Mobile workers, contingent labour: Migration, the gig economy and the multiplication of labour

The article takes the surprising exit of the food delivery platform Deliveroo from Berlin as a starting point to analyse the relationship between migration and the gig economy. In Berlin and many cities across the globe, migrant workers are indispensable to the operations of digital platforms such as Uber, Helpling, or Deliveroo. The article uses in-depth ethnographic and qualitative research to show how the latter's exit from Berlin provides an almost exemplary picture of why urban gig economy platforms are strongholds of migrant labour, while at the same time, demonstrating the very contingency of this form of work. The article analyses the specific reasons why digital platforms are particularly open to migrants and argues that the very combination of new forms of algorithmic management and hyper-flexible forms of employment that is characteristic of gig economy platforms is also the reason why these platforms are geared perfectly toward the exploitation of migrant labour. This allows the analysis of digital platforms in the context of stratified labour markets and situates them within a long history of contingent labour that is closely intertwined with the mobility of labour.

German market in a few days without giving a clear reason for the exit (to this day, the reasons are subject of speculations).It ended by thanking the workers for "riding with Deliveroo" and wishing them the best for the future.A future that was suddenly extremely precarious for the approximately 1000 riders who had delivered food for the platform in Berlin, the majority of them being migrants (according to our own studies, see also Heiland and Schaupp, 2020).Only three days earlier, all riders had received a cheery email from Deliveroo offices inviting them to come and pick up new gear designed for the riders "We are happy to present our new rider collection to you so you can look even more awesome while riding on the streets!".Now, all riders were stunned by the next email only three days later, announcing the exit of the platform from Berlin.Those who did not read the email instantly were informed by their colleagues on the lunch shift or by frantic calls and texts from friends and family.
One of them is Tommaso, i a 37-year-old veteran rider from Italy who had worked for Deliveroo Berlin for several years.In his case, the email announcing the exit had gone directly to the spam folder of his account and he received the news through a friend who sent a screenshot.To Tommaso, the exit came as a tremendous shock: "I counted on Deliveroo.I counted I can go on at least for a couple of years more, I mean, talking about my body […].And now it's a problem because Deliveroo gave me about 40% of last year's income.Now I have to find that 40% elsewhere".ii With his second job, where he works as a freelance city tour guide, he has at least some income to count on, which is more than most of his colleagues have: "I can make money with another job.I can, so….There are friends of mine, actually, they have families.And they are basically doing only Deliveroo.For them, it's a disaster, I think.It simply is a tragedy".The proportion of migrants in the group of riders working full-time on the platform and thus being very dependent on the income and hit hardest by the sudden exit was even higher than in the platform's overall workforce, which was already characterized by a large majority of migrant workers.
In recent years, Berlin has become again a major destination for heterogenous movements of migration, including refugees crossing the Mediterranean to escape the war in Syria as well as many migrants from crisis and austerity-ridden countries in Southern Europe or Latin America, among many other groups.In the last decade, a growing number of these newcomers found jobs with digital platforms like Uber, Helpling or Deliveroo and the latter's exit left hundreds of them facing a very precarious situation.When the news spread through the media, Bastián, a young rider who came from Chile to Berlin in 2018 and had worked for Deliveroo ever since, received sarcastic comments from a friend.He recounts: "I have an Italian friend, he heard the news, and he sent me these sarcastic comments like 'Who will exploit the immigrant labour now?'"While he could appreciate the sarcasm of his friend, he emphatically pointed out how important the platform had been to him and many other migrant riders: But at the same time, this is the only option that the immigrants or people from Chile or people from India have.Like they cannot work anywhere else.So even though the work conditions are shit, they…, it's the only thing people have, yeah, the only opportunity.And I was earning even more money than in any other job.So for me, I was really happy with it.And as long as I didn't get hit by a car, everything was going to be okay.
While road accidents are among the risks very present to bicycle couriers like him, being out of the job in a matter of days was utterly unexpected and posed a huge problem to him and many of his fellow riders with scarce alternatives in the job market.

Researching migration and the gig economy in Berlin and beyond
The 4-year stint of the food delivery platform Deliveroo in the city of Berlin provides an almost exemplary picture of why urban gig economy platforms are strongholds of migrant labour, while especially its sudden exit shows the very precarity and instability of gig work, especially for migrant workers.Based on in-depth ethnographic work and qualitative interviews, this article takes the sudden exit of Deliveroo from Berlin as a starting point to dig into the relation of migration, stratified labour markets and the gig economy in the specific context of Berlin and beyond.It is based on extensive qualitative research in two projects on gig economy platforms, migration and urban space.The first project, which is the main source for this article, focuses specifically on migration and the gig economy, and was the framework for over six months of auto-ethnographic research with Deliveroo in Berlin (from the start of 2019 until the exit of the platform in August of the same year) and 15 qualitative interviews with riders supplemented by follow-up interviews to account for the worker's pathways after the exit of Deliveroo, all done by the author.iii While this project allows for deep ethnographic insights into the platform and its workforce in Berlin, a second project researching platform labour in urban spaces allows the contextualisation of these results as it researches four different platforms (including Deliveroo) in seven European cities. iv This also allows for a tentative attempt at generalising some of the findings on mobile labour and digital platforms.
Indeed, there are very similar tendencies and logics at play in many European cities (and even beyond): More often than not, the platforms' workforces are in their majority migrant workers (see e.g.Altenried et al., 2020;Barratt et al., 2020;Heiland and Schaupp, 2020;van Doorn, 2020).By the example of Deliveroo and with a view to other platforms and other European countries, I will argue that without migrant labour, there would be no gig economy as we know it.Situated in and contributing to critical migration studies and anthropological and sociological perspectives on labour and the rise of digital platforms, this article will show the embeddedness of digital platform labour in stratified labour markets characterised by mechanisms of "differential inclusion" and migration regimes more broadly (Altenried et al., 2018;Forschungsgruppe Transit Migration, 2015;Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).
Looking at the gig economy from the perspective of migrant labour also entails shifting the focus: From this perspective, low pay and precarity are nothing new or exclusive to digital platforms, but have been the characterising conditions for migrant and racialized labour for centuries and the history of flexible and contingent labour are closely entwined with this historyand presentof mobile labour.Instead of addressing platforms only as innovative disruptors of standard employment, it becomes necessary to discuss how digital platforms are able to renew and reconfigure forms of contingent labour and how their important, new and specific digital qualities concerning, for example, algorithmic management and new forms of controlinteract with stratified labour markets.Such a perspective allows a contextualised analysis of gig economy platforms in labour markets constituted and stratified by differential migration regimes including multiple vectors such as citizenship, language, visas, or work permits.
In the following, I will start with a view to the intersection of platforms, urban space and mobile labour.Platforms like Deliveroo are not only intervening in labour relations, but are also part of a multifaceted transformation of urban life, social reproduction, and even the architecture of cities themselves.Starting at a "virtual restaurant" that constituted a centre of Deliveroo's operations (and my ethnographic research) in Berlin, I will show how mobile workers are a crucial part of such an emerging platform of urbanism and move on to analyse the reasons why migrants constitute the majority of the workforces of many gig economy platforms, in Berlin and elsewhere.This entails both a view to the reasons why digital platforms are able to attract migrant workers (and sometimes even become part of their mobility projects and migration infrastructures) and what, in turn, allows the platforms to manage them effectively.I will argue that the very characteristics of gig economy platformsconceptualised as a combination of algorithmic management and flexible employment relationsmake them perfectly suited to exploit migrant labour.I will propose further that this is a common trend, even beyond the world of digital platforms: The specific combination of algorithmic management and hyper-flexible contracts allows the inclusion of very heterogenous, often migrant workforces into production processes in numerous industries.The intersected transformations of digital technology, flexible labour, and new cartographies of mobility and globalisation are theorised in the context of a dynamic of the multiplication of labour (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).In the following section, the view is broadened onto other platforms and cities and the dynamics of digital platforms and mobile labour in Europe and globally.In the conclusion, platform labour is situated in the entangled histories of migrant and contingent labour and some brief conclusions for current labour struggles are drawn.

Platform urbanism and migrant labour
Working shifts in the final week of Deliveroo in Berlin was an eerie experience.While some riders tried desperately to earn as much money as possible in their last shifts, others just got on their bikes to talk to their colleagues and friends about the situation and future employment possibilities.While there was talk about founding a worker-owned cooperative platform, the imminent future for most meant applying to Lieferando, Deliveroo's biggest competitor, platforms in other sectors like the cleaning platform Helpling, or other unknown jobs.Some even talked about leaving the city and going back to their home countries.Throughout the conversations between riders and restaurant staff, it became apparent that it was not only the riders who were in trouble, but also many restaurants that had relied on Deliveroo.Some gastronomy businesses even feared bankruptcy in the wake of Deliveroo's exit.
For the customers, Deliveroo is an app where they can order from restaurants in their area.Around 140,000 restaurants in almost 800 cities in 12 countries in Europe, Asia, and Australia are available on the app (Deliveroo, 2020).Deliveroo organises the delivery from the restaurant to the customer through its fleet of mostly self-employed couriers (around 110,000 so-called riders globally) and takes a small delivery fee from the customers and a bigger cut from the payment to the restaurant.While these fees are painful to the restaurants, many re-organise their businesses to serve the high number of customers the different platforms have enlisted.Some even cook exclusively for delivery.
Like Green Gurus, a so-called "virtual restaurant" or "ghost kitchen" in Berlin-Kreuzberg, that prepares food exclusively for the delivery platforms.Next to an inconspicuous black door hangs a discreet placard with the company name and the logos of various food delivery services.Numerous bike couriers go in and out.Behind the door, Mexican burritos, Thai curry, vegan hot dogs, or Hawaiian poke bowls are cooked directly next to each other.On a rack hang numerous tablets upon which the orders placed on a platform somewhere in the city are displayed.Food is prepared solely for delivery, precisely portioned and strictly timed.Situated in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighbourhood, the place was a central point of Deliveroo's operation in the Kreuzberg and Neukölln districts, a meeting point for riders and a central site of my ethnographic work.
When Bastián came here after the news broke, not only the riders were in disbelief.The cooking staff had just been fired as the owners of the virtual restaurant that had concentrated on Deliveroo felt that it could not exist without the platform and would also close it four days later.He describes how he met an acquaintance crying next to the door: She is an Argentinean girl.She told me 'Our dream falls apart like this.Like we're all immigrants in this kitchen.We have no one and nothing.We have nothing, and this is all we had.And even though the work conditions are shit, it's the only thing we have.We don't know what's going to happen after Friday'.
Such virtual kitchens are signs of emerging platform urbanism (Barns, 2020;Rodgers and Moore, 2018;Sadowski, 2020).They show how platforms like Deliveroo intervene in the organisation of food markets and social reproduction (Altenried et al., 2021b) and even urban space as such, as restaurants make space for ghost kitchens cooking only for delivery platforms.These dramatic days in Berlin in August also showed how these interventions in cities by venture-capital-funded platforms can crash very fast, with far-reaching consequences.While some labour advocates applauded the exit of Deliveroo, the scenes in restaurants, in the streets, and at worker's meeting points in Berlin showed how hard such an event hit many of the workers.Not only the kitchen staff at the virtual kitchen Green Gurus in Berlin-Kreuzberg, but also the overwhelming majority of Deliveroo's riders was constituted by migrants who had come to Berlin at some point throughout the last years.Just as Bastián and Tommaso, many could not think of good alternatives to quickly replace urgently needed income.The composition of its workforce was nothing original to Deliveroo in Berlin.In many cities across Europe, migrants are the most important group of workers of Deliveroo and other platforms.The reasons for this are very similar across different cities and platforms.

Platforms as migration infrastructure
"I always thought that it was an option working in Deliveroo, even when I was in Chile".For Bastián and many other young people planning to come to Berlin, working for gig economy platforms was a known option, even before they arrived in Berlin.Among the migrants from Chile and Argentina, most of them who came to Berlin on a one-year visa like Bastián, "it's quite known that both Helpling and Deliveroo are the easy jobs to apply to when you come with a visa because you only have one year, and this is very immediately.They…, you don't need that much papers, and you don't need to speak German" as he explains.
The points he mentions already explain many of the reasons why gig economy platforms are a stronghold of migrant labour.Most platforms have a quick and unbureaucratic application process with very few formal requirements concerning qualifications, documents or skills.Many platforms even dispense with application interviews and only ask for a minimum of registration papers, work permits, and similar documents, and have few mechanisms to control the existence of these papers (workers often report that they can work even though they failed to provide all documents platforms initially asked for).For many (especially recent) migrants whose documentation, visa, and permits would not suffice at other jobs, digital platforms are a quick way to start earning money.In Berlin, for many newcomers, for example, a huge problem is often the "Anmeldung", the registration of their residence which is dependent on a rental contract.Finding a flat and signing a lease is difficult in the tense rental market of Berlin.As a result, many recent migrants, even those with all necessary visas and work permits, face a huge starting obstacle in the labour market.
In some cases, the migrant workers on digital platforms have numerous qualifications and degrees which are, however, often not accredited in Germany, a fact that contributes to protecting better-paid parts of the labour market against migrant workers.Another major and related problem for many migrants coming to Berlin is the German language.The availability even of precarious and low-skilled jobs becomes scarce and many find that their options diminish substantially without basic German skills.Like Manuel, a dedicated courier and bicycle enthusiast who applied to a traditional bicycle courier company after he arrived in Berlin, only to find out that this company's radio dispatching system was in German.He had no chance following the radio conversation with his limited language skills, while cycling through the city.The app of Deliveroo on the contrary, the next place he applied to, functions in different languages, and hence, poses no problems to him.As the gig economy apps often work in several languages and are quite simple to operate, this offers possibilities even to those who speak no German or English.Like many workers, Manuel feels that his work is tightly controlled by the app, but also offers a degree of autonomy as compared to working under the direct command and insight of human managers.This is a feeling shared especially by riders who recount experiences with racist managers in previous jobs.
The easy and quick accessibility of platforms like Deliveroo and the ability to earn money without the knowledge of the language makes those platforms important to many migrants especially in the time immediately after their arrival.As Bastián explained above, the option to work for such platforms is common knowledge among young people from Chile or Argentina wanting to come to Germany.Some did similar work (sometimes for the same platforms) in other countries before, like Francisco, another Deliveroo rider and part-time industrial climber, who worked as a food delivery courier for Deliveroo and UberEats on three different continents.In these cases, digital platforms become part of "migration infrastructures" as Biao Xiang and Johan Lindquist describe the "systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility" (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014: 124; see also Altenried et al., 2018).While these platforms do not inhibit active brokerage positions such as labour agencies sending workers abroad, they enable new strategies, routes and pathways for migrant workers who base their mobility projects on platform labour and condition their differential, i.e. partial and temporal inclusion into national labour markets.Some migrants even apply to the platforms before they come to Berlin.Like Gabriela, a young woman from Barcelona, who came to Berlin to escape a difficult labour market in Spain that is especially precarious for young people.In comparison to the undocumented works she did in restaurants and cafes in Barcelona for a wage of around €5 per hour, working for digital platforms in Berlin seemed a good option to her and she applied to Deliveroo online before she arrived in the city.In 2019, she worked for Deliveroo (now she has moved on to the competitor Lieferando) as well as the cleaning platform Helpling.To make ends meet, she would sometimes additionally move to her boyfriend for a few days and informally sublet her apartment via Airbnb to earn additional income.Digital platforms are of crucial importance to her precarious mobility project and she is a primary example of how Berlin's platform urbanism is interwoven with mobility and migration (Altenried et al., 2021a).

Mobile workers, contingent labour
For platforms like Deliveroo, Helpling, Uber and many others, migrant workers constitute a crucial pool of workers willing to accept unstable and precarious conditions.While the importance of migrant labour especially to the service, gastronomy, or taxi sectors of Berlin and many other cities is nothing new (Sassen, 2001;Wills et al., 2010), digital platforms express a new special quality here.In fact, the labour model of the digital gig economy is geared perfectly towards the exploitation of migrant labour.The systems of algorithmic management (Beverungen, 2017;Lee et al., 2015) employed by the platforms via their apps allow for the (semi-)automated organisation and control of labour replacing, in large parts, human management, while allowing for a new level of granular control and planning.This drives down the cost for staff needed to command and survey workers, which in turn allows the platforms to accept almost all who apply if needed.Through the algorithmic architecture of the apps, there is very little training necessary and a high level of control over the labour process is easily achievable.Hence, algorithmic management produces a first precondition for the inclusion of a heterogeneous group of (migrant) workers, high interchangeability, and constant fluctuation of the workforce.
In the case of digital platforms, these mechanisms of algorithmic management only really develop their effect and efficiency in combination with contingent labour arrangements, i.e. the forms of self-employment and the outsourcing of entrepreneurial and social risk onto the workers typical for the gig economy (Altenried, 2017).As most workers are self-employed "independent contractors", there are very few fixed costs for the platforms.In most cases, workers pay for the means of production such as bikes themselves.With the contractual form of selfemployment, the gig economy is also part of a curious digital renaissance of a seemingly outdated wage relation: the piece wage, once described by Karl Marx as "the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production" (Marx, 2004, 698; see also Altenried and Wallis, 2018).In the case of Deliveroo riders, they are only paid for single deliveries which result in highly fluctuating wages because of varying numbers of orders and active riders in a given time and place.This form of self-employment and piece wages is not only functional in the sense of providing a flexible and scalable workforce for the platforms, but it also pushes costs for downtime and equipment as well as insurance and other forms of social protection onto the workers.
These conditions contribute to the precarity of platform labour.Additionally, they are the preconditions for the platforms to allow a high fluctuation and often an oversupply of workers (as compared to the demand).For a platform like Deliveroo and Uber, having a lot of couriers and drivers online at the same time is desirable as a high number of available delivery or taxi drivers guarantees a speedy service for customers, and produces no costs in case of low demand, as they are only paid when they work.Tommaso, the 37-old Italian rider explains: "So, their [Deliveroo's] ideal condition would be to have a lot of couriers doing just one delivery per hour, and the rest of the time doing nothing".For the workers, in turn, such a situation is disastrous, as few orders mean little income.Tommaso, who was quite happy with the money he could earn with Deliveroo most of the time, explains this problem: "There was no guarantee actually, no protection as a worker, let's say.So, also there was no guarantee, the company would keep the same level of average deliveries per hour.And there was no control actually over how many people were employed".Here, he reflects a situation that he shared with many platform workers in very different locations and platforms.
In fact, the oversupply of workers compared to the demand for work is a global problem for the majority of all gig economy workers (both on location-specific platforms like Uber or Deliveroo, and even more so in the online platform economy, see e.g.Graham et al., 2017;Lomas, 2018).Especially, if the platforms do not regulate the number of (active) workers, there is often a high number of workers competing for a limited number of jobs; thereby, decreasing the amount and stability of income and creating the need for long working days to make ends meet.In many cities, this problem has dramatically increased since the spread of the coronavirus.Oversupply of labour and the fluctuating job possibilities make platform labour often a precarious endeavour without even talking about the lack of sick pay, insurance, and other forms of social protection.This situation is the reality for a high number, maybe even the majority of gig workers around the globe, from Uber in London, Helpling in Berlin, or Deliveroo in Paris, up to the world of the online gig economy platforms like Amazon, Mechanical Turk, or Freelancer.
The very combination of systems of algorithmic management and their possibility of the (semi-) automated management, control, and measurement of workers, on the one hand, and the contingent employment relations of independent contractors paid by piece wages, on the other hand, is the core of the gig economy.It is also this very combination that allows platforms to accept a high number of workers as there are very few fixed costs and almost all the risks are outsourced to the workers.The platform workers need only minimal training, language skills, or supervision as they are navigated by the app through urban space.Under these conditions, a high fluctuation in the workforce is no problem, but rather part of the calculation of the platforms that can count on a latent reserve army of (migrant) workers who can be allowed into and expelled from the platforms with minimal costs and problems.

Digital platforms and the multiplication of labour
As we have seen up to this point, the very combination of (semi-)automated algorithmic management and organisation of labour and hyper-flexible employment relations that is characteristic of gig economy platforms is also the reason why these platforms are ideally geared towards the exploitation of migrant labour.Gig economy platforms provide an entry point for migrants struggling with stratified labour markets requesting language skills, documents, formal qualifications, and so on.The ability of platforms to digitally organise, control, and measure labour allows the (semi-)automated management of heterogenous and migrant workforces that are easily scalable according to fluctuating demand at almost no cost (as workers are only paid when they work).
Hereby, gig economy platforms are at the forefront of a tendency that Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson describe as the "multiplication of labour" understood as "the parallel operation of the three tendencies-intensification, diversification, and heterogenization of labor-that are increasingly reshaping labor experiences and conditions" (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 91-92).With the term, they strive to supplement the familiar term of the division of labour and hint towards the very heterogeneity and mobility of living labour in a time that is characterised by the increasing coalescing of labour and life, the increasing flexibilisation of labour as well as shifting forms of the mobility and geography of labour.
The concept is indeed extremely effective also in understanding the transformation of labour driven by digital technology, and of gig economy platforms in particular.The platforms' recruitment strategies profit from stratified and segmented labour markets that create a multiplicity of migrant situations and a reserve army of workers for the platforms.Digital technology, in turn, enables the tightly controlled and standardized cooperation of a huge number of these workers who can come from different backgrounds, experiences, and locations and who are distributed throughout (urban) space.Digitally (and often automatically) managed and standardized work procedures allow for the quick inclusion and remote organisation as well as substitutability and fluctuation of workers, and hence, contribute to the flexibilisation and heterogenization of labour.
For the platform workers themselves, we can furthermore observe the literal multiplication of labour in the sense that a huge number of people need to work more than one job.Sometimes platform workers are logged in the apps of various delivery or ride-share platforms at the same time to minimize unpaid waiting times; many also work several different jobs in different sectors to make ends meet.Working as a self-employed rider or driver for different platforms means very often extended and fragmented working days and a further blurring of times of labour and free time.This model of platform labour and the platforms themselves proliferate and multiply across different cities and spaces in a way that is both standardising and adaptive to local conditions and particularities.These platforms interact in particular ways with the patterns and rhythms of mobile labour and produce their own geographies of "platform mobilities" (Altenried et al., 2020) Here we may, for example, think again of Francisco, who has worked for the same platforms on three different continents.
If we think about the multiplication of labour as the nexus of digital technology, flexible contractual forms such as short term, subcontracted, freelance, and other forms of irregular employment and the mobility of labour itself, we can see how these are important developments even beyond the world of the gig economy.We may think of further examples such as an Amazon distribution centre, where a highly standardised digitally organised labour process allows the flexible inclusion of short-term and seasonal workers to scale the workforces according to fluctuating demand, for example, in the Christmas season.Across the world of work in digital capitalism, we find many examples where the new possibilities of digitally organising, controlling, measuring work produce new configurations and geographies of labour and mobility (Altenried, forthcoming).

Migration and platform labour: Berlin and beyond
When Deliveroo suddenly exited Berlin in August of 2019, it left many riders in dire need of new income and shed light on their limited alternatives on the job market, especially for migrant riders.Many turned to Deliveroo's competitor, the food delivery platform Lieferando, which held chaotic improvised onboarding meetings to hire new riders for the expected rise in demand after the exit of Deliveroo.Some of my interview partners such as Gabriela, who took part in such a meeting with 30 other former Deliveroo riders, work to this day for Lieferando, others did not get in or have moved on to Wolt, a new food delivery platform that entered the Berlin market in 2020.A few moved their energy into cooperative enterprises, namely a courier collective and a small food delivery cooperative founded after the exit of Deliveroo.Others yet turned to the cleaning platform Helpling or started to explore possibilities to work for the taxi platform Uber, both platforms where the majority of workers already had a migrant background.While some had the opportunity to concentrate on jobs and income they had before at the side of Deliveroo, others yet turned to jobs in cafes and bars or logistics and parcel delivery for jobs.In many cases, these jobs are part-time, fixed-term, and at least partially undocumented and provide as little stability and security as platform labour.Most riders faced a drastic loss of income highlighting the fact that working for Deliveroo was in most cases more lucrative than working for other platforms in the city, or local cafes and restaurants.Also compared to other European cities, working with Deliveroo in Berlin was relatively lucrative and allowed comparable high hourly earnings, especially for part-time riders who could concentrate on times with high demand.
Sofía, a rider from Northern Spain who had already worked for Deliveroo in Madrid before she came to Berlin and continued to work for the platform in the German capital, was surprised how much more she could earn in Berlin as compared to Madrid, where "you would work a lot and get very little money".She explains: "It was really complicated.Like in summer in Madrid, it's just crazy when you have to cross the whole city with an order […] We were striking and stuff because the conditions just got so bad".Upon her arrival in Berlin, Sofía, who also works remotely as a freelance graphic designer for customers from Spain, was surprised about the different conditions the same platform offered in Berlin.Here, both she and her boyfriend worked for the platform and were quite content with the amount of money they could earn by working preferably in times of high demand.
In the days after receiving the message that Deliveroo was leaving town, Sofía cancelled her holiday plans and also went to one of the chaotic onboarding meetings with Lieferando and started working for the platform right away.Lieferando offers mostly part-time contracts instead of working with self-employed riders and Sofía got a contract for a "mini-job", i.e. a part-time job without most of the benefits of regular employment.In a follow-up conversation a few months after the initial interview and the exit of Deliveroo, she said that she was looking for new job possibilities since "the arrangement with Lieferando is not so flexible and the money is not good enough to work in bad weather conditions".
But even if Deliveroo would not have left the city surprisingly, chances are that her income would have decreased over time in Berlin as well.The comparison between Berlin and Madrid hints at a tendency that has been reported by several Deliveroo riders we interviewed in different European cities: After the platform enters a city, it tries to attract riders with comparatively highincome possibilities and concentrates on gaining a big market share without minding loses.Over time, however, wages and conditions tend to gradually worsen as the platform secures its position in the city.This process is observable in the majority of the European markets of Deliveroo and has been accelerated by the covid-19 crisis.
With the gradual worsening of conditions and pay, the workforces also change over the years.While the first generation of Deliveroo riders often includes dedicated bicycle couriers who have worked in the profession before as well as many students, over time and with decreasing income opportunities, they get complemented and replaced by a "second generation" of riders that is often already in its majority constituted by migrant workers.With the further worsening of conditions and income, a "third generation" of often undocumented migrant workers enters the picture.As the platform becomes less attractive to workers with alternatives in the job market, they leave, and are complemented and substituted by workers with fewer alternatives such as undocumented migrants.v  As those workers normally lack the papers to apply to the platform directly, many rent the accounts of others who have the documents to register with the platforms.This practice is against the rules of platforms like Deliveroo that sometimes allow registered riders to work with substitutes but only such workers who are documented and registered.At the same time, platforms have, in most cases, little or no mechanisms in place to control who works through the accounts.This practice of informal subletting of accounts is also quite common in Spain."What I think is interesting from Spain is that Deliveroo is a way in for a lot of South American illegal immigrants because of how it is.Like a Spanish guy can have an account, and he can sublet it to other people" reports Sofía, who could observe these processes first-hand while working for Deliveroo in Madrid.Reflecting sympathetically about the situation of her undocumented colleagues in Spain, she mentions how these platforms are a way to earn money for people with little alternatives, while acknowledging the enormous precarity of these informal constellations: "Most of the people working for Deliveroo are Venezuelan people, which is in one way, obviously, super positive because they have a way into the country and to be safe and whatever.But then it's just crazy, the lack of control they have".
In Berlin, Deliveroo had not reached this status.Here, account renting occurred, but mostly as a practice of solidarity (when Bastián had trouble with his visa, a fellow Chilean rider let him use her account to work without charging him money for it).In Spain, the United Kingdom, or France, and to some extent Italy, for example, the renting of accounts for delivery platforms to illegalized migrants has become a business and is sometimes widespread.In the UK, attention-grabbing headlines about illegal migrants working for platforms have caused police raids and actions by platforms to obstruct the subletting of accounts (Bryan, 2019).A trial in Northern Italy has uncovered the practices of "caporalato" firms, who hired vulnerable undocumented migrants for shell companies to have them work as couriers with Uber Eats accounts that were given to them (while they only got a fraction of the earnings).A wire-taped manager from Uber Eats Italy involved in the practice is quoted in a newspaper saying to a co-conspirator "We have created a system for desperate people" (Allaby, 2021).In a position where they cannot easily complain to the police or the platforms, many undocumented riders across different cities in Europe report that they have to pay a cut of 30%-50% of their income to the people from whom they rent their accounts (see for example Alderman, 2019).vi  It is important to underline that these forms of over-exploitation of undocumented workers are in no way exclusive to the gig economy but rather wide-spread across many sectors and European (urban) spaces (in Italy, for example, the practice of "caporalato" is common in the agricultural sector, see e.g.Perrotta and Sacchetto, 2014) and that that the majority of workers in Deliveroo and other platforms are not undocumented (even though the scandals referenced above are no isolated incidents).The undocumented riders are part of the very heterogeneous and fragmented workforces organized by the algorithms of platforms like Deliveroo and they are, maybe, the clearest example of "super exploitation" of migrant labour in the platform economy.With this term, anthropologist Anna Tsing aptly describes situations, where the rate of exploitation is higher than one would expect in a certain location and sector, based on "so-called noneconomic factors" such as citizenship, visa, work permits, and residency status in this case (Tsing, 2009: 158).
In any case, these developments including the practice of account renting show how gig economy platforms interact with labour markets characterized by mechanisms of "differential inclusion" (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) stratified by vectors such as citizenship, visa, work permits, language skills, racism, and many more.These vectors produce fragmented urban labour markets characterized by a range of statuses and positions.It is especially the various migrant parts of these urban workforces that constitute the labour pools gig economy platforms tap into.With a view to the undocumented riders who have to rent their accounts, or to workers with shortterm visas, or intra-European migrants with a range of social and labour market rights, it should be clear that the category of the migrant is itself far from homogeneous but highly manifold, fragmented, hierarchised, and fluid in multiple ways (Altenried et al., 2018).
The dynamics of migration and the gig economy are in no way exclusive to Europe: Reports from the US, India, China or South Africa, for example, show the importance of mobile workforces to gig economy platforms across the globe (Bandeira, 2019;Das and Srravya, 2021;Greef, 2019;Liu, 2019;Markham, 2018;van Doorn, 2020).The same is true for Latin America, the home continent for many of the former Berlin Deliveroo workers."In Chile, it has the same effect as here", explains one of them, the 26-year-old Tomás, who worked for Deliveroo in Berlin after he arrived from his hometown of Santiago de Chile."A lot of people from Colombia and Venezuela are working there.So it's like a job that is accessible to them.It's just like the same with us, like another country that is coming with difficulties in terms of economic opportunities".

Conclusion: Berlin, March 2020
Looking at gig economy platforms with the history and present of migrant labour in mind, their labour model seems less "innovative" or "disruptive" than presented by the platforms themselves, and sometimes by critics as well.From this perspective, the standard of employment is characterised more often than not by instability, precarity, and over-exploitation.The long history of contingent labour is closely entwined with the history of migrant (and often also feminised) labour.Starting with the "thetes", the landless labourers of ancient Greece (van der Linden, 2014), and including the mobile day labourers of the feudal system, mobility and precarity have a common history.From the home-based workers in the cottage industry and putting-out system of early capitalism, a system which organised the labour of mostly women and children with the help of piece wages and middlemen into an "external department of the factory" (Marx, 2004, 591), to the harbours of the United States in the early 20th century where workers, among them many migrants, would show up early every morning hoping to be hired for a day (Bell, 1962), labour paid by the piece and competition for short-term work have been continuities of capitalism.This history reaches deep into the present of global capitalism, digital or otherwise, if we think of migrant day labourers in California and other regions across the world, the urban gig workers of this article or their counterparts working for online labour platforms in what is maybe the first truly "planetary labour market" (Graham and Anwar, 2019).With such a history in mind, especially but not exclusively, from the perspective of migrant labour, precarity and contingency are the norms, and Fordist standard employment, conversely, the exception, a short period further limited by vectors of geography, gender, or mobility (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008).Accordingly, gig economy platforms have to be situated in a long genealogy of contingent and precarious labour, a history that is closely entwined with the variegated mobility of labour itself.
With a view to these dynamics and the workforces of gig economy platforms across the globe, perspectives from critical migration studies are indispensable for researching the contemporary gig economy.Such perspectives are not only interested in researching specific migrants or groups, but also "migration regimes" and with this the constitutive relation between the (im)mobility of labour and labour markets in capitalism (Altenried et al., 2018;Bauder, 2006;Bojadžijev, 2008;Forschungsgruppe Transit Migration, 2015).Such a perspective also helps to understand the logics of "differential inclusion" (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), i.e. the mechanisms of gradual, temporary, partial, and variable inclusion of migrant workers into national labour markets and national systems of rights and social protection.These forms of differential inclusionincluding vectors that have shown to be important in the course of this article such as citizenship, residency, visa, work permits, language, and many moreare part and parcel of the multiplication of labour and produce the stratified and fragmented labour markets and a reserve army of migrant labour which is the base for the operations of many gig economy platforms, and without which, there would be no gig economy as we know it.The perspective of mobile labour then allows a situated analysis of these digital platforms in labour markets stratified by differential migration regimes.From this perspective, many of the characteristics of the gig economy such as instability, little protection and rights, or fluctuating demand for labour are not that exceptional, but rather typical to many sectors of labour markets populated by migrant workers.
Clearly and importantly, digital technology adds a new chapter to this history and it is in the process of profoundly transforming the way mobile and contingent labour is organised, managed, and controlled.The possibilities of algorithmic management, new forms of control, and new constellations of the geography, space, and scale of labour enabled by digital infrastructures are the conditions that allow for the reconfiguration of old forms and techniques of contingent labour such as piece wages.Digital platforms represent new migration infrastructures and the way they organise labour reconfigures the dynamics of migrant labour and labour markets in a number of ways, only some of which could be explored in this article.Hence, arguing that we need to situate the gig economy in a long genealogy of contingent labour does not imply that nothing has changed.On the contrary, the new possibilities of digital management, organisation, and control of labour represent significant changes that interact with the dynamics of mobile labour and the systems of differential inclusion in a way that increasingly compels us to think about the co-constitution of migration and workplace regimes as Simon Schaupp has recently put it (Schaupp, 2021).As I have argued, the very combination of new forms of algorithmic management and hyper-flexible forms of employment that is characteristic of gig economy platforms is also the reason why these platforms are geared perfectly toward the exploitation of migrant labour.Hereby, they represent a dynamic that can be observed well beyond the confines of the gig economy.
What does this finally mean for the labour struggles and political contestations that have accompanied the rise of the gig economy?It has already been argued convincingly that the demands for gig worker re-classification (from self-employed contractors to employees) that has been a crucial demand for years, may in itself not be sufficient to better the conditions, especially for migrant workers (Van Doorn et al., 2020).It is still important to underline that labour regulations and the idea of standard employment (understood more as a "normative model" (Huws, 2016: 8) and certainly not at an all-encompassing reality) can and have served as powerful political and legal tools to fight for better conditions in the gig economy.On the other hand, and this is especially true for migrant workers, the legal status of employment is by no means a safe haven from precarity (we may think of zero-hour contracts in the UK or the world of temporary labour agencies, for example).In this sense, re-classification is only one component in the struggles for a different platform economy, and while platforms react to new judgements and regulations regarding self-employment with new forms of subcontracting and other strategies, the terrain is shifting anyway.Hereby, it becomes even more clear that platforms have to be understood (and regulated) as situated in a landscape of precarious labour and the segmented labour markets they are part of.
If we look at Berlin in March of 2020, half a year after the exit of Deliveroo, some of these dynamics may become clear.After the onset of the corona crisis, the city is in lockdown and most economic activity is put on hold.These former Deliveroo riders who are now employed by the food delivery platform Lieferando have at least a little security as their wages are paid while deliveries are discontinued.Their contracts, mostly part-time and fixed-term, however, provide very little long-term security.And when Lieferando restarts deliveries after a short break, riders are forced back on the streets despite fears of contagion and with little protective gear.When customers start cancelling practically all bookings for the cleaning platform Helpling, all selfemployed cleaners are immediately without income and have to look for other jobs, for example, in the agriculture industry where closed borders cause a labour shortage as seasonal migrant workers from South-East Europe cannot travel to Germany (Altenried et al., 2020).The drivers for Uber, who are employed by a wide range of subcontracting firms and agreements because of regulations in the German taxi industry, also have little protection and many are out of work quickly while others face accumulating debt and try to compensate for the lack of passengers with workweeks of 90 h and more.
Across the different employment arrangements, the mostly migrant workforces of Berlin's platforms are among those hit hardest by the corona crisis.With this, the complexity and multidimensionality of the struggles for better working conditions become clear.It is as much a question of power as it is one of the legal arrangements and the horizon for improvement should be universal rights independent of employment status and citizenship.Ultimately, this demands alternatives to the logics of platform capitalism geared toward privatising profits while pushing social and entrepreneurial risk onto other actors; in this case, predominantly the mostly migrant workers of these platforms.