a situated analysis highlights the social and legal differentiation of labouring migrant subjects, which may direct them towards platformised self-employment as a seeming opportunity. Thus, their previously defined legal status and associated rights make engaging in self-employment via a platform rather than remaining in the ‘prison’ of an employment relationship that limits them to legally defined work hours (Van Doorn, 2023) seem the best remedy for navigating the individualised relationship to the border regime and managing the struggle against being pushed back in time, the reduced opportunities to make long-term plans and their efforts to reproduce a dignified transnational life in the here and now.
Such individual and pragmatic ways of countering the limitations arising from their relationship to the border regime (Maury, 2020) may have a broader impact, as exemplified in migration authorities’ suspicion of platform workers’ seemingly overly high earnings – an imaginary modelled around the migrant as an essentialised, low-paid working subject – collected by working day and night to enable a future family reunification, but instead leading to battles against deportation (Yle News, 2022). Thus, the relationship demonstrates how migrants’ subjective efforts to have a life and maintain transnational family relations, assisted by their access to platform labour (despite the severely exploitative and extractive features), engender friction in relation to the border regime and forces migration authorities to reconsider the standards dictating an acceptable income for working migrants. In sum, what may appear as migrant workers placing a high value on earning money rather than ‘being free at home in the afternoon’, a situation that places migrants’ social relations ‘at the periphery of cultural normativity’ (Weidenstedt et al., 2024: 1286), might instead materialise as battles over time and struggles against inequality structures that narrow their opportunities to have a dignified life and provide economic support and care for close and far away important others.
Conclusion
Platforms can be approached as tools for reducing labour costs and extracting value from social reproduction (Chicchi et al., 2022; Medappa, 2023; Van Doorn, 2017), which increases the amount of work serving as a resource free for capital to appropriate (Federici, 2012). From a lived perspective, it signifies that life itself is put to work, which places pressure on the migrant platform workers to reproduce their lives accordingly. The divulged struggles over meeting basic bodily needs, such as eating, using the bathroom and sleeping, have led me to apply a social reproduction lens to better understand how migrant platform workers reproduce their labour power in the enmeshment of gigs. The choice to depart from the analytical insight that ‘all working people must struggle to subsist’ (O’Laughlin, 2022) in no way suggests that unequal gendered structures of social reproduction have been evaded; instead, it has made it possible to place greater analytical emphasis on the pronounced relationship affecting the migrant platform workers’ social reproduction, in this case the one between the labour platforms and welfare state bordering, including its racialising features.
The intersection of labour mediated via a platform, which allows companies to evade responsibility for the costs of social reproduction through workers’ self-employed status, and welfare state bordering, which engenders social and legal differentiation, reduces the migrant workers’ choices regarding their life and labour, while it heightens the impact of platform labour on their everyday lives through the intensified competition over gigs and positioning in the algorithmic worker hierarchy. Moreover, the centring of migrant platform workers’ efforts to socially reproduce their labour power calls attention to the fact that in the regulated welfare state, migrants are not simply produced as an available and exploitable labour force in the platform economy. Rather, migrants actively participate by showing documents, such as platform earnings and taxes paid, to reproduce a legally legible self for migration authorities. Thus, the production of an exploitable platform labour force in Finland hinges on the social reproduction of the migrant worker (Maury, 2024b), and it exposes the close entanglement between global labour platforms and the border regime, both formatted in, and testing the boundaries of, the socio-legal environment. Subsequently, the agentic subjectivities that take shape as a result demonstrate that areas of extraction do not arise out of nowhere; they are continually produced in complex entanglements of the subjective force of living labour and the socio-political, technological and infrastructural environment it encounters. Focusing on the male migrants from the Global South and Global East in a Nordic welfare state, whose labour power structurally becomes racially feminised through the extraction of value enabled via the struggles over social reproduction in the enmeshment of gigs, brings attention to bear on the ‘colonial imprint’ ingrained in the ongoing reproduction of exploitable migrant platform labour and the various techniques of extraction (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2018).
The article has called attention to migrant workers’ ambivalent relationship with platformised food delivery and demonstrated how it is shaped by the specific position the workers occupy as migrants: if the only other options available in the racialised economic landscape are precarious employment contracts with a human boss, and since the temporal border regime forces an orientation towards the present rather than the future, then self-employment via a labour platform may produce experiences of having increased control over one's life. However, choosing platform work seldom implies optimism about one's employment prospects; rather, the couriers repeatedly emphasised experiences of unfreedom and ‘slavery’-like conditions in the food delivery business. Such experiences point to how the platform structure overshadows everyday life and how relations of command are constituted based on the choices available and opportunities created along the continuum of engaging in income-generating and life-sustaining activities, that is, life's work. Thus, despite the opposing objectives of platforms and migrants, the socio-legal environment in which migrants strive to reproduce a transnational life in the here and now creates an interdependence between the two. This positions the platform strategy of ‘contentious compliance’ (Valdez, 2023) not only in relation to the regulatory framework, but also in relation to migrant workers, with the platforms partly adapting to workers’ desires and needs to organise their lives in a bordered world, albeit with exploitative and extractive downsides.
Finally, from a methodological and theoretical standpoint, the focus on migrant platform workers’ emphasis on life's work highlights on the one hand the balancing acts forced by the platform between the possibilities of reproducing the living labouring body and the simultaneous reduction of costs and, on the other hand, the impact of welfare state bordering in facilitating a business model based on severe inequality. Here, acknowledging the pragmatic ways of handling life and labour as forms of agentic reasoning allows researchers to move past the established liberal Western notion of agency, which presupposes ready-made hierarchical worlds of sense (Lugones, 2005: 86, italics in original), and instead focus on the politics impacting the multi-directional efforts of migrant platform workers as they move within and against power structures, negotiating life amidst structural tensions. As one of the research participants in the study at hand noted, their efforts consist of looking past labour rights to adopt a more encompassing view of human rights and create options for safety structures beyond those specified in the existing legal framework. Thus, it is not sufficient to merely reclassify workers; more broad-based worker protections and redistributive social policies must be put in place (Van Doorn et al., 2023), because if left unregulated, platform companies will adopt the most profitable model and increasingly externalise risk to the workers themselves (Muldoon and Sun, 2024). In closing, by transcending a ‘productivist’ approach to labour and instead seeking to grasp the continuity of life's work through platform labour, it is possible to build relations of solidarity across various forms of precarious, poorly paid and unpaid work and find options for greater rights in a world of work where social reproduction increasingly becomes subject to the extractive operations of capital. Such struggles must be accompanied by a rejection of legal structures that deprive mobile subjects of the right to have decision-making power over their life and labour.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Future Challenges in the Nordics Programme (Tackling Precarious and Informal Work in the Nordic Countries).
