Riders on the Storm: Amplified Platform Precarity and the Impact of COVID-19 on Online Food-delivery Drivers in China

ABSTRACT

The global COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately intensified the precariousness of insecure work. This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on platform-based food-delivery drivers in China, particularly focusing on labor conditions. Drawing on 52 in-depth interviews with drivers from top Chinese food-delivery platforms, this article shows that the precarity of drivers' work and life is dramatically amplified by the pandemic, resulting in escalating work insecurity, financial instability, and subservient class identity. More specifically, drivers struggle with increased physical risks, livelihood crisis and inflamed racism. All this results from the reorganization of algorithmic labor process and management facilitated by the coalition of food-delivery platforms and Chinese states, which results in surged workload, unpaid labor, uncompensated prolonged production time and extra investment in production assets.