The precarious work conditions and livelihood strategies of app-based food delivery drivers in Shanghai, China

This research explores the everyday lived experiences and livelihood strategies of platform workers in China’s largest city, Shanghai. Building on Polanyi’s double movement theory, this thesis holds that marketisation and commodification of platform workers is met by resistance that manifests itself predominantly as self-protection. Focusing on migrant app-based food delivery drivers in Shanghai, the study examines three questions: how drivers are managed by the online food delivery platforms; what kind of precarious conditions drivers face inside and outside the workplace; and how drivers resist precarity.

The research finds that because of management policies pursued by the delivery contractors and the monopoly position occupied by the two biggest companies controlling the platform business, drivers in Shanghai are at the bottom of the interest chain and operate under high degrees of pressure. In addition to their labour, the drivers’ data becomes another form of commodity and raw material in platform capitalism. Both full-time and freelance drivers face multi-layered precarities, not only from exploitative platform companies operating strict algorithmic controls, but also from very limited access to liveable housing conditions and exclusion from social insurance as a result of their status as migrants from rural areas. Rather than risk undertaking explicit forms of protest, drivers tend to favour more individual and quiet practices of resistance. However, the drivers’ short-term survival goals limit acquisition of skills, and further reinforce their reliance on platforms and commodification in the workplace. By drawing on traditional conceptual avenues as well as current debates around the platform workers’ work conditions and resistance, this research places the livelihoods of Shanghai app-based drivers within a broader global context, suggesting similarities and contrasts between conditions in China and those prevailing elsewhere in the world.