Beating the algorithm: navigating labour, risk, and reward on food delivery platforms

This thesis critically examines the everyday lived experiences of 17 app-based food delivery workers and my ethnographic fieldwork of delivering orders on an electric unicycle. I argue that workers negotiate the risks and rewards of gig work by self-mobilizing knowledges and strategies in response to algorithmic management and necrocapitalist platform structures. I draw from theories that center the relations of consent in the labour process, ecrocapitalism, and the concept of thin and thick agency to recognize how workers contend with their work conditions. My findings, based on participant interviews and fieldwork, show that gig work is simultaneously embraced and contested as workers navigate opaque platform structures that atomize, deflexibilize, and precaritize the labour process. This study contributes to empirical and theoretical discussions of how precarity, racial inequalities, and new understandings of work are woven into the gig economy.