Platforms without Borders: Examining Migrant Labour on Global On-Demand Labour Platforms

数字技术极大地改变了工作的组织方式，在零工经济中创造了新的“按需”工作形式。通过数字平台促进的按需工作在全球各地的城市空间中激增，包括送餐、打车和便利工作等领域。媒体叙述和学术文献很少重视的是，这些平台上的工作在多大程度上是由移民工人承担的，他们经历了一系列与居留身份、经济不安全感和难以获得国家福利制度相关的复杂脆弱性。平台劳工为移民提供了急需的机会，但据称也降低了工作条件，增加了工人的不稳定性和脆弱性。“无国界平台”是一项跨国人种学研究，由英国、中国和巴西的研究人员组成，旨在确定按需劳动力平台如何在平台经济中为移民工人分配新的机会和脆弱性。它超越了平台劳动力研究对全球北方少数几个城市的狭隘关注，通过在伦敦、北京和圣保罗与送餐员的实地调查，考虑了三个不同城市和国家背景下农民工面临的不同情况。国际焦点提供了一个机会来研究全球平台公司如何在不同的监管环境中以不同的方式运营，这将加深我们对平台经济的理解。该项目采用了从保罗·弗莱雷的“大众教育”概念发展而来的新颖的民族志研究方法，通过这种方法，工人们在与批判性社会分析的对话中批判性地反思自己的工作经验。该方法强调工人作为积极主体的重要性，他们对劳动过程有自己独特的理解，并有能力开发新的解决方案来改善他们的工作条件。从工人的经验出发，该项目将确定与性别、种族、阶级、教育和移民身份相关的权力交叉制度如何影响农民工对平台劳动的体验。它将研究更广泛的移民、福利和劳动力市场政策系统如何在不同的国家背景下运作，以及这如何影响工人的经验。这项研究将吸引工人参与，目的是为数字经济中出现的新问题提供新的政策解决方案。

Digital technologies have dramatically changed the organisation of work, creating new forms of "on-demand" work in the gig economy. On-demand work facilitated via digital platforms has proliferated in urban spaces across the globe in food delivery, ride hail and handy work sectors, among others. What is rarely appreciated in media narratives and the scholarly literature is the extent to which work on these platforms is undertaken by migrant workers who experience a set of compounding vulnerabilities related to their residency status, economic insecurity and difficulties accessing national welfare systems. Platform labour offers much-needed opportunities to migrants, but has also been claimed to degrade working conditions and increase workers' precarity and vulnerability. "Platforms without Borders" is a cross-national ethnographic study by a team of researchers based in the United Kingdom, China and Brazil which aims to determine how on-demand labour platforms distribute new opportunities and vulnerabilities for migrant workers in the platform economy. It moves beyond the narrow focus of platform labour studies on a select few cities in the Global North by considering the different circumstances facing migrant workers in three distinct cities and national contexts based on fieldwork in London, Beijing and Sao Paulo with food delivery riders. The international focus provides an opportunity to examine how global platform companies operate differently in distinct regulatory environments, which will deepen our understanding of the platform economy. The project employs novel ethnographic research methods developed from Paulo Freire's notion of 'popular education' to engage with migrant workers through which workers critically reflect on their own experience of work in dialogue with critical social analysis. The methodology emphasises the importance of workers as active agents with their own distinct understanding of the labour process and the capacity to develop novel solutions to improve their working conditions. By starting from the experience of workers, the project will determine how intersecting regimes of power related to gender, race, class, education and immigration status affect migrant workers' experience with platform labour. It will examine how broader systems of immigration, welfare and labour market policies operate in different national contexts and how this affects the experience of workers. The research will engage workers with the aim of generating novel policy solutions to the emerging problems of the digital economy.